Wednesday marks the real beginning of House Republicans’ efforts to bury President Joe Biden and his administration under an avalanche of time-wasting probes. This debut performance of the newly empowered majority will surely be a preview of the next two years — and just how seriously the public should take their version of “accountability.”
The action kicks off in the House Oversight Committee, where the first hearing of the new Congress is dedicated to examining federal pandemic spending. “For the past two years, Democrats in the Administration and Congress have spent far too much time pushing money out the door and far too little time conducting meaningful oversight of how that money is being spent,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement released last week announcing Wednesday’s hearing. “Under Republican leadership, the Oversight Committee is returning to its primary duty to root out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and hold President Biden accountable.”
It’s going to be an uphill climb for Comer to sell Americans on the investigations his committee and others will launch in the coming weeks.
The tone from Comer is definitely aggressive but nothing outside the norm from a Republican legislator. In fact, the messaging Comer presents comes across as weirdly normal compared to the conspiracy theory-obsessed signaling toward the GOP base that has become typical. And rather than begin this first round of investigations with a subject that only the far-right fringe would latch on to — like, say, Hunter Biden’s laptop — he has chosen a topic that’s aimed at the kind of sensible, fiscally conservative, suburban voter Republicans used to target as their primary audience.
It’s part of a more sensible tone Comer is trying to project in front of more mainstream audiences, as Axios reporter Sophia Cai recently noted. He appeared Monday at the National Press Club, where he admitted that while “I believe I’ve demonstrated that I’ll do what I think is right, what I think is best,” it “doesn’t mean I’m going to be right 100% of the time.” On CNN, Comer was also sure to highlight his hope that he and ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., can work together on reforming how outgoing administrations handle classified documents in light of discoveries of such documents at homes owned by Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
But polling suggests it’s going to be an uphill climb for Comer to sell Americans on the investigations his committee and others will launch in the coming weeks. A recent NBC News poll found that 55% of respondents believe the GOP will “spend too much time on the investigations and not enough time on other priorities.” Meanwhile, only 8% of those polled had “a great deal of confidence” that Congress will be able to conduct a “fair and impartial investigation” into Biden and his administration, compared to 63% who said they had either “only a little confidence” or “no confidence at all.” Another 27% said they had “some confidence” in Congress’ impartiality.
That all tracks with the findings from a poll CNN released last week, in which 73% of respondents agreed that Republicans in the House “haven’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.” While it’s not particularly surprising that 92% of Democrats surveyed agreed with that assessment, it’s telling that a full 48% of Republicans did, as well — not to mention 76% of independents. That’s a number that has to have swing-district members of the GOP caucus sweating. (For those wondering, 48% of those asked listed some facet of “the economy” as the most important issue facing the country.)
A recent NBC News poll found that 55% of respondents believe the GOP will “spend too much time on the investigations and not enough time on other priorities.”
Convincing skeptics otherwise is going to be made harder when you consider the far-right ne’er-do-wells Republicans have placed on Comer’s committee. I struggle to believe that the likes of Paul Gosar or Arizona or Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia are going to tone down their rhetoric when they question Wednesday’s witnesses. After all, what’s going to go more viral or earn them more donations: a level-headed question directed to the Government Accountability Office’s comptroller general about how the administration is tracking spending or a rant about how federal spending on vaccines was part of a plot to erode American freedom?
Comer isn’t doing himself any favors, either, when it comes to his appearances on the likes of Fox News and Newsmax. When he has been speaking directly to the GOP base, he has been more than happy to focus on baseless claims about Biden and his family, including an absurd, unsubstantiated claim that Hunter Biden might have traded classified documents to a Chinese businessperson in exchange for a diamond. If that’s not the kind of rhetoric he wants in the committee room, he’s doing a terrible job of setting an example.
Even if Comer wasn’t talking out of both sides of his mouth here, voters already have a clear understanding of the GOP’s end goal. As one independent voter in Virginia recently said when presented with a list of potential Republican investigations during a focus group session: “Nothing on that list is going to improve my life. They are more occupied with busywork than doing anything substantial. This is all a get-even list.”
He’s right. Comer clearly knows how to sound like he’s doing the actual work that legitimate oversight requires. But it is readily apparent that the GOP’s investigations are going to be drawn from a grab-bag of right-wing grievances rather than issues that most Americans are concerned about. Instead, embarrassing the administration and “owning the libs” is the name of the game — and it’s not clear that the payoff Republicans are betting on will ever come to be.
