Vengeance, Governance and the Road Ahead

Differences between the Democrats and Republicans remain clear and tragic

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This week House Republicans surprised no one by voting for a select subcommittee to investigate any federal agency that collects information about American citizens, meant to enable the panel to intervene in ongoing criminal cases and seek highly classified information on national security matters. Leading this committee will be Trump sycophant Jim Jordan, current GOP chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The purpose of this subcommittee, which passed on a strict party-line vote of 221-211, is said by Republicans to be an investigation into the weaponization of the federal government. But there’s little doubt that the desire to protect Donald Trump from ongoing investigations is at the top of its priorities. As New York Rep. and ranking Judiciary Committee member Jerrold Nadler put it: “In fact, this new select subcommittee is the weapon itself,” adding:

It is specifically designed to inject extremist politics into our justice system and shield the MAGA movement from the legal consequences of their actions. In order to become Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy sold out our democracy by handing power-hungry Jim Jordan subpoena power and a green light to settle political scores under the phony pretext of rooting out conservative bias.

Forget oversight, a legitimate responsibility of Congress. This is a panel built by the Freedom Caucus for attacks against perceived enemies, an opportunity to act on their grievances. Check out the words of Rep. Scott Perry, a possible member of the subcommittee, despite a conflict of interest since his phone was taken as part of the Justice Department investigation into the use of fake electors to keep Trump in office.

“Why should I be limited?” Perry asked. And then: “I would say this: ‘The American people are really, really tired of the persecution and instruments of federal power being used against them.”

A reading of the approved resolution addressing the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” illustrates the loose plan that gives Jordan and his eventual panel broad powers: “The subcommittee must investigate matters related to the collection, analysis, dissemination, and use of information on U.S. citizens by executive branch agencies, including whether such efforts are illegal, unconstitutional, or otherwise unethical.”

The idea that Jordan and other election deniers and insurrectionists will be determining and investigating what’s illegal, unconstitutional and unethical? Laughable if it weren’t so serious. Count on this subcommittee to be exploited as a vehicle to push back against special counsel Jack Smith if his probe leads to Merrick Garland announcing indictments in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

The subcommittee has been unfavorably compared to the legitimate Frank Church committee in the 1970s to investigate intelligence and domestic law enforcement abuses—and in response to the work of the Senate Watergate Committee. But as Nadler said this week, it may be more comparable to the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Newly elected Rep. Daniel Goldman called the new subcommittee “a shocking abuse of power.” Shocking? Not so much. An abuse of power? To be sure. Get ready: These House Republicans are just getting started in their bid to distract, push back, change the narrative, exploit their power and try their damnedest to restore and reelect Trump.

On Tuesday, the same day this resolution was approved by Republicans, the Biden-Harris administration released its strategic plan for cutting all greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector by 2050.

In a reminder of what actual governance looks like to better (indeed, save) lives, their “National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization” emphasizes the benefits of federal partnerships. This 88-page blueprint to zero carbon emissions was jointly proffered by the departments of Energy, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency—and intends to work with counterparts at state, local and tribal levels, as well as with the private sector and global partners.

“Transportation policy is inseparable from housing and energy policy…We must work together in an integrated way to confront the climate crisis,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “Every decision about transportation is also an opportunity to build a cleaner, healthier, more prosperous future.”

Not long ago, surely during a previous administration and prior to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act to help fight the climate crisis, such words would have sounded like empty platitudes. But beyond the strategic planning, sales of electric vehicles are booming and beating expectations. From just 10 million around the world in 2020, now there are more than 30 million, with market share tripling.

As David Wallace-Wells noted in The New York Times, achieving net zero is “an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the [electric vehicle] front.”

Wallace-Wells, best-selling author of The Uninhabitable Earth, who is often inclined toward doomsday scenarios, said that the growth in electric vehicles is “a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation.” Calling the growth “eye-popping,” he concluded his take with unusual optimism:

We’ve seen this phenomenon before, with many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition. It’s enough to make many optimistic observers giddy with anticipation of what’s to come.

In a world far from the Republicans (where government is viewed as the enemy of freedom and life itself), it’s possible to find real evidence that it’s working—capable of confronting some of the globe’s most serious challenges if led by people who care about positive change and are willing to do the hard work.

I’d be remiss to ignore the breaking news of AG Garland announcing a second special counsel to investigate a small number of government documents in the possession of President Biden. We will be hearing pundits opining, ad nauseam, on what this means politically for the president and how this could undermine Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump and the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Yes, the newly appointed Robert Hur must clarify what documents Biden has had, where he’s kept them, why he’s had them and for how long. But I’m registering here my relative indifference to this in contrast to the criminality of the previous White House occupant, who took thousands of documents, lied about what he had, refused to return what he had despite repeated DOJ efforts and lied about his legal right to keep them. As this investigation concludes, we may yet learn if he sold or otherwise exploited them for personal gain.

Yes, the Republicans will make every effort to use this apparently minor case to minimize the behavior of Trump—and they already are. But consider me hopeful that it may ultimately provide a stark contrast in how the two men handled the revelation of these documents, one likely illustrating transparency and fully cooperating with the law, while the other intent—criminally intent, that is—on obstructing justice and more.

Meanwhile, I remain focused on the need for Jack Smith to conclude his probe “expeditiously” as promised. In addition to the Mar-a-Lago case, every day Trump is not indicted and prosecuted for his principal role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection and coup attempt is another day the sociopaths and extremists feel empowered to emulate him.

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