Your Tax Dollars at Work
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 3, 2023
It was your tax dollars at work, even if work has become a most uncomfortable process.
The vaunted House Republican assault on all-things-Joe Biden got off to a shaky start this week, with the seething political divisions we all feel throbbing through the opening issues.
Without even getting to substantial issues, congressmen immersed themselves in early partisan skirmishes over how many times a day House members need to pledge allegiance to the Flag in the name of patriotism, arguments over how to identify exactly what is chaotic on our borders and a fight over whether it is okay to bring guns into committee meetings.
There was more attention on which opponents to throw off influential congressional committees — it took an all-out campaign to dump Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Relations panel — than there was any discussion of problem-solving, and a lot more talk about avoiding talking about the distraction that the fraudulent meanderings of Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has brought to government than anything resembling ethics enforcement.
Even in the premier cage-match between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden over Republican demands for spending cuts to obtain cooperation in passing the required bill to raise the debt ceiling for payment of already gathered government bills, there was more talk about the pending confrontation than details of what purportedly was an agreement to hear out one another’s arguments.
What did come across in interviews, statements, promises and agendas all week was that the tone is contentious and partisan. It took the Department of Justice to remind Republican congressmen eager to use the discovery of classified documents in Biden’s think tank office and home that congressional requests for details would have to await the department’s own processing of materials in a live, possible prosecution case.
Republicans want to investigate it all, air out statements with or without evidence in public hearings, and generally put the Biden administration on House Republican trial.
Wait, What About Guns?
It was hard to get to the substance if the parties were going to debate their safety in meeting with one another. The Republican House leadership moved quickly to remove the metal detectors that some Republican members were evading anyway, in the name of gun rights.
The House Natural Resources Committee’s first meeting of the year turned heated this week when a Democratic member offered an amendment that would prohibit lawmakers from carrying guns in its hearing room. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said he was proposing the “sadly necessary” amendment because it’s a “major issue of safety” after the Republican-controlled Rules Committee removed a provision prohibiting firearms in hearing rooms.
It took no time before a verbal donnybrook — without firearms — ensued, including a challenge from one Republican for Democrats to name those whom they feared in the room might be packing.
The issue is less crazy than it may sound at first. After all, the committee Republicans include several who have aligned with Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists. And the halls of Congress clearly are not being recognized legally as a place from which firearms should be banned, no matter how heated the hot air.
New York and New Jersey have adopted laws that sought to make it much more difficult for individuals to carry guns in “sensitive areas.” Those laws were voted in response to a Supreme Court ruling overturning a New York ban on carry permits as an abridgment of the Second Amendment. Now a federal district judge in New Jersey has ruled in a case brought by the Second Amendment Foundation and others challenging whether a designated place must be “supported by a historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Presumably, that would not include the halls of Congress or even my local church, synagogue, mosque, or saloon unless there had been a history of regulation to back it up.
Let’s ask Rep Cory Mills (R-Fla.) who this week incongruously delivered inert hand grenades manufactured in his district to colleagues as a gift “to come together and get to work on behalf of our constituents.”
Addressing Issues
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee used their first hearing to focus on “The Biden Border Crisis — Part I,” in case anyone thought that the issue might be more complicated than partisan politics can reflect. Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio and Republicans blamed the administration’s policies for the record number of migrant apprehensions at the border over the past two years — even as Biden has kept some of President Trump’s key border policies in place, including the pandemic restrictions known as Title 42.
Basically, Republicans sought to portray the surge in migrants as a threat to communities across the country, while Democrats wanted to talk about systems, fearmongering, and misinformation. There was a general melding of problems among cartels taking over the migrant business, the rising smuggling of fentanyl, a mixing of asylum and illegal crossing cases.
Just to add an exclamation, we had another bill introduced calling for impeachment of Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas. Who knows what to make of it, since no Biden administration officials were called to testify.
In another hearing, Rep. James Comer opened hearings into the excess of on what watchdogs described as “indications of widespread fraud” in federal coronavirus aid programs. Of course, those programs were initiated under Donald Trump, but Republican lawmakers complained that too little attention was paid to the problems when Democrats controlled Congress.
The issue is rich with hypocrisy. It has been Biden administration figures who pursued fraud. More than 1,000 defendants have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding covid programs, and another 600 face charges.
There will be lots more of the same partisanship to come. Unless Beyonce has trouble selling tickets to her new tour. Then a bipartisan Congress can call Ticketmaster back to air less-than-partisan attacks.
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