UPDATE II:
As expected, on a party-line vote of 221 to 211, Republicans approved the formation of a Select Subcommittee to investigate the “Weaponization” of the Federal Government, to be chaired by Trump’s close buddy, Jim Jordan, who himself “was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”
As Jordan will have extensive subpoena authority, it is worthwhile remembering that both he and now-Speaker McCarthy have refused to comply with subpoenas from the January 6 Committee, “an inquiry they both sought to block.”
UPDATE I:
And, indeed, on Monday night House Republicans voted to gut the Office Congressional Ethics, “and George Santos said it was ‘fantastic’”
Original Post:
One of the extortionists’ demands Kevin McCarthy appears to have capitulated to during the recent four-day, fifteen-act tragicomedy that played out on the floor of the House of Representatives is to empower individuals under current or past investigations for January 6 and related crimes to themselves investigate the investigators who have investigated and continue to investigate those crimes.
As part of a new rules package and under the language of a proposed House Resolution, a “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” will have sweeping powers to — among other — “conduct a full and complete investigation and study” of the alleged “weaponization.”
It would give the Subcommittee extensive authority to review investigations conducted by the Justice Department, the FBI, other national security and law enforcement agencies related to January 6, including the ongoing criminal investigations by Special Counsel Jack Smith into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and into his absconding with highly sensitive national security documents.
It would also give the Subcommittee sweeping power to access any information shared with the House Intelligence Committee and to issue what probably will be a flood of subpoenas.
A piece in Mock Paper Scissors is not too far off the mark when it comments:
It probably is not much of a surprise that the Republicans would want to know what special counsel Jack Smith has learned, especially because so many of them are likely involved in the crimes of January 6. Remember, 17/20 of the holdouts were involved in the Stop The Steal part of the Stupid Coup.
This, after Republicans turned a blind eye to — even approved of — the blatant refusals by scores of legislators and Trump administration officials to comply with subpoenas legally issued by the January 6 Committee.
This, after Republican legislators refused to answer questions even voluntarily posed by the January 6 Committee investigating the role that certain members of Congress played in trying to change the 2020 election results and in attempts to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.
This, after the proposed Chairman of the new Judiciary Committee and of the new Subcommittee, Jim Jordan — a close ally of the alleged January 6 insurrection and “Big Lie” mastermind, Donald Trump — refused to voluntarily answer questions by the bipartisan January 6 House Select Committee, claiming that “[t]he American people are tired of Democrats’ nonstop investigations and partisan witch hunts.”
This, after the leading role Jordan played in the infamous two-year, seven-million-dollar Benghazi investigation fiasco — an investigation about which McCarthy at the time bragged that it had successfully brought Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers down
Don’t be fooled by language about investigating all current criminal investigations. This select committee is primarily interested in the investigations into Donald Trump. It is clear why Trump was so desperate to see Kevin McCarthy become Speaker. House Republicans will try to shut down the special counsel probe into Trump…
The reader may ask, “Are there not any safeguards to prevent such clear ethics violations from occurring in the House of Representatives”?
The answer is yes, there are or, perhaps more accurately, there were.
For, it is reported that McCarthy made one more concession to the hostage takers: To – through personnel staffing and other rules changes — “largely gut” the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) — an Office that was preparing to investigate lawmakers implicated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and in related election shenanigans. The changes may result in “potentially limiting the office’s ability to investigate lawmakers.”
Established in 2008, the OCE, an independent body separate from the House Ethics Committee, has been effective at investigating wrongdoing by legislators of both parties. By contrast, the House Ethics Committee has long been criticized as being ineffective and lacking in transparency.
Kedric Payne, with the Campaign Legal Center says, “This could easily kill the only body that’s investigating ethical issues in Congress…[T]here are no investigations in the Senate. And the only investigations that happen in the House of any significance are done by the OCE.”
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen, puts it slightly different. “Today’s Republican Party is rife with ethical transgressions,” he says “And it is now trying to make it much harder to hold members of Congress accountable to the standards of decency we expect.”
To put it more succinctly: In the 118th Congress, there will not be anyone to prevent the inmates from running the asylum.
