Every House Rethug Votes To Conduct A Biden Impeachment ‘Investigation’. In the hopes of, you know, finding something:
It’s a win for Speaker Mike Johnson, who managed to unify his conference after battleground-district Republicans spent months resisting a formal inquiry — leading his predecessor to backtrack and start the investigation unilaterally.
“This is an important step. The impeachment power resides solely with the House of Representatives. If a majority of the House now says we’re in an official impeachment inquiry … that carries weight. That’s going to help us get these witnesses in,” Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said ahead of the vote.
Republicans are months into their impeachment probe, which has largely focused on the business deals of Joe Biden’s family members. While they’ve found evidence of Hunter Biden using his last name to bolster his own influence and poked holes in some previous statements by the White House and the president, they have yet to find direct evidence that the president’s official decisions were meant to benefit family businesses.
Even as Republicans inch toward making Biden the fourth president to ever be impeached, they are trying to draw a bright line between their vote on Wednesday and any eventual vote on impeachment articles.
A subtlety that will be lost on voters in battleground districts. But, hey, it enables Trump to argue that Biden has done things “far worse” than what he has been accused of. Mission accomplished.
Hunter Biden Shows Up. Rethugs scurry:
Hunter Biden was scheduled to appear before a House committee on Wednesday and answer questions in a closed-door session. Instead, President Joe Biden’s son did the one thing that Republicans were desperately trying to avoid: He spoke in public.
Hunter has offered to appear before the House Oversight Committee in an open public session. He offered to testify on Wednesday or on any day that the committee’s chair, Rep. James Comer, might suggest. But Comer was horrified by the idea. He and the other Republicans on the committee want Hunter in a closed session so they can bury any exculpatory evidence, selectively leak fragmented quotes to feed their baseless “impeachment inquiry,” and release carefully edited snippets of themselves haranguing the president’s son for their 2024 campaigns.
Rethugs’ response: Threatening him with contempt proceedings for offering to testify in public. The contempt is well-earned.
Has the Overton Window really moved this far? Yes. The Republican Party indeed is merely a vehicle moving us towards authoritarianism. Which reminds me:
Rethugs To Ukraine: Drop Dead. All Of You:
The arch-conservative and very influential Heritage Foundation, a onetime bastion of hawkish GOP interventionism, is reportedly holding a meeting this week with allies of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s government to discuss opposition to further aid to Ukraine. Heritage itself signed a cooperation agreement this year with the Danube Institute. The head of the Budapest-based, Orbán-aligned organization described the agreement as showing that “Hungary has allies in the United States.”
“In the very recent past, the GOP pulling support for a country like Ukraine in the conflict that it’s in would have been laughable,” Kim Holmes, an assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush Administration and a former executive vice president at the Heritage foundation, told TPM. He added that Trump had “opened the door” to a deeper strain of isolationism after “he got it in his mind that he was being undermined by the Ukrainians.”
He attributed the cratering support to a “political calculation, that somehow Ukraine was Biden’s country and Russia was Donald Trump’s country, because of all the melodrama around the impeachment of Donald Trump.”
As Biden continued to voice support for Ukraine, Holmes said, rank partisanship took over: “Ukraine became Biden’s, and after Biden started supporting Ukraine, oddly enough in a perverse way, it gave permission for these Republicans to go against it.”
How Police Have Destroyed The Promise Of Body Cameras:
In every city, the police ostensibly report to mayors and other elected officials. But in practice, they have been given wide latitude to run their departments as they wish and to police — and protect — themselves. And so as policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct.
I honestly don’t know: What is the policy of the State of Delaware, counties and local municipalities as to who controls the footage? More award-worthy reporting from ProPublica.
Netanyahu: No Hostage Negotiations Will Be Permitted On My Watch:
Israel’s war cabinet has blocked a planned visit to Qatar by the head of the country’s foreign intelligence service that was aimed at kickstarting negotiations over a new hostage release deal.
According to several reports, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, had wanted to travel to Qatar but was blocked by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and other cabinet ministers.
The decision prompted demands from the families of hostages for an explanation, saying that they were “shocked” by it.
In a statement they called for an “immediate end to the deadlock in negotiations”, adding they were “at their wits’ end with the indifference and stagnation”. They described the situation as a daily “Russian roulette in which families are informed about the murder of a hostage in captivity”.
Guess the hostages were merely a pretext for the leveling of Gaza. Apparently, they no longer even have PR value to Netanyahu.
Not the most optimistic of Open Threads. But that’s where the news took me today.
What do you want to talk about?