It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson's honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The right-wing House Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that Johnson allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck's Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the [John] Boehner playbook" referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats.
Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision" because he wouldn't choose between two competing bills. And apparently, it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off. We used to be able to get answers from people.” Who could have seen that coming?
It's clear from his record that Johnson would love nothing more than to stand by their side and throw tantrums — but his new job as speaker is coming into conflict with his ideology as a MAGA warrior and it's probably not going to end well for him.
He has certainly gone out of his way to show the hardliners that he's one of them. He immediately made the required pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring and then enthusiastically delivered his endorsement making it clear that he is all MAGA all the way. And despite just a few weeks ago suggesting that impeachment was no longer necessary since President Biden's polls numbers are weak (therefore admitting that the whole thing is a partisan sham) he delivered for Trump and the MAGA faithful on their biggest priority this week. He brought the vote to formalize the inquiry to the floor and persuaded the so-called moderates in the party to go along. You'd think that would have appeased the Freedom caucus but let that be a lesson to Johnson: It is simply not possible.
All the usual suspects have been making the rounds since the vote suggesting that the party line vote (which Johnson once insisted could destroy the Republic) shows they have the goods. But once again, they are lying. They have still produced not one sliver of evidence that Joe Biden did any of the things they are implying he did with their histrionic innuendo about "the Biden Crime Family."
Interestingly, there is one member of the House who may have actually done the things he's accusing Biden of doing.
A few weeks ago, Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast broke a story about some shady dealings by House Oversight Chair James Comer that resembles some of the crimes he's accusing Biden of committing. In a new report this week, the AP unearthed new details that make it pretty clear that Comer's crusade is a clear example of GOP projection.
Comer has been yammering about "the Biden family" shell companies, which Joe Biden had nothing to do with and were actually completely legitimate companies with real purposes, for months. He even once told Fox Business, “nobody creates shell companies.”
Actually, some people do. In fact, Comer himself has a shell company which grew from $50,000 and $100,000 at the time of purchase to between $500,001 and $1 million today. Evidently, he's conveniently forgotten to report the assets within it which goes against House rules which require members to disclose assets held by companies worth more than $1,000. Oh, and this shell company was formed from a transfer of a piece of land co-owned with one of his major campaign donors and nobody can figure out what the purpose of it was or why he has gone to such lengths to obscure it.
When asked about this, he keeps saying that the questioner is "financially illiterate" which is hilarious considering the total illiteracy of his charges against Joe Biden. If you don't believe that, I highly recommend this thorough fact check by the Washington Post's Philip Bump or this one by Factcheck.org. It would be sad if it wasn't so outrageous.
But the point of all this is to dirty up Joe Biden as corrupt to give some red meat to the Trump followers and make the rest of the country assume "where there's smoke there's fire" which is something they've been successful at doing against their enemies for decades. I'm sure I don't have to remind people about Whitewater which bears some similarities with this current bogus scandal in both its lack of evidence or its relevance to the current presidency. The memory of Benghazi and "But Her Emails" against Hillary Clinton are still fresh. The Birther scandal enraptured the right wingers throughout the Obama presidency and launched Donald Trump's political career.
This is what they do. And more often than not, when you examine these scandals closely, you'll find that it's the Republicans doing the accusing who are actually guilty of the crimes. James Comer's flagrant hypocrisy is just par for the course.
Donald Trump wants revenge for his two impeachments and if there was time he would demand that they impeach Biden three times just so he'd have one more than him on his record. And because they've pounded this story on right-wing media for years now, the MAGA base is slavering over the prospect of taking down the president. It has nothing to do with any real crimes or evidence or anything else that would justify an impeachment.
Those Representatives from swing districts who voted to open the inquiry this week may believe this was essentially a free vote and hope that they won't be asked to vote for an actual impeachment but I think they are deluding themselves. The constitutional standard for impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" but in practice, as the late president Gerald Ford put it, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
At this moment in history, Donald Trump, James Comer and Jim Jordan will be deciding what it is and it's clear that their standard is literally nothing. They'll do it because they can. It's the only reason they need.
