The method to their madness
Greg Sargent has a blazing insight here, one that I had not considered before.He discusses the fact that Democrats believe the investigation extravaganza planned by the House GOP won’t add up to much unless they uncover something devastating about Joe Biden. But they have another reason for doing it: “if they can confuse voters — and seduce the news media — into treating any and all congressional oversight as inevitably politically motivated, they will succeed in a whole different fashion.”
This goal — which entails obfuscating the basic distinction between oversight conducted in good faith and in bad — will be within reach for Republicans, due to a peculiar situation. The House select committee examining Donald Trump’s coup attempt will release its report before the end of this year, and might make criminal referrals. Those findings will be debated well into next year, while Trump is running for president.
Which means that for House Republicans, the goal of next year’s investigations will not just be to let a thousand Hunter Biden probes bloom. It will also be to discredit revelations produced by Democrats about Trump.
This week, we learned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) won a promise from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), potentially the next speaker, to begininvestigations of the Justice Department’s treatment of Jan. 6 defendants. Other Republicans are vowing investigations of the department, too.
Congressional oversight of the department serves a critical public function. We want law enforcement to feel constrained by oversight, which Republicans could theoretically do in good faith, in a valuable and revelatory way.
But Republicans have signaled something different. Greene describes Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners.” She and others have demanded the defunding of the FBI simply because it executed a lawfully approved search, which they describe as unchecked jackbooted lawlessness, of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Their position, then, is essentially that all investigative activity involving Jan. 6 and Trump is inherently illegitimate. So their oversight is likely to metastasize into an industrial-strength bad-faith effort to discredit all such activity, expressly to protect Trump from accountability, and to bury the Jan. 6 committee’s final report in a blizzard of propaganda. Republicans could even try to defund continuing law enforcement investigations and prosecutions.
He’ right. This is exactly how it will unfold. And the media will help them do it with equally breathless coverage of the bogus investigations as the real ones, eagerly chasing “scoops” and granting the phony scandals the same stature as the attempted coup.
And the thing is that I doubt very many Republicans, if any at all, are even aware of the strategic value of doing this. They are driven by a primitive desire for vengeance and juvenile “I know you are but what am I” tactics. But the end result is exactly what Sargent outlines here. And it can work.