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If Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing is any indication, maybe House Republicans want to shut down the government so that they have an excuse to save themselves from further embarrassment.
How bad was it?
The three Republican witnesses all testified that they did not present any first-hand witness accounts of crimes committed by President Joe Biden.
One of them, Jonathan Turley, a law professor and Donald Trump loyalist, also testified that there was not enough evidence to vote to impeach Biden.
One Republican after another trotted out the same unproven allegations that “the Bidens” committed crimes, without specifying what those crimes were, providing evidence, or even showing that Joe Biden was involved in any way at all.
It was so bad that even Fox News Host Neil Cavuto offered a damning assessment of the circus House Republicans held.
“None of the expert witnesses today presented… yet… any proof for impeachment,” Cavuto said, noting also that, after months of supposedly gathering evidence, Republicans had come up empty and now want to get more bank records from the Bidens.
Democrats, on the other hand, came prepared, and each of them seemed to offer a new line of attack.
They used House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) own words against him to expose his hypocrisy on launching the inquiry without a vote; they showed Trump’s own financial ties to China. They also drew parallels between the former president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who played a major role in the White House and then got a couple of billion dollars from the Saudis, and Hunter Biden, who made millions of dollars from foreign sources but had no role in government.
Perhaps the most telling moment of the entire six-hour hearing came when Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) got his turn to speak.
He posed a very simple question to all of his colleagues.
“Will members of the Oversight Committee please raise your hands if you believe both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable for any of the indictments against them if convicted by a jury of their peers?” Casar asked.
All of the Democrats present at the time immediately raised their hands while none of the Republicans did.
“I think it is worse than embarrassing that Republicans won’t raise their hands,” Casar said. “They refuse to say that equal justice under the law should apply to everyone. And when you step back and think about it, it is kind of scary.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) was responsible for the funniest moment of the hearing. She listed the felonies Trump has been accused of and waved a picture of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom in which the FBI had found documents the former president had illegally taken after leaving the White House.
“These are our national secrets — looks like in the shitter to me,” Crockett said.
In addition, to remind the American people that Congress has better things to do than launching vague fishing expeditions against the president, many Democrats displayed a countdown when they talked showing when House Republicans would shut down the government.
That clock is now ticking and down to a little over two days.
