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…
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