“What a day we are having…. As a former director of emergency management, I know a disaster when I see one,” Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said yesterday in the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, overseen by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee chaired by James Comer (R-KY).
Moskowitz wasn’t wrong. After a hearing that lasted more than six hours, highlights of which Aaron Rupar of Public Notice reposted on social media, Neil Cavuto of the Fox News Channel was unimpressed. He said that although Comer had promised to present “a mountain of evidence” against President Biden, “none of the expert witnesses today presented…any proof for impeachment…. The way this was built up, ‘where there’s smoke there would be fire,’... but where’s there’s smoke today, we just got a lot more smoke.”
The Republicans on the committee repeatedly talked about the volume of evidence they have uncovered, but they were never able to link their piles of evidence to the president. Under questioning, their own witnesses said there was not enough evidence to impeach President Biden.
It seemed as if Republicans have become so accustomed to being able to say anything they want to on right-wing media without being challenged they thought a congressional committee would operate the same way. When the Democrats pushed back, they seemed flummoxed.
Comer lost control of the hearing as Democrats on the committee, thoroughly prepared, came out swinging. Representative Shontel Brown (D-OH) noted that “[t]he DOJ and FBI under former President Trump spent 5 long years looking into these Republican conspiracy theories, and debunked them. Repeatedly.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The majority sits completely empty handed with no evidence of any presidential wrongdoing, no smoking gun, no gun, no smoke.”
Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) called out the Republicans by name for holding a sham impeachment hearing instead of funding the government and working for their constituents. She noted that 217,583 people living in the districts of the Republicans on the committee would lose their paychecks because of the Republican shutdown.
Most notably, the Democrats called out the places where witnesses or committee members had deleted words in quotations that changed their meanings. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) emphasized that the four Republican witnesses said they had not presented any first-hand witness accounts of crimes committed by President Biden, while the committee was blocking the testimony of witnesses who could testify to actual facts. She also noted that members of Congress could say anything they wanted because they are covered by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause protecting them,
Democrats also called out the many ways in which the Republicans were trying to discredit President Biden with speculation during an impeachment hearing to distract from the very real legal troubles of former president Trump. Representatives Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) called out the Republicans for focusing on allegations about Hunter Biden and ignoring the very real issues involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who could not get a security clearance until Trump demanded he be given one, worked on Middle East issues in the White House, and then received a $2 billion investment from the Saudis shortly after Trump left office.
Most dramatically, Representative Greg Cesar (D-TX) asked the members of the Oversight Committee to raise their hands if they believe that both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable if they are found guilty on any of their indictments. The Democrats all raised their hands. The Republicans did not.
One senior republican aide told CNN’s Melanie Zanona: “This is an unmitigated disaster.”
It did not get better after the hearing ended. A fact-check by CNN’s Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Annie Grayer tore apart the committee’s “evidence.” Although Comer said in his opening remarks that the committee has uncovered how “the Bidens and their associates…raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019,” all but about $7 million went to Hunter Biden’s business associates, who according to the Washington Post had “legitimate business interests,” and there is no evidence that President Biden himself received any of this money.
Comer’s accusation that money was wired to Joe Biden’s Delaware address did not note that the money was a loan, and it went to Hunter Biden’s bank account. Hunter Biden’s lawyers say that he used the Bidens’ Delaware home as his address at the time.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) claimed that documents released Wednesday from 2020 showed that the Department of Justice was protecting President Biden. But in 2020 Trump, not Biden, was president, and the official who urged Biden senior’s name be kept off a search warrant did so because there was no legal basis to include him in a search warrant concerning a business involving his adult son.
And on it went.
Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark wrote: “The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco. To put it mildly, the GOP did not bring their best.”
At the end of the day, it seemed as if Democrats had flipped the script that has worked so well for so long on right-wing media. Rather than being on the defensive themselves, they put Republicans on the defensive. And because their hits were based in reality, rather than a false narrative, they left the Republican committee members with few options today other than to take to social media, once again, to boast of all the evidence they have accumulated against President Biden.
The hearing was designed to give the extremists of the Freedom Caucus one of their demands, likely in the hope that they would agree to pass a stopgap funding bill that would at least make it look like the House Republicans were trying to fund the government. But today, when House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) brought to the floor an extreme bill that would have made 30% cuts to food assistance, housing, education, funding for border agents, and so on, and insisted on closing the border while funding the government for only another 30 days, 21 extremists voted with the Democrats to kill it by a vote of 198 to 232.
This was a harsh blow not only to McCarthy but to all the Republicans in swing districts. House leaders forced them all to vote for a measure chock full of enormously unpopular cuts and then snatched away the prize of funding the government. Such a political disaster speaks very poorly of McCarthy, who should have never put members of his conference in such a position. Losing 21 of his members in this vote is an embarrassment. The loss weakens the party for 2024: the Democratic ads will pretty much write themselves.
And the members refusing to fund the government simply don’t appear to care, either about their colleagues or their constituents.
At any point, McCarthy could bring up before the House the bipartisan measure already passed by the Senate. Democrats would then likely make up the votes he would lose in his own conference. But the extremists would then challenge his speakership, and that is apparently a challenge he is unwilling to brave.
* Edit at 2:00 on September 30: I incorrectly identified Robert Garcia of California last night by a different name. My apologies.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-impeachment-hearing-house-oversight-09-28-23/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/politics/fact-check-house-impeachment-hearing-biden/index.html
Twitter (X):
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Women have begun to see that if I go through that doorway, I take everybody through it.
___Dianne Feinstein
'No Child Left Behind' requires states and school districts to ensure that all students are learning and are reaching their highest potential. Special education students should not be left out of these accountability mechanisms.
____Dianne Feinstein
College costs continue to rise, and student loan debt threatens to price many Americans out of a college education and out of the middle class.
___Dianne Feinstein
Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.
___Dianne Feinstein
I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care.
___Dianne Feinstein
Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.
___Dianne Feinstein
Congressional overseers and the public must be given appropriate insight into government activities as well as their legal rationale to ensure America's values are being upheld and our interests advanced.
___ Dianne Feinstein
‘James Haas was a San Francisco land use attorney, and a gay man who was not yet out in 1970, when he became an informal advisor to Dianne Feinstein.’
‘He also authored the city’s most abiding epigram about Feinstein’s relationship to the gay community:
“Dianne Feinstein doesn’t care who you sleep with,” he famously quipped, “as long as you’re in bed by 11 o’clock.”
“From her time serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with Harvey Milk to her battle to protect transgender service members, Dianne Feinstein has been a champion for LGBTQ equality and social justice,” Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide gay civil rights organization, said in endorsing her final campaign in 2018. “Senator Feinstein stood with our community back when few others did.” (Politico) See link below.
'Dianne Feinstein, who died Friday at the age of 90, made history as the first woman to become mayor of her hometown of San Francisco.'
'A graduate of Stanford University, Feinstein began her career in politics when she was appointed by Gov. Pat Brown to the California Women's Parole Board in 1960. Nine years later, she was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was elected president of the board in 1978.'
'She became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 following the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The following year she was elected to the first of two four-year terms.
She was elected to the U.S. Senate in a 1992 special election. becoming California's first female U.S. senator. It was an election cycle that became known as the "Year of the Woman" for the record number of female candidates elected to Congress.'
'Feinstein was re-elected five times and in the 2012 election, she received 7.86 million votes, the most popular votes received by any U.S. Senate candidate in history.'
'President Biden said in a statement. "Often the only woman in the room, Dianne was a role model for so many Americans - a job she took seriously by mentoring countless public servants," Biden said Friday. "Dianne was tough, sharp, always prepared, and never pulled a punch, but she was also a kind and loyal friend, and that's what [First lady] Jill and I will miss the most."
For a list of her accomplishments:
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/key-accomplishments
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/29/dianne-feinstein-legacy-00116902
Quiverin' Qevin has shown himself to be a feckless, worthless coward, a political incompetent, a liar who can't be trusted farther than you can see him with your eyes closed. He's hated by both Republicans and Democrats. How the country survives the next 13 months of what he has loosed on us is something I can't figure out.
As to the 48 Fweedumbererasses, they are traitors who have declared war on the United States. They need to be rousted at midnight, and disappear into pretrial detention. Personally, I'd like to see all 137 of the traitors in both houses of Congress arrested.