Two of the goings-on in the House of Representatives in this week now ending serve to show how far removed things are from any kind of bipartisan cooperation and respect. There have always been times when differences between Republicans and Democrats got personal and nasty, but it comes in ebbs and flows, and it’s at a high point now: a high point of nastiness.
On Wednesday, September 20, Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. With the Republicans in the majority in the House, every House committee has a Republican majority and Republican chair, and that committee’s Republican chair is Rep. Jim Jordan from Ohio. Jim Jordan was one of the lawmakers who voted on January 6 to reject the electoral vote for Joe Biden, and he was one of the Republicans whom House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy wanted to appoint to the committee investigating the January 6 attack, whom Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House at the time) refused to allow. Jim Jordan is very pro-Trump and is an attack dog on Trump’s behalf, against Biden and against the Democrats. That’s whose committee Merrick Garland had to face on Tuesday.
Like other Republicans, Jim Jordan regards the indictments of Trump as being politically motivated and thinks the Justice Department has been persecuting Trump while protecting President Biden and his son Hunter. The phrase “two-tiered system of justice” keeps being invoked. The fact that Hunter Biden had just been indicted for lying about his drug use on an application for a firearms permit did not impress Jordan and his comrades any. Jordan grilled Garland on certain procedural points in the investigation of Hunter Biden, accusing Garland of handling matters in a way assured to be as soft on the president’s son as possible. He also, at one point, made the false statement that Trump had voluntarily returned all the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago and had cooperated with everything the government had asked him to do in its investigation.
Garland wasn’t about to comment on specific prosecutorial decisions, and it should be noted that in the case of both Hunter Biden and Donald Trump he appointed special counsels and let them use their own discretion in their respective matters. He did insist that he was not the president’s personal lawyer, then added that he was not Congress’s prosecutor either.
While all this is happening, the inability of Congress to pass a budget or even a continuing resolution by the end of September makes an October 1 government shutdown seem increasingly likely. The only way there won’t be a government shutdown is if the Republican-majority House and the Democratic-majority Senate can agree on a set of measures that President Biden is willing to sign. But at the moment, the House Republicans can’t even agree amongst themselves on a budget bill worthy of even being brought to the floor for debate. A small handful of hardline conservative Republicans–essentially the same ones who tried to block the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker–are blocking even the procedural votes to bring such budget bills up for debate on the House floor. The bills that McCarthy wants the House to pass are not conservative enough for the hardliners of the party, while at the same time being much too conservative for the Democrats to entertain. So there are two seemingly impossible hurdles: First the Republicans in the House have to agree among themselves on funding levels for various programs; then the Republicans and the Democrats have to come to some agreement. And McCarthy knows that if he concedes even a quarter of an inch to the Democrats, his days as Speaker are likely to be numbered.
Article in TheHill.com on Garland’s testimony, September 20, 2023
Complete C-SPAN video of Merrick Garland before the House Judiciary Committee, September 20, 2023
Article in TheHill.com on shutdown prospects, September 22, 2023
