Vengeance
The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives can’t count. We saw it when the entire country waited for a week, fifteen full House votes, for them to choose Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. We saw it again, as they dumped poor Kevin (the next Chairman of the MAGA-Republican Party??), and went through candidate after candidate (Scalise, Jordan, et al) until they finally reached Mike Johnson, an unknown with only five terms in the House, as Speaker. He wasn’t around long enough for folks to know – ignorance has advantages.
Now Mike is leading the House on a “vengeance tour”. First it was the “Biden Crime Family”, with all sorts of noise about impeaching the President himself. When their “investigation” revealed nothing, they switched to Hunter Biden, surviving son of the President, and a man with a dark past of drug addiction, tax evasion, and idiotic choices in computer repair shops.
Hunter
Hunter was a mess (seems better now), but out of all of that, the House committees were only able to come up with what the Department of Justice already knew. He evaded income taxes (now all paid with penalties). He, for a week, possessed a gun as a drug addict. And Hunter got jobs that seemed above his “paygrade” (even with a Georgetown University bachelor’s and a Yale Law degree). There is no question: his employment likely had more to do with his last name and his father, than his experience or expertise. It’s unsavory, almost as ugly as the pictures from the “lost” laptop, or the Trump profits from the Old Post Office Hotel.
But it wasn’t illegal, and neither were the naked pictures Marjorie Taylor Greene got so much pleasure displaying to the Nation in an open committee hearing. (Is there an underlying theme here: are MAGA-Republicans really hung up on sex?).
But when the House thought they had Hunter boxed in – he refused a subpoena requiring him to come in for a “private” interview – Hunter’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, brought him to an open Committee meeting and demanded an interview in front of the cameras, the Nation, and God. So while the House could still refer charges to the Justice Department, Hunter’s very public willingness to testify in an open hearing makes criminal charges less likely.
SOMEBODY
So Mike and “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” couldn’t get Joe, and they couldn’t get Hunter. But they HAD to impeach SOMEBODY, after all the noise, they needed a success. So they turned their sights on Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Mayorkas, (Cal. Berkley, Loyola Law School) a veteran of the Department of Justice, was pursuing the Biden agenda for the Southern border. That’s “ground zero” for the Trump and MAGA-Republican campaigns: they are working hard to convince the Nation that all of our troubles are coming over from Mexico with backpacks full of fentanyl and a willingness to work for nothing and vote Democratic.
(Let’s be clear – the migrants would LOVE to work, and will work for less; at jobs the vast majority of American citizens won’t do. And the vast majority of fentanyl is coming over the border in semi-truck trailers or in shipping containers on the docks, not the tattered backpacks of migrants fording the Rio Grande or wandering the Great American desert. And even when those migrants do get here, THEY CAN’T VOTE. ONLY US CITIZENS CAN VOTE; and citizenship is an arduous process of tests, recommendations and time).
Inconvenient Impeachment
But there was one minor inconvenient fact about Mayorkas: he hasn’t committed a “high crime or misdemeanor”, the language of impeachment described in the US Constitution. So “the gang” is shooting for a lower standard (but another “I” word), incompetence in office, claiming that makes him “impeachable”.
Now it’s true that impeachment technically is anything that the majority of the House says it is. So all it came down: could Mike and the “gang” count to the 216 votes needed to pass a Bill of Impeachment to send to the US Senate. (Where the Senate would deal with it appropriately and with dispatch. There’s nowhere near the two-thirds majority to convict Mayorkas in the Senate. Senators can count).
It was always going to be a near thing. There are only 219 Republicans in the House (they started with 222), and Speaker Mike counted on one Democrat, Al Green, to stay in the hospital after emergency abdominal surgery. But Green decided it was important for his voice to be heard, and was wheeled onto the House floor in his hospital scrubs to cast a last minute vote. The vote total stood at 215 to 215, Green’s vote crucial creating a tie (and therefore a fail). Ultimately one Republican switched his vote for parliamentary reasons, and the final total was 216 against, and 214 for impeachment.
Missed Again
The “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” missed again. They couldn’t count, in front of the entire Nation, again. But they blamed Democratic “trickery”, bringing Green back “from the brink” to sink their plan. Johnson and the gang need to blame somebody. I guess if it wasn’t Green, it would be their high school math teachers. They just can’t count, and they don’t learn other repeated lessons either.
Don’t worry, they haven’t given up on Mayorkas yet. Next week their own hospitalized member, Steve Scalise, will be back from his chemo treatments. Maybe they’ll be able to find a majority then. But I wouldn’t count on it – because clearly, they can’t.
