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Now that House Republicans have finally settled on a new speaker, they can get back to business. In their case, that means staging political stunts and harassing a private citizen so that they can manufacture “evidence” against President Joe Biden.
You will never be able to stop them from doing the former. Case in point is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who on Thursday introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for leading “an insurrection into the Capitol complex.”
That’s nuts, of course.
The “insurrection” Greene is referring to was actually a demonstration last week by hundreds of protesters, many of whom belonged to Jewish advocacy groups, who called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Because these kinds of events are not allowed inside of Capitol buildings — a House office building in this case — more than 300 of them were arrested.
But the particulars obviously don’t matter because the whole point of Greene’s resolution is to cheapen the term “insurrection” to play down what happened when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Actually, she probably also wants to get on Fox News, which is the point of everything Republicans do… including the impeachment probe.
The standard order of business in this “investigation” so far is that some GOP lawmaker, usually Rep. James Comer (R-KY), will take a piece of information and then spin it into an entire narrative that is wholly unsupported by this flimsy evidence.
And then the rest of the bunch tweets up a storm to talk about this “smoking gun.”
All of this is meant to rile up the Fox News crowd and insinuate that Biden did something illegal (or even improper), an assertion that Republicans have not been able to back up with any actual evidence.
You can tell that’s the case because, after making the rounds for a day or two, that ironclad “proof” is never heard of again.
The latest example is a “direct payment” of $200,000 that Biden received from his brother James. This is meant to show that the president (who was a private citizen when he received that check) benefitted from an influence peddling scheme others in his family were supposedly involved in.
What Republicans won’t say is that the check in question says “loan repayment” and corresponds to a $200,000 loan Joe Biden had given his brother less than two months earlier.
Ooops.
Democrats, for their part, are getting really tired of this charade.
On Thursday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, sent a letter to Comer, who chairs the panel, that essentially tells the Republican to stop lying, making things up, harassing private citizens for political gain, and abusing his power.
Raskin takes issue with Comer’s request for “all financial records” of members of the Biden family and one of their business partners.
The Democrat says this blanket demand, which covers years of documents going back to 2014, is an “egregious abuse of this Committee’s authority.”
“This continuing random search for content approach is profoundly troubling, especially in light of your blatant misrepresentations about the contents of these bank records and willingness to use this investigation to promote salacious and baseless accusations against the President’s children and grandchildren,” Raskin wrote.
Obviously, that’s not going to stop Comer and other GOP lawmakers from their shenanigans, but it’s nice to see that at least somebody is pointing out what they are doing.
