By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President!
An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
The latest Consumer Price Index figures are in this morning, and policymakers are still struggling to take the last inch against stubbornly persistent inflation. Axios reports that CPI “rose 2.7 percent in the 12 months through November—a bigger increase than the prior month—while the core measure that excludes energy and food prices rose 3.3 percent.” Happy Wednesday.
A Hostile Work Environment on the Hill
by Andrew Egger
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) [Update, 12:45 p.m., December 12, 2024: Since this newsletter was published, a spokesperson for Raskin passed along a quote the congressman gave the Hill:
In America, we jail people only for having committed criminal offenses that they are found guilty of by a unanimous jury of their peers. We don’t jail people for doing their jobs and living up to their constitutional oaths of office.
It would be nice to live in a time again when people can do their jobs without being threatened with jail time or worse for doing their jobs and living up to their oaths of office. We’re proud of the work we did on the Jan. 6 select committee. We are proud of standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and we’re still doing it. And we will keep doing it.]
Oversight is the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
Good Grief
by William Kristol
The five stages of grief, we’re told, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
For us Never Trumpers, denial was short-lived. Early on election night we thought, or hoped: Well, Georgia and North Carolina aren’t going to come through, but the Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin could still hold.
Unfortunately, by 11:00 p.m. or so it was clear that the wall had crumbled, and that Donald Trump would be our next president.
Our denial stage had only lasted for a matter of hours.
What about stage two, anger? We’ve all experienced flashes of anger since that fateful election night. Why couldn’t Harris have run a better campaign? Why didn’t Biden step aside a year earlier? Don’t Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk have a lot to answer for? What is wrong with the American people?
These are all reasonable questions, surely leading in the last few weeks to a certain amount of righteous indignation bubbling up in our souls and occasionally erupting. But I’ve seen less anger than I would have expected. I’d like to claim that this is due to the unusually cheery disposition of Never Trumpers, or at least to our impressive capacity for philosophical resignation. Or maybe avoiding anger is simply a more sophisticated form of denial. Who knows?
Still, most of us moved beyond anger to grief’s third stage: bargaining. In these circumstances, bargaining can be a kind of wishful thinking or hopefulness that allows us to avert our gaze from the abyss. Maybe a few Republican senators will step up and defeat some of these awful nominees! Maybe Marco Rubio’s going to figure out how to stop Trump from abandoning Ukraine! Maybe Scott Bessent’s going to persuade Trump to back off on tariffs! Maybe it’s going to be more difficult to undermine the rule of law and civil liberties than we think!
Maybe. Some of these things—all of these things?—could happen. Fatalism is an intellectual trap as well as a moral one. Sometimes wishes come true. We should work to make them come true, even if the odds are a bit long.
But that work of course can’t entirely prevent our slide, at least at times, into the fourth stage of grief: depression.
In a new piece on her excellent A Zebra Without Stripes substack, Holly Berkley Fletcher describes touring the West Wing of the White House with her family last night and reflecting on tour history:
And then there’s Trump. Honestly, there’s something deeply wrong with the man. Irrevocably. I could feel sorry for him if he weren’t so hell-bent on destruction.
As we walked through these rooms—at once so hallowed and oddly familiar, lofty and ordinary, weighty and homey—like our democracy itself—the horror and outrage of him hit me anew. He is the living, breathing nightmare of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest.
It is depressing. And as Holly writes: “As the tour continued, I felt increasingly nauseous, panicked, helpless, frustrated. despairing. And I have felt it all day today. That’s just the truth.”
Holly goes on to recommend humor as an antidote to excessive gloom. There are other remedies—family, faith, friends, fiction, football, fantasy, Figaro (Marriage of)—just to list some of the ones beginning with the letter f. Still, some gloom and some depression is natural and proper. The key is not to let depression become either permanent or paralyzing.
What of the fifth stage, acceptance? Obviously, in one’s personal life, one has to accept certain things that have happened and can’t be reversed. In this respect, acceptance is surely healthy.
But for the nation? No! Nations aren’t individuals. It’s true that in this area, too, acceptance of basic facts is necessary. So, for instance, we accept that the next four years will be difficult. But acceptance that these next four years will irrevocably shape our national future? That they’re a gateway to permanent new reality, to irrevocable decline? No. We do not have to accept that.
So, despite it all, after the denial, and anger, and bargaining, and depression, I still say: Never Trump.
Drowning in Covid Contrarians
by Cathy Young
Yesterday, I wrote a story on Donald Trump’s pick for director of the National Institutes of Health, Stanford professor and COVID “dissident” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—and, more generally, the apparent takeover of federal health agencies by COVID contrarians in the second Trump administration. But Bhattacharya is not the only Trump nominee looking to dramatically alter our nation’s health care. There is also Marty Makary, the nominee for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Like a lot of Trump appointees, Makary is a Fox News contributor. Like Bhattacharya, and unlike prospective secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he has a background in actual medicine, not quackery: He is a pancreatic surgeon at Johns Hopkins. In the early days of the pandemic, he shared some fairly “establishment” views, supporting masking and vaccine initiatives. But since then, he too has joined the COVID culture wars on the contrarian side. Last year, Makary told the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” pointing to early claims about virus transmission through surfaces (based, at the time, on still-evolving knowledge) as well as the promotion of masks and vaccine boosters. Yet critics say that Makary’s own broadside distorted the data. For instance, he described an authoritative research review as showing that masks are useless against respiratory viruses when its actual results were inconclusive and complicated.
Another reliable measure of a person’s descent into contrarianism or even crankery is their attitude toward RFK Jr. And here, Makary notably fails the test. He was singing hosannas to Kennedy long before he knew Mr. Brain Worm was soon going to be his boss. In a Fox News appearance in July 2023, he lauded RFK Jr. as a wrongly maligned truth teller and commended him for sharing stories of kids who died after being vaccinated. And Kennedy’s 500-page book purporting to expose the infernal villainy of Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and “Big Pharma”? “One hundred percent of it is true,” declared Makary. It’s also worth noting that conservative British physician and writer Theodore Dalrymple, himself a lockdown skeptic, has slammed Kennedy’s tome as “full of errors and gross misrepresentations” and likened it to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Makary’s fulsome pandering to RFK Jr. does not bode well for his ability as FDA head to push back against whatever crackpot idea comes down the pipeline. Human lives and health are potentially at stake.
Quick Hits: End of the Affair
Nothing gold can stay, it seems. Donald Trump Jr.’s long engagement to MAGA personality Kimberly Guilfoyle appears to have ended, with the New York Post reporting yesterday that the First Son has been spotted out and about holding hands with “glamorous Palm Beat socialite Bettina Anderson.”
Amazing to live in a world where we get TMZ-style quotes like this about our political scions now: “Bettina and Don have been together for a few months, and are super cute and happy together. It’s just a natural fit—everyone is happy for them!” What are we, the UK?
Anyway, this would probably be beneath our attention if Donald Trump Sr. weren’t getting Guilfoyle out of Palm Beach in objectively the funniest way possible: “Today, I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Kimberly Guilfoyle as the United States Ambassador to Greece,” the president-elect posted on Truth Social yesterday. “For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally. Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States, and safeguard its interests abroad.”
Hopa!!!
Cheap Shots
In case anyone is interested, I downloaded ALL the January 6th Select Committee documents from Benny Thompson's website while he still chaired the committee.
I figured that if it all got flushed down the MAGA memory hole with a change of party majority, there would be _at least one copy_ of their work still in the wild.
"With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark."
This has to be the most hypocritical, tone deaf statement ever made by anybody. This man literally tried to do all of these things. BTW the Jan 6 committee put no one in jail.