Americana

The committee that can turn Fox News segments into subpoenas

THE NEWS

The day that Kevin McCarthy lost his first vote to become speaker, Fox’s Tucker Carlson decided to lead his nightly program with a list of demands the Californian would have to fulfill if he ever wanted the gavel.

Tops on the list? A new committee to look into the “weaponization of government,” styled after Congress’s famous Church Commission that looked into FBI abuses in the 1970s. The TV host told viewers that it should be led by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, an affable libertarian who came up in the Tea Party era.

The new committee, modeled on the 1975-1976 Church Committee that probed abuse by foreign surveillance agencies, was created this week after the negotiations between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and GOP rebels who’d opposed him.

It has the power to issue subpoenas even when they overlap with “ongoing criminal investigations,” which could become especially relevant as President Biden and Donald Trump are now facing their own special counsels. Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who will oversee the new committee, sent a letter Friday to DOJ demanding answers on both probes.

In fact, House leaders were already moving to enact a version of the “weaponization” committee, but conservatives secured additional commitments that they hope will give them the resources, security clearance, and scope to put them on par with the Democratic-led select committee that investigated January 6th.

In a floor speech announcing its creation, Jordan cited the FBI’s interactions with Twitter and arrests of anti-abortion activists as examples of topics they planned to dig into.

“We don’t want to go after anyone,” he said. “We just want it to stop.”

That worries Democrats, who predict that the GOP will go on fishing expeditions any time Fox News hosts or Donald Trump’s allies urge them to. They’re especially concerned about a push to “investigate the investigators” as retaliation against officials who looked into wrongdoing in the Trump administration.

“The facts speak for themselves,” said California Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. “You had multiple convictions of Trump associates because they violated federal law. There’s no indication to me that the FBI was doing any of that for political reasons. They were doing it based on the facts presented.”

Massie, who is now expected to be seated on the committee, said that Democratic critics were misguided.

“I think they’re going to be eating crow if they call it a tinfoil hat committee, and six months or 18 months into this we find out stuff that is appalling to their constituents as well as ours,” said Massie. “And I think it’s a mistake to say that the federal government’s infallible, and that we don’t need to watch over them.”

DAVID’S VIEW

The new committee combines two priorities from different wings of the GOP: Massie’s libertarian skepticism of the security state, and the post-Trump conservative movement’s conviction that Trump was railroaded by a permanent deep state.

On the right, one of the first calls for a “new Church Committee,” came in August 2019, two weeks after federal prison guards claimed to have found convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein dead in his cell. Eric Weinstein, the managing director at Thiel Capital, called for “a Senate Church II committee formed to investigate Epstein, FBI, CIA, NSA five Eyes, Clinton Global Initiative, Russia/China interference, etc.”

Weinstein, who coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web,” did not get much pickup initially; his #BackToChurch hashtag was mostly used by people promoting religious services. John Durham, who would later be made a special counsel, had already been appointed to investigate whether the FBI’s 2016 probe of Russian political interference was politically motivated.

Durham didn’t find much, and conservatives grew more suspicious that domestic law enforcement was out to hurt them. The drumbeat for a new committee continued in conservative media last year, with former Washington Times editor John Solomon identifying a “growing number of influential figures in Washington who wanted a new Church committee” specifically.

“I know a lot of people that work with the FBI are good, hard-working people,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. told Solomon. “But there is a political cabal inside the FBI that has to be dealt with. It’s inside the Department of Justice also.”

Kash Patel, a former Trump official at the center of both the January 6th and classified document probes, endorsed “new Church” in a pre-election column. An effective probe of bias couldn’t be run out of an existing committee, he wrote, because of “jurisdictional barriers that the FBI has expertly used to play shell games with congressional committees for decades.”

“I actually don’t believe, as I sit here, that we can abolish the FBI, unless we do something to replace it,” North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop said at a post-election panel hosted by the conservative Claremont Institute, on the need for a new select committee.

A few weeks later, Bishop was one of the 21 holdouts who demanded concessions before giving Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel.

Before the vote, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent and one of the House’s most moderate Republicans, told Semafor that he was the agency’s “biggest defender,” but saw why colleagues wanted to probe it for bias.

“FBI agents, in order to do their job, need the faith of the public,” said Fitzgerald. “And if you have a scenario where every other door you knock on in the neighborhood is getting slammed in your face because of politics, that’s a problem. Even if it’s just a perception issue, that makes our country less safe.”

Political pressure works. The Church Committee’s revelations about CIA assassination plots and NSA surveillance of domestic politicians are seared in the national memory; for decades, it was the left, not the right, that wanted a sequel.

“I think it’ll backfire in the long run, because this committee is really about pandering to the base,” said Kurt Bardella, a former GOP press secretary for the House Oversight committee who now advises Democrats. “The entire premise that the federal government is being weaponized while ignoring everything Trump did for four years is just a non-starter from a credibility standpoint.”

NOTABLE

• In the Bulwark, former Church Committee aides Loch K. Johnson and Frederick Baron write that the new committee “bears no likeness” to the one they worked for, and is “intended to generate headlines rather than needed reforms.”

National: Holly Otterbein and Adam Wren catch up with the people who want California Rep. Ro Khanna to run for president… Paul Ryan talks to Joseph Zeballos-Roig about the state of wonky fiscal conservatism… Jim Swift asks how committed House Republicans really are to the Fair Tax.

Illinois: Nader Issa and Fran Spielman break down Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “problematic” offer to Chicago Public School students: To come work for the campaign.

Mississippi: Ashton Pittman reports on Brandon Presley’s run for governor: A Democrat with a famous name versus a Republican he accuses of “zero conviction and maximum corruption.“

Montana: Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine talk with the Democrats begging Sen. Jon Tester to run again… Abe Streep explores the rightward shift in a formerly libertarian-minded state.

Virginia. Trip Gabriel looks at how Gov. Glenn Youngkin juggles his national ambitions with his quest to win this year’s General Assembly election.

Lightfoot for Chicago, “I’ve Got a Plan.” After a few light-hearted ads that starred the mayor herself, personally solving Chicagoans problems, this spot lets an actor tell voters that they’ve been misled. “You wouldn’t know it by watching the news or listening to the haters,” he says. “But on crime, Mayor Lightfoot’s got a plan.” Challenger Paul Vallas was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police last week, and Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia is releasing his public safety plan today. Lightfoot’s argument: Things are getting better already.

National Republican Senatorial Committee, “Retire or Get Fired.” Three Senate Democrats are up for re-election in 2024. The GOP’s campaign committee made a small, five-figure digital ad buy against all three (Montana Sen. Jon Tester, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin) previewing 22 months of ads tying them to the president and vice president, if they don’t wise up and quit. It’s an increasingly popular tactic; two years ago, the House GOP’s super PAC ran early ads to warn swing-seat Democrats of what was coming, and Republicans believe that played a role in the retirement of ex-Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy.

The president’s post-election honeymoon ended in August 2021, during the fall of Kabul. After that, a plurality of registered voters gave him a negative job approval rating in averages of polls; one year later, his positives were tumbling under 40%. This is the first poll in a long time that’s found most voters generally approving of Biden, even as they view the economy and his handling of nearly every issue (inflation, immigration) negatively. He’s benefitting from unpopular Republican opposition, with 55% of voters viewing “Republicans in Congress” negatively and just 36% approving of Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.

The caveat: This poll was conducted before the special counsel appointment on Thursday.

Flickr/RhodesJ

It happened very fast. On Monday, Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg that gas stoves were a “hazard” and products that could not be made safer could be “banned.” Bloomberg’s headline warned that a federal agency might “consider [a] ban on gas stoves amid health fears.” On Wednesday, CPSC chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said that no federal gas stove ban was being considered.

Some states and cities are banning future sales of gas stoves, and the natural gas industry has mobilized to stop that with populist campaigns and even state laws that preempt local restrictions. The industry didn’t need to do much this week; Republican politicians, including two potential presidential candidates, went to war.

At a stop in The Villages, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brandished two signs supporting gas stove freedom, more than a year after he and the GOP legislature prevented Florida cities from banning natural gas appliances.

“I just want to make it clear to everybody that when we say ‘Don’t Tread on Florida’ or ‘Let us alone,’ we mean that, including for your gas stoves,” said DeSantis.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley joined him, with an icon of a stove inspired by Texas’ “Come and Take It” flag. “First, the liberals came for our light bulbs,” Haley tweeted. “Then, they came for our cars. Now, they’re coming for our stoves.”

The arc of the debate was classic “real America” populist, though the geography was a little unusual this time. Outside the coastal elitist bubble, most households do not use gas stoves already — they’re most heavily concentrated in blue states like New York, California, and Illinois, and in households with higher incomes.

It’s Matt Gaetz’s House now

Matt Gaetz got almost everything he wanted. The Florida congressman was part of the “Never Kevin” cohort of five Republicans who withheld their vote for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hoping to replace him, joined by 16 more Republicans who wanted to negotiate for rules changes.

McCarthy won, without Gaetz’s vote, but the rebels got their rules changes, their guaranteed votes on spending bills, and up-or-down votes on a broader conservative agenda.

“We had a Republican conference meeting this morning, and I was taken by the pep rally atmosphere,” Gaetz told Semafor this week. “Many of my colleagues who just days before were calling us the Taliban 20 were celebrating this new open, transparent process.”

Gaetz made McCarthy sweat first, casting a late “present” vote on the 14th ballot that denied McCarthy the speakership and briefly threw the House into chaos — Rep Mike Rogers, R-Ala. had to be physically dragged away from Gaetz. The Florida Congressman signaled his fellow holdouts to allow McCarthy’s confirmation on the next ballot. It was a gesture of goodwill, but one that made it clear exactly who was in control of the floor.

While the headlines played up the embarrassment for Republicans, Gaetz called Semafor to discuss a new CBS News poll that showed most GOP voters approved of how the speaker vote played out.

“The organizing principle of my effort was to ensure that omnibus legislation would not be our future,” he said. “We should take great joy in noting that Nancy Pelosi is the last of the imperial speakers.”

AMERICANA: In the run-up to this vote you talked a lot about how you didn’t trust Kevin McCarthy? Why? Has that changed after last week?

MATT GAETZ: In the spirit of an earned honeymoon, I’m not going to reflect negatively on the speaker at this time. I’m going to give him a chance to meet the very serious and important concessions that he’s made. And I’m going to cheer him along, so long as he’s doing that.

AMERICANA: You used media in an interesting way last week, bypassing some traditional sources, jumping on Twitter spaces at midnight to talk to activists. What was the strategy?

MATT GAETZ: We tried to lay a good foundation with my podcast Firebrand, and I really think the novel way people understood our goals was through observing the floor debate. Millions of people were tuning in and observing some of the interactions of members on the floor. And from the body language and the substance of our remarks, I think people came to understand our position.

I was also doing a lot of interviews on conservative media, and there were times when some of the hosts that were gracious enough to have me on did not fully agree with me. People I respect a lot, like Charlie Kirk and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, expressed some skepticism and pressed me, as journalists should. I think I was able to use those platforms to articulate how we wanted to change this place.

AMERICANA: The Laura Ingraham interview I just watched with you and Rep. Lauren Boebert went pretty well.

MATT GAETZ: Go watch the interview I did with Laura Ingraham two nights before that.

AMERICANA: I bring that up because you told her that you didn’t foresee needing to use the motion to vacate the chair.

MATT GAETZ: It’s not a frequently used tool. Historically, it would only be used in the most egregious of circumstances, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen. In the Boehner era, there weren’t other tools that gave members the opportunity to push back against omnibus legislating.

AMERICANA: Tom Emmer said that McCarthy would be a historically strong speaker because of what was implemented in these rules. Do you agree with that? The more popular take has been that he’ll be a weak speaker because of everything he had to accept.

MATT GAETZ: The popular take is wrong. Here’s how I think that plays out specifically. The Senate likes to legislate by omnibus, and we actually strengthen the speaker’s hand. When he goes over to the Senate and says, “Mitch, I can’t take an omnibus. House rules won’t allow it,” that will strengthen our hand to get individualized assessment of appropriations bills. That will strengthen our hand to get individualized assessment of appropriations bills.

I remember how it strengthened McConnell’s hands during the Obamacare repeal debate, to be able to tell us that it didn’t really matter what he thought about the merits of our concepts to include in that Obamacare repeal. What mattered was whether the parliamentarian thought they violated the Byrd rule, and we all became captive to the thinking of the Senate parliamentarian. Now, we can utilize these very strong House rules to inform how the Senate thinks about legislating, much in the way that they used their parliamentarian to inform how we thought about it.

AMERICANA: Have you followed the discourse among progressives about why the House Freedom Caucus did this and the Squad didn’t extract concessions this way?

MATT GAETZ: That was a conversation on the floor that I overheard. I agree with it. This town doesn’t give you anything. You’ve got to earn every, every inch of change. We did play hardball, but it ended up in a really good place.

AMERICANA: What’s a rule change that got lost in the fog of war that you expect people to appreciate?

MATT GAETZ: The Holman rule, the ability to defund particular bureaucrats. Imagine if we’d have had that with a majority, while Dr. Fauci was still a government employee.

… 39 days until the special election for Virginia’s 4th district

… 46 days until Chicago’s mayoral election

… 81 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election

… 660 days until the 2024 presidential election

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