Congress

As the government barrels towards a shutdown, bipartisan flurries of lawmakers are rolling out legislation. They are taking aim at lawmaker pay, even their ability to raise money while American troops, border patrol and millions of others in the federal workforce go without remuneration. One man has found himself at the center of it all: a military veteran and freshman member of Congress who wants to make the nation’s capital in Washington, DC look a lot more like Iowa’s capital, Des Moines. As a state senator, Zach Nunn passed legislation that banned his colleagues, and himself, from trading individual stocks. He wasn’t necessarily ready to find senators in DC shoveling wads of cash and bricks of gold into their closets.

Rob Gronkowski may be retired from the NFL, but he and his Frenchie pup Ralphie were the MVPs of Congress as it returned from summer recess this week. The former Patriots and Buccaneers tight end even fueled some speculation that he’d seek to join the esteemed body down the road. Gronkowski took the Hill with bipartisan acclaim, bringing his talents to the nation’s capital to push Congress to #squashsuperbugs, like Valley fever. Gronk took up this new cause shortly after adopting Ralphie (and also shortly after he won his fourth Super Bowl).

Impeaching a president may not have the same power it once did in Washington. But the announcement of an official inquiry today by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the first time Capitol Hill Republicans have seriously deployed impeachment in a quarter century. Much as Republicans hated Barack Obama, and much as they could have found a path to impeaching him with their large post-Tea Party Congressional majorities, they never went down this path. This is the new aggressive politics in an age of lawfare — but it’s also justified by what we already know, and what we’ve learned in the past year. “I’m directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” McCarthy announced.

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze in place and was unable to answer questions for an agonizing period. The incident raised concerns about both his age (eighty-one) and health. But it should spark a larger debate about the gerontocracy that sits atop America's government. In January, the Pew Research Center reported that the Senate's median age is now 65.3 years old. That's up from 62.4 years old as recently as 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency. More senators have been eligible for Social Security than not for years. Just this Monday, an Associated Press poll found 77 percent of Americans think eighty-year-old President Biden is too old to effectively govern in a second term. That included 69 percent of all Democrats.

The calm tones and bipartisan agreement at Wednesday's congressional hearing didn’t match the zany issue on the table — UFOs. During the two-hour hearing, every congressman accepted the premise that UFOs exist. It seems the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the truth is out there.   Three former military and intelligence officials testified before the House Oversight subcommittee that America is being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAPs — and no one in Congress questioned it.   Representative Tim Burchett, who has been calling for a congressional hearing for months, set the tone during his opening statement. “This is an issue of government transparency. We cannot trust a government that does not trust its people.

The Department of Justice denied agents investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business deals access to evidence and witnesses, according to two IRS whistleblowers.   The House Oversight Committee heard testimony from Special Agent Joseph Ziegler and his supervisor Gary Shapley of the IRS during a six-hour hearing Wednesday. The two agents involved in Biden’s criminal probe expressed frustration at how US attorney for Delaware David Weiss and prosecutors within the DoJ handled the investigation.

Trying to make horseshoe theories of left-right politics happen is harder than it seems. Much as the topic of a political realignment has dominated discussion in Washington since the rise of Donald Trump, there has always been something missing: actual legislation to prove such a realignment is possible as policy. I included this point in my piece on the New Right this spring:  One astute observer of national politics, supportive of the New Right’s goals, told me he believes the real fault is the lack of a single clear legislative victory.

Sparks flew during a series of testy exchanges about “nonconsensual nudes,” domestic terrorism and social media censorship as FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the House’s Judiciary Committee. The hearing marked Wray’s first appearance to Congress since Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former president Donald Trump. It kicked off with some snide remarks from committee chair Jim Jordan, who chided his Democratic counterpart for mispronouncing a name, perhaps because he missed an earlier deposition. Republicans portrayed Wray as disconnected with his own department, while Democrats used him as a stand-in to praise all law enforcement.

The media buzz surrounding the PGA-LIV Golf merger just won’t stop — and the Senate’s investigation on Tuesday did little to help. The hearing came across as more a show trial of moral posturing on an issue that few outside of the golfing community have been following. After nearly three hours, one question still remained unanswered: why should anyone care?  Senator Richard Blumenthal, who announced the investigation last month, appeared to be the only one in the room invested in the hearing, which included testimony from PGA Tour chief operating officer Ron Price and board member Jimmy Dunne. The other committee members came with a few obligatory questions for PGA’s executives or outright supported them.

The gloves were off in the House of Representatives this week after Georgia congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene called her Colorado colleague Lauren Boebert “a little bitch.” The gruesome twosome used to be thick as thieves. What happened?  The fight erupted over impeachment articles that Boebert introduced Tuesday and tried unsuccessfully to force a vote on. Greene, who drafted her impeachment articles in 2021 and again this May, publicly accused Boebert of copying. On Wednesday, Boebert again tried unsuccessfully to force a vote on her impeachment resolution.  During the vote, Boebert confronted Greene over comments the congresswoman had made to the press. C-SPAN’s camera’s caught part of the exchange in a center aisle of the House floor.

“Because that’s where the money is.” That was the answer that Willie Sutton, an expert in his chosen field, gave when asked why he robbed banks. Maybe the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, should consider employing a kindred candor about their business activities in Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere back when Joe was Obama’s VP.   So far, they have been disappointing on that score. Here’s the state of play: an FBI whistleblower revealed the existence of a complicated bribery scheme that allegedly funneled millions of dollars into the Bidens’ coffers via a network of at least twenty shell companies set up to launder the dough.

Just as TikTok looked as though it had weathered the storm following a murky congressional hearing, a group of Republicans are demanding that the Department of Justice investigate its CEO for allegedly lying to Congress. Thirteen House Republicans, led by Representative Tim Walberg, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a letter obtained by The Spectator, demanding that the DoJ look into what they claim are critical lies told to Congress by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, while he was testifying under oath. “It is imperative that we hold Chew and TikTok accountable for his false statements regarding crucial facts of the company’s operations,” the Republicans wrote. The signatories are all members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which grilled Chew earlier this year.

After multiple rounds of negotiations to raise the debt ceiling with President Biden's team — not the president himself, of course, because he was busy eating his ice cream — the House Republican leadership announced an agreement in principle, subsequently putting up language up over Memorial Day Weekend for members to consider. There are hurdles to overcome, but based upon initial reactions, majorities of Republicans and Democrats are agreed on this deal, with opposition coming from fiscal conservatives and progressives: particularly environment-focused progressives angered by the inclusion of energy policy priorities for Republicans and for Senator Joe Manchin.

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

Kevin McCarthy rose to the speakership despite being loathed by a lot of very online conservatives and a rump portion of his own party in the House. He had to win that role across multiple votes, which the media pronounced as humiliating, indicative of a GOP incapable of governing and all the normal tropes that partisans such as Jake Tapper deploy in place of real informed analysis of the situation. This is why they’ve proven to be so utterly wrong about McCarthy’s strength as a leader since taking the gavel.