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Republicans Storm the Schiff SCIF!
Yes, the title of this post is hyperbole, and I’m delighted to describe the most dramatic event for the Republicans in the impeachment process this year; I hope they were all taking notes. I think this action was especially noteworthy and beneficial to the Republicans and I’ll describe the reasons. Let me first give a brief description of the event:
House Republicans stormed a closed-door impeachment hearing on Wednesday to protest the inquiry and refused to leave until Democrats held an open hearing.
About 30 House Republicans, headed by Rep. Matt Gaetz, forced their way into the hearing as Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, was providing private testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry inside the House Intelligence Committee’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
Here are the reasons this demonstration was so significant:
- It’s sending a message to the House Democrats that they can’t control everything in this process.
- The Republicans are finally discovering the joy that Trump has known for months of demonstrating pure power.
- No one even tried to stop them, eject them or punish them; they were chastised for taking their phones into the room.
- Schiff left in a huff with Laura Cooper so that the interview didn’t happen.
- The Republicans continue to demand transparency, the right to call witnesses and a copy of the transcripts.
- The Democrats have been given notice that the Republicans are not going to cave in to their tyrannical and secretive activities.
- Democrats who are reluctantly going along with this charade are going to be even more uncomfortable as Republicans point out their irresponsible efforts to withhold information from the public.
- Even those Republicans who weren’t with the 30 who attended the sit-in did their part in bringing in 17 pizzas to feed the troops.
- Republicans must continue these kinds of protests; others are calling the protest a political ploy, but their actions are bringing international attention to the situation.
- These actions could unite Republicans like they haven’t been united in a long time, both in the House and in the Senate, as well as their backing the President.
Let’s hope this is not just a one-time effort, and that Republicans are developing other strategies to shine a light on the misadventures of Adam Schiff and his cohorts.
Keep on fighting, Republicans!
Published in Politics
Why do we let these people govern us? And why are so many here so excited over a dumb publicity stunt? This is a fundamentally unserious response by our supposed lawmakers (though making laws hasn’t been their strong point) and everyone is just lapping it up. Stop being total marks. Nothing they did will stop the impeachment process. That was already set in stone the day the House was lost. Instead of filling up the clown car and rolling up to the door of a SCIF perhaps these so-called leaders could come up with a plan to make the case against impeachment to the public, almost none of whom find this kind of performance art persuasive. The Democrats are going to make their case to the public and you know they’ll have as much media time as they want to do it. Rather than going full Brick Tamland some of these folks could think about a strategy that actually gets their message (though God knows what that even is) to the voters in a way that doesn’t seem like the antics of a spoiled child. Just a thought.
Mr. President, your Emancipation Proclamation is just a dumb publicity stunt. It doesn’t free a single slave in the north, south, or border states. It’s a fundamentally unserious response while a serious war is going on, though the management of this war hasn’t exactly been your strongest point anyway.
Yeah, Trump and Ukraine is pretty similar to abolishing slavery. Almost indistinguishable tbh.
In a way, I agree with you @reformed_yuppie. I much prefer dignity, rational behavior, politeness. Republicans have tried that for years, and here’s where it’s gotten us: Democrats stomping all over us. As you point out, it’s easy to criticize but much harder to resolve. These actions are not meant to be polite; they stop just short of guerilla warfare. I hate it. But I see no choice. When you figure out a better strategy, let us know.
Here’s a great article by Mollie Hemingway. In part, she says:
At some point it won’t just be marches on Capitol Hill from a few Republican congressmen that the Resistance will have to deal with. It is unclear what the proper reaction to an unrelenting campaign to overturn the result of the 2016 election should be exactly, but they should stop expecting people to be as polite as they have been in response.
The title of the piece is
GOP Has A Choice: Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort Or Surrender Government To Democrats
Perhaps “Si vis pacem, para bellum” is a good motto for our current political state.
Or as one President notoriously said “Punch back twice as hard.”
Or to crib from the Greatest President of the 20th Century: “My idea of Republican policy toward the Democrats is simple: We win and they lose.”
That’s a great piece, and a call to arms.
I bet you really cleaned up on the analogy questions on your SAT exams.
Based on what metric? They weren’t doing much stomping when Obama was president. Hell, he basically wiped out his party from the state level on up. The day after the election in 2016 the GOP controlled the House, Senate, White House, a majority of state legislatures, governor’s mansions, and was about to tip the balance of the Supreme Court. I keep hearing this argument that the GOP does nothing but lose and yet from 2010 onward all they’ve done is win more and more control nationwide. If that’s what getting stomped by Democrats looks like then we should be pretty pleased.
On one adversarial site, these are the Republicans reported to be “stormers”:
Republican Whip Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, Mark Walker, Andy Biggs, Lee Zeldin, Mo Brooks, Mark Meadows, Kevin Hern, Paul Gosar, Steve Watkins, Debbie Lesko, Russ Fulcher, Buddy Carter, Steve King, Bill Johnson, Fred Keller, Brian Babin, Ken Buck, Michael Waltz, Ralph Norman, Louie Gohmert, Mark Green, Carol Miller, Vicky Hartzler, Alex Mooney, Jeff Duncan, Drew Ferguson, Gary Palmer, Jody Hice, Duncan Hunter, Ross Spano, Bradley Byrne, David Rouzer, Markwayne Mullin, Randy Weber, Pete Olson, Ron Wright, Scott Perry, Greg Murphy, and Ben C
You’re the one who made the world’s dumbest comparison. Don’t blame me for noticing it. But please explain, in detail, how the two things are similar. The floor is yours. Wow us with your powers of persuasive.
They win some electoral offices but those offices become less relevant, as they use their offices to give more money and power to the administrative state that has now became an independent power to rule over us. The size and scope of government is not one whit smaller. And the corporate welfare state has not retracted one iota. If that’s what winning is like, I say we should try losing for a change.
Please note the sentence in bold. And let’s not forget 2018 when we lost the house. All they did was make promises about getting rid of Obama care, and we know how that went . . .
Yes. Conservatives put them in power, but what did they do once they got there?
They stomped all over us while Obama was President. Or did your ox not get gored?
I think I already persuaded you; otherwise why would you be trying to divert attention from the point by playing dumb? Ooh! That’s another similarity! You’re playing dumb, and I can play that game, too! For example:
Ukraine had an orange revolution, and the maker of the Emancipation Proclamation was eventually succeeded by an orange president. There is orange everywhere. The two cases could not be more similar.
But as those who scored well on their SAT exams know, even though those two cases are exactly alike, the analogies don’t depend on that particular similarity.
Here is a sample SAT analogy question that I found on the web:
Now I suppose there is some genius who would say the correct answer is choice #5, because some prescribed medicines are stimulants, or choice #2 because doctors of medicine sometimes treat the effects of hunger, but that the other things don’t have anything to do with medicine. A person who thinks that way would score well enough to be admitted to a social justice math program at a university.
I’ve got some bad news: government isn’t going to shrink. There is no incentive for the people we elect to “take away” existing goodies from their base of supporters. The best you can hope for is that your guys are the ones who choose how to expand it. That’s it. That’s what winning looks like. Those were the rules of the game and the GOP won that game repeatedly. Now maybe we go through a reckoning and see some cultural shifts that push back towards a more favorable environment to shrink the federal government. That would be nice. But until such time you have to accept that the GOP, whether good or bad or neutral, racked up a lot of wins within the contest in which they participated.
That’s an entirely different problem though. The first goal is to get in power. The second is to figure out how to effectively use it. Just because #2 wasn’t achieved does not invalidate #1. The issue was (and will continue to be) that large broker parties represent a pretty diverse range of ideas and tactics. Reconciling those differences are pretty hard. The Dems are going through that same dance now. Most of the party—that is, the actual voters—are generally not nearly as progressive as the Twitter wing of the party. If they get in power there will be a massive struggle to try to placate all the respective voices. That’s the nature of the era we’re in now.
I see a math problem there.
I see human nature.
My point is that you claim that Republicans are winning just by pointing out electoral victories. But as you yourself point out, that’s just winning power. It’s not winning on policy. Those idiots can’t even defund the baby-parts traffickers in Planned Parenthood.
Ah. The Republican wing of the Republican party.
You have a point RY. And I accept that no one person will be 100% in agreement with me. However, there are a number of disconnects with even the most highly touted convervative “stars”. For example, Dan Crenshaw has been mentioned as a possible future candidate for POTUS. Yet he is in favor of greatly expanding the H1B visa program, undercutting American workers. And as @drewinwisconsin notes, we can’t even defund PP.
For me, if a Republican candidate says s/he will do something during the campaign and then, once in office, doesn’t follow through when the opportunity arises, that is the sort of betrayal that rankles and makes me think “What have they conserved?”
See the late John McCain and his promise to get rid of Obamacare.
How did the Obamacare repeal pan out? Bringing the rational, cohesive argument to 325 million people, only half of whom vote, and 51% of that half decides who’s president?
These sorts of arguments were dismissed as arguments long before rational argumentative theory was first theorized by arguing theorists during The Theorists Century.
Politics is as much theater as it is a public policy dissertation. When the scope of the government is so large, and nothing it touches gets simpler or easier to understand, it just gets more complex, assuming that an hour-long slideshow explaining the disaster that is the Democrats in whole or in part, in terms of impeachment or other policy, is not going to move the electoral needle much.
So: It’s not going to shrink. Then it is going to shrink?
Is shrinkage possible or not? Or in the words of a favorite theorist of mine: Is shrinkage unpossible?
Here’s another example of a publicity stunt:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should [pull a publicity stunt] and declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
To avoid turning it into a publicity stunt, they could have written up their resolution and then stamped it top secret, put it in a strong box, and hidden it in a dusty archive.
I was defining “winning” by the most observable metric, i.e. winning the contests in which they had entered. Since I have never once expected a politician to actually follow through on their promises I just assumed that everyone else was into that game as well. Which leaves us with one universal definition of winning. Otherwise we (collectively) would never be able to set any standard since you may want one thing very much but I may not care about it at all. Your point isn’t wrong, but you’re talking about oranges and I’m talking about apples.
I think we go through phases. There were a lot of isolationists before WWI, and by the time WWII rolled around that part of the public was a very small minority. Big changes in the global economy or in geopolitics have lasting effects on how we view our own interests and what direction should be taken. But that ship takes a long time to turn around. So I wouldn’t rule out a future revolt against a growing government, but that’s not the reality of the moment as we live it today. Everywhere I look I see fewer people in power advocating for government to shrink. I don’t think Trumpism was ever about smaller government. Some of the folks who wish to follow in his footsteps (Hawley is the most obvious case) are talking about an expanded regulatory state. So for now the small government crowd (of which I generally count myself a member) don’t have a lot to look forward to. It’ll change one day, but I wouldn’t bet that day is anytime soon. Does that clarify it a bit more?
By comparing Matt Gaetz to Jefferson you kind of make my point. You are free to like the stunt. You can even pretend like it was meaningful. But you don’t actually have the power to make others buy it just because you did.
I don’t give a crap about the apples if they’re not delivering on the oranges.