MAGA Extremists Are “Weaponizing” The House
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | January 26, 2023
On Tuesday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis indicated that a special grand jury has recommended multiple indictments as a result of its investigation of the efforts of former President Donald Trump and his collaborators to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.
Willis said that her decision on whether to bring criminal indictments is “imminent.”
The Georgia criminal investigation and the broader Justice Department criminal investigation being led by Special Counsel Jack Smith involve the gravest internal threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
They pose a fundamental question for the country: Will former President Trump and his key collaborators be held accountable for their attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election?
The Trump-led coup attempt represents the only such attempt to steal a presidential election in the history of our nation. The Trump-inspired January 6 assault on the Capitol represents the first such mob attack on the Capitol since the British attacked it more than 200 years ago.
To this day, more than two years after the election, former President Trump and his election-denying followers continue to claim that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. They make their baseless claims even though neither Trump nor anyone else has produced a shred of evidence that any improper voting activities affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Today, the House of Representatives is a nesting place for some of the coup plotters and some of the most extreme MAGA election deniers.
Earlier this month, these MAGA extremists held Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) hostage in his bid for Speaker until they gained inordinate power in the Republican Caucus and greatly weakened McCarthy’s speakership.
And now, in the guise of investigating the alleged “weaponization” of the government, these extremists are, in reality, “weaponizing” the House with the goal of retaliating against those who investigated and continue to investigate the Trump coup attempt and the January 6 assault on the Capitol.
In essence, these MAGA Trump followers have set their sights on investigating the investigators.
Democracy 21 in partnership with Ambassador Norman Eisen (Ret.) are committed (as are others) to proactively challenge these efforts – in other words, to Investigate the Investigators who are Investigating the Investigators, or the “Four I’s Project.”
Coup participants and election-denying Republicans now holding positions of power in the House have zero credibility to investigate those working to hold accountable Trump, his coup plotters, and the Capitol attackers.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), for example, the new House Judiciary Committee Chair, and Chair of the new Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, is an election denier, a participant in the Trump coup attempt, and a Member who refused to comply with a congressional subpoena.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), chair of the influential, right-wing House Freedom Caucus, is likewise an election denier, a participant in the coup attempt, and a Member who refused to comply with a congressional subpoena. Rep. Perry apparently believed he was so deeply involved in the presidential coup attempt that he reached out to Trump for a pardon, according to testimony before the House January 6th Committee.
And that’s just to name two MAGA House Members.
There are numerous other Representatives now in House power positions or serving on key Committees who also participated in the coup attempt or are election deniers. None of them should be treated as credible investigators or questioners, given their track records as coup plotters or supporters of Trump’s Big Lie.
The next two years in the House will be an ongoing battle.
The House Republican extremists can be expected to ignore the needs of the American people as they instead spend their time attacking the government, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement, among other institutions of our democracy, without cause or reason.
These House extremists must and will be fought every step of the way.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
