There Is Almost No Substantial Floor Debate
The new Republican majority in the House has started in earnest, with votes on rules, packages, bills arriving quickly, one after another. Almost all are straight party-line votes with few objections, so the Republican bills pass narrowly with all Democrats voting no.
There is almost no substantial floor debate before the next bill flies, and all seem more a reflection that “Washington is broke” than aimed at fixing anything. None of them seem to have support in the Senate, raising the question of whether passing bills in one house of Congress can prove effective.
In the upside-down values world of politics, doing so is good for “messaging,” for fundraising for a base of contributors happy to see such messages, and for outlining a debate for presidential candidates two years hence.
So far, we’ve seen bills to rescind budget approval to hire 87,000 employees for the Internal Revenue Service, with the expectation of keeping the IRS from unduly going after tax filers, and now there’s a bill introduced – for which a floor vote is already part of the promises that Speaker Kevin McCarthy made to get his job – to eliminate the IRS altogether.
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In that case, any information that most of the 87,000 employees hired over 10 years would not be tax agents but those providing customer service and technical support would not matter much, since Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. wants a Fair Tax Act that aims to replace the national income tax, as well as other taxes, and with a single consumption tax. The same people who throw national debt in our faces want to cut out taxes.
The House also plans to pass a series of bills in the coming days to impose abortion limits and curtail immigration. Despite the national pushback against abortion restrictions, two bills would curtail abortion with new prohibitions on federal funds for the procedure and new regulations about how doctors need to care for infants born alive after abortions – a rare event that only serves to continue the anti-abortion flag.
On immigration, a bill certain to pass would empower the Homeland Security secretary to block entry for migrants at “his discretion” as necessary to “achieve operational control” over the border. That is, unless the House impeaches Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary, as threatened. Another would require the background check system to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement if a person in the U.S. unlawfully seeks to buy a gun. Hey, maybe this is an omen of a new attitude towards gun control.
Whatever else you want to say about the pace and directness of these challenges taken in the name of retribution, these are bills that oversimplify what exist as complex questions, and likely deserve some discussion that is missing.
Onto the Investigating
What with all the efforts to ignore ethics complaints and to bar Democrats Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from committees, maybe the flurry of all these futile legislative efforts are just meant to clear the boards for endless investigation of all things Biden.
Apart from one bipartisan-supported review of U.S.-China strategic policies, all the others under discussion from a re-questioning of Jan. 6 evidence to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop ripple with partisan overlay. The ink isn’t dry on reports of Biden turning over some classified documents, but the calls for special Congressional investigation are already loud.
Even calling the new investigative panel that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government tells the story. The panel is expected to investigate not only how the executive branch has gathered information on citizens, but how it has worked with other bodies – including private sector companies – to “facilitate action against American citizens.”
Along the way to repeated mentions of Hunter Biden, it intends to bump into the Justice Department over the content of active cases, including those involving former president Donald Trump – and now, and first, the discovery of classified documents at Joe Biden’s offices and home. Oversight apparently now starts with the first mention of an issue; the Justice Department’s appointed special counsel hasn’t even set up shop.
The Justice Department expects its inquiries to be quiet and ordered, not shared and public in ways that either tank prosecutions or open witnesses to danger. That might end up in some legal bruising, or more likely, the committee will just breeze by it to assert facts.
“The prospect for mischief is chilling” from such interference, writes Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus. “There is a difference between oversight and overstepping.”
What was noteworthy about the Biden case was the speed with which Republicans insisted on their own public investigation of matters that they have been pooh-poohing about Trump.
In the last session, while Republicans were in the minority, Jordan already outlined the case, though most of his 1,000 pages of report were notes from his committee itself raising questions rather than the collection of evidence.
The question about these investigations is not whether they should exist, it is about whether they are intended to collect and explore evidence or simply to issue conclusions that will have partisan implications.
If the bill-passing we have seen to date are any indication, the question at hand is whether these hearings and investigations serve purposes other than self-promotion.
Already, these investigative efforts are well beyond evidence, promoting calls for “defunding” the FBI or other law enforcement agencies as if that is the answer to more complex relationships between government and social media companies, for example.
The knock on the Freedom Caucus now in control of the House is that its extremist members are solely focused on iconoclastic takedown of the very government it claims to support. The test ahead is whether they even come close to substance.