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Item one: Well, you can’t say House Republicans didn’t fulfill a campaign promise

The lowlight of the week, even with neofascist members of the House of Representatives catcalling the president at the State of the Union address, was clearly Thursday’s first meeting of the new “weaponization of government” subcommittee.

What happened at this hearing? On Friday’s Morning Joe, the show used a video mashup to boil the hearing down to its essence: Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden. And then Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden (a trifecta from GOP panel member Elise Stefanik). Then: Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton.

That was pretty much it. Testimony was taken from Tulsi “Putin isn’t the problem, friends” Gabbard and, as Democrat Gerry Connolly pointed out on Chris Hayes’s show, a former FBI agent who retired in 1999 before the iPhone was invented. And no, if you’re keeping score, there wasn’t much mention of the GOP’s actual avowed plans to purge the civil service and use the administrative state to punish its political enemies, thanks for asking!

Remember in old parodies of Westerns how a guy would shoot a pistol and, instead of a bullet, a little flag with the word “BANG!” written on it would come out of the barrel? That was this committee meeting.

In an early, encouraging sign of new Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s good judgment, he put a number of serious Democrats on the committee, including ranking member Stacey Plaskett (who studied constitutional law under Jamie Raskin), Connolly, and freshman member and former federal prosecutor Dan Goldman. I think we can assume these folks will be able to hold their own against Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Stefanik.

This committee is the living embodiment of the truism that Republicans have come to believe: that governing boils down to getting great coverage on Fox News. I didn’t watch Fox Thursday night myself, but I’d wager the coverage was fawning and fulsome. Republicans in Congress and in the right-wing media writ large have apparently convinced themselves in a genuine way that these are the matters the American people are concerned about.

Well—we can’t say they aren’t keeping a campaign promise. Hunter Biden is what they said they’d do, and they’re doing it. So while the Democratic president talks about Social Security and Medicare (beautifully walking Republicans into a trap during Tuesday night’s SOTU) and monopoly power and junk fees and higher taxes on the wealthy, let them talk about these things. Voters will note the difference.

And speaking of Social Security and Medicare: That SOTU moment has quickly developed into a major headache and maybe an outright disaster for Republicans. Democratic war-room operations easily and quickly turned up evidence of a number of Republicans pledging to “reform” Social Security and Medicare. And in dramatic fashion on Thursday, Mitch McConnell not only threw Florida Senator Rick Scott under the bus, he sat at the wheel and ran over the body several times.

Scott, as head of the GOP Senate campaign committee last year, released a plan that called for making Congress reauthorize and refund entitlements every five years. That’s chiefly what Biden was referring to at the SOTU. More recently, sure, Donald Trump has said those entitlements are not to be touched. And Kevin McCarthy, after initially making some noises about tying Social Security and Medicare to the debt ceiling debate, backed off threats to these programs as well. So while the Republican Party in general has been after Social Security and Medicare for years, they can fairly try to argue that it isn’t their position now (except that, you know, it always secretly is).

All of which sets the stage for what McConnell said Thursday on a podcast. “Unfortunately, that was the Scott plan, that’s not a Republican plan,” he said, repeating variations on that theme a few times. He even said this: “I think it will be a challenge for him to deal with this in his own reelection in Florida,” noting that it is “a state with more elderly people than any other state in America.” Throw that bus in reverse one more time!

Item two: What will Mike Pence do?

The motivation behind special prosecutor Jack Smith’s move to subpoena Mike Pence seems pretty obvious: He’d like to get Pence to testify that, yes, Donald Trump had prior knowledge that the January 6 mob was pretty much designed to turn violent. Such testimony would enable some kind of insurrection prosecution against Trump.

Will Pence do it? In all honesty, it seems unlikely, doesn’t it? You would think that the fact that his boss literally wanted him killed would be pretty good motivation to testify against him. But I’d still bet that Mr. Water Bottle won’t move against Trump in any meaningful way.

In fairness to Pence, he may simply not have any direct knowledge of Trump’s knowledge and intent. Trump—who as we know talks like a mob boss, all grunts and winks—is perhaps likely to have simply said to Pence, if he said anything at all, “Stick around, Mike—it’s gonna be an interesting day.”

Pence is also making noises about having “executive privilege” concerns with regard to testifying against Trump. These seem completely bogus: Executive privilege can be a legitimate thing when certain very sensitive matters of state are involved, but it was never intended to facilitate and protect presidential lying.

What is likely to be guiding Pence’s actions is the prospect of his comical presidential campaign. Does he really imagine he needs to avoid alienating Trump’s base, which already despises him?

Pence aside, the subpoena shows that Smith means business. So that’s good.

Item three: When mass-murdering tyrants oversee earthquake relief

Finally, we should note that the areas of Syria hardest hit by this catastrophic earthquake are the rebel-held areas of the northwest, which have endured more than a decade of nearly every conceivable kind of assault from their own “president,” Bashar Al Assad. The conflict in that region, which has pretty much petered out of the Western news cycle, is still ongoing. And while fewer airstrikes have been reported in the area since late last year, according to the United Nations, in most other ways “the picture remains as dire as ever,” as the U.N. special envoy to Syria put it. According to an article in Foreign Policy, 4.5 million people live in the region, three million of whom are displaced; two-thirds of the basic infrastructure has been destroyed or otherwise laid to waste.

I share with you this piece by Arwa Damon, a CNN correspondent and fellow of the Atlantic Council who ran a relief operation in Gaziantep, the main Turkish city near the Syrian border to which many refugees have fled. Damon writes that while aid has been flowing into Turkey, it has been very slow to get to Syria, and that only one border crossing to Turkey is open because the U.N. has to renew it every six months and Russia is always a threat to veto it (though it was reapproved again not long ago). The German foreign minister has recently tried to pressure Assad to allow aid to reach all areas of the country. But how likely is it that this butcher, who has been trying to kill these people for years, is going to do that? Damon quotes a friend who said of the earthquake: “It did what the Assad regime and Russians wanted to do to us all along.”

Oh, by the way, you may have missed this back in May 2021, but President Al Assad was reelected with 95 percent of the vote. It was a great victory for the Syrian people.

This week’s quiz: Hey, it’s just a game: The Super Bowl in history and culture. Cuz the game is this Sunday, for you liberal, un-American Premier League snobs.
 

Doritos seems like the lock of the decade to me. Oh, and: I loved the Chiefs when I was a little boy, even though I’ve never even been particularly near Kansas City in my life. However, I fear the Eagles are the better team here, especially with Mahomes on that gimpy ankle. But what the hell. KC 31, Phil 27. MVP: Willie Lanier. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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