Even in recess, House GOP priorities are all screwed up

Following an unusually unproductive and chaotic session in 2023 — and the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this month without a shred of evidence that he committed a high crime or misdemeanor — the Republican-led House took a vacation. During the two-week recess, GOP leaders doubled down on another baseless, pointless, partisan witch hunt and made no visible progress on averting a government shutdown, securing the U.S. border with Mexico or providing military assistance to Ukraine.

While they were away, Special Counsel David Weiss, who was originally appointed by President Trump, indicted Alexander Smirnov for lying to FBI investigators that in 2015 and 2016 the Ukrainian corporation Burisma paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million apiece to protect it “through his dad [then Vice President] from all kinds of problems.” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Cal.) cited this allegation by “a trusted FBI informant” to justify launching an impeachment probe against President Biden in September. This “highly credible confidential human source,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), provided “the most corroborating evidence we have.” Fox News cited it in stories about “the Biden crime family” more than 2,600 times; Sean Hannity touted the claim on 85 segments of his prime-time show. “The evidentiary record is impossible to ignore,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared in December.

None of these inquisitors mentioned that FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that the document they demanded to see contained “unverified reporting” that “does not validate” the allegation, “establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information verified by the FBI.” Or that Bill Barr dismissed the claim, first made while he was attorney general, as uncorroborated.

Weiss’s indictment concludes that Smirnov’s story “was a fabrication, an amalgamation of otherwise unremarkable business meetings that had actually occurred at a later date.” Smirnov, it turns out, did not meet with any Burisma officials until 2017, when Biden was no longer vice president.

Faced with the collapse of the principal pillar of his fact-starved case, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) maintained he would still vote to remove Biden, but would not “lose sleep over whether he gets impeached because we know the Senate’s not going to convict. My job never was to impeach.” Comer now insists his goal was to lay an evidentiary foundation for legislation to ban influence peddling, a subject he did not seem passionate about when Donald Trump was president.

In what appears to be a desperate attempt to find or fabricate something, Comer’s committee conducted an eight-hour closed-door interrogation of James Biden, the president’s brother, during the recess.

Meanwhile, the House dawdles and diddles on urgently important priorities. After Speaker McCarthy and President Biden agreed to avoid a catastrophic debt default by setting spending for this year’s discretionary budget at $1.66 trillion, Congress approved the plan, but some House Republicans refused to abide by the deal. The impasse led to a “continuing resolution” that extended funding at current levels to avert a government shutdown. When the CR passed with support from Democrats, a few MAGA extremists ousted McCarthy as Speaker and shut the House down for two weeks as Republicans failed to agree on a successor.

Two more CRs have followed. The third one runs out on March 1 for some government agencies and March 8 for the others. If a budget is not approved and signed by the president, parts of the government will shut down; in April, mandatory across-the-board cuts on spending opposed by most members of Congress will be implemented.

A few weeks ago, Republican support for a bipartisan legislative package combining border security and aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — praised by the Wall Street Journal editorial board for containing “long-time GOP priorities” — sunk in the Senate when Trump trashed it. Johnson, who had demanded such legislation, said it would be “dead on arrival” in the House.

After 70 senators (including 22 Republicans) voted for a stand-alone bill to aid Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Speaker Johnson (who declared in October that Congress would not “abandon Ukraine”) proclaimed that the “Republican-led House will not be jammed into passing a foreign aid bill” which “does nothing to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.” Amidst reports of Alexei Navalny’s death in an Russian penal colony and Ukrainian forces running low on ammunition and being forced to withdraw from a key town, Johnson also called for “united opposition” against Russian aggression.

Science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote that good governance depends on “the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.”

These days, alas, good governance is in short supply. And a large number of voters seem willing to choose leaders whose character they should not respect.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.