It’s fair to say the stupidest member of the 117th Congress doesn’t hail from the eight-member Kentucky delegation, nor will anyone from the Bluegrass assume that distinction as long as Texas remains in the union.
Kentucky doesn’t provide the republic with the most glaringly repulsive lawmaker, the most dishonest legislator or the one who represents un-American values. You can look in Georgia to find the latter.
But taken as a whole, it must be said that the folks dispatched to Washington from the United We Stand, Divided We Fall Commonwealth constitute, well, certainly one of the most, if not THE most, bizarre groups steering the nation’s contemporary jcourse.
The past week provides a wonderful example.
Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, has customarily been one of the saner members of the delegation. He holds the Kentucky record for congressional longevity – 41 years and counting – and used that time, especially when he served as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to flood his district with pork barrel projects.
Given that he hails from one of the nation’s most impoverished regions one can hardly blame him, although the fact that friends and family somehow benefitted from this largess doesn’t exactly present his tenure in the brightest light.
Rogers was always a hail-fellow-well-met but it’s beginning to look like his 84 years are catching up with him and, perhaps, he should have skipped this year’s re-election bid, which will be his twenty-second.
The hints started earlier this year when he voted against certifying the 2020 election results that established President Biden victory over the incumbent Republican, Donald J. Trump.
In a notoriously conservative House delegation save for Rep. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville, Rogers proved to be the lone hold-out. He maintained he was, “objecting to electoral votes tied to allegations of election fraud and voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.”
Simply put, claims of fraud and irregularities were bogus, as has been proved time and time again, and were based on lies circulated by the former president. Rogers’ vote rejecting the electoral vote tally came on the same day a mass of Trump supporting insurgents stormed the Capitol in a hideous effort to take matters into their own hands.
But Rogers transition from congressman to hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn old fogey came this week when he told a fellow member of Congress – a Democrat, a woman and an African-American — to kiss him on a part of his anatomy usually covered by a pair of pants.
As related by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-OH, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus via Twitter: “Today, while heading to the House floor for votes, I respectfully asked my colleague @RepHalRogers to put on a mask while boarding the train. He then poked my back, demanding I get on the train. When I asked him not to touch me, he responded, ‘kiss my ass.'”
Rogers subsequently apologized but, well, 42 years might prove more than enough.
Then there’s our old favorite, the Whiz Kid, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, who offered up something so totally irrational this week it’s difficult to believe even he could have said it.
Massie, as noted in the past, has a fancy engineering degree from MIT, a bunch of patents in his pocket and must be viewed, by all traditional measures at least, as a really smart bloke. It’s just a problem that what oftentimes emerges from his mouth doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
This week was a lulu. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Wonder Boy has made it clear he’s less than enthusiastic about wearing a mask to protect others, is so-so at best about vaccines and is dead set against any health mandates and thinks Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top medical advisor, is a fraud.
This week Massie opened a new line of attack, this one against Medicare. It goes something like this:
“Over 70% of Americans who died with COVID, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”
Now, it’s a struggle to make any sense of this comment whatsoever, which is not unusual when dealing with Massie, but this one is even more looney tunes than his usual crackpot assessments.
There is no study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association defining a link between Medicare and COVID-19. The world isn’t sure what caused the virus outbreak but it’s nearly certain that Medicare had nothing to do with it. It helps pay for the treatment of the elderly, it doesn’t require they participate in some sort of health regimen that exposes them to the virus. People on Medicare aren’t forced to get vaccinated or even wear a mask.
It’s like saying 100 percent of Americans who died inhaled oxygen, and some people want to inhale oxygen?
There’s stupid, really gut-wrenching, awful stupid, and then there’s this.
Then we have Sen. Rand Paul, R-Bowling Green, who has this weird, ever-growing fascination with Fauci, the presidential advisor who doubles as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases where he leads the fight against COVID-19.
Paul has developed an unhealthy obsession with Fauci. This week he made it clear he intends to make Fauci’s life a living hell if Republicans grab the Senate majority in November, a turn of events that is a distinct possibility. Paul is said to be in line for chairmanship of the Senate Health Committee.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of his records,” Paul during an appearance on a podcast hosted by conservative Lisa Boothe. “We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again.”
The “this” referenced in “we don’t need this to happen again” is unclear. But Paul has used committee hearings in the past couple of years to needlessly assassinate Fauci’s character on a range of pandemic-related issues, ranging from mask wearing to vaccines to the origins of the outbreak.
Paul seems convinced, for some reason, that Fauci is the Dr. Josef Mengele of the American pandemic because they differ on the proper approach. Paul is particularly belligerent over Fauci’s refusal to acknowledge that the source of the virus spread was a leak from a research lab in Wuhan, China, and that Fauci, through the National Institutes of Health, helped fund the development of the supervirus. None of this has been proven.
“What happens when he gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue, all of a sudden that kindles the crazies out there, and I have threats upon my life, harassment of my family, and my children will have seen phone calls because people are lying about me,” Dr Fauci said about Paul at a recent Senate committee hearing.
Which brings us to the granddaddy of them all, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, who suddenly is being praised as something of a hero among the anti-Trump forces on both sides of the political aisle.
The Republic National Committee this week decided to censure two party members – Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois – for serving as members of a House committee investigating the chaos surrounding the failed Jan. 6 insurrection effort.
McConnell, in what some has cast as a grand moment of courage, criticized the RNC’s action.
“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell told reporters. “That’s what it was.”
Which is fine, accurate and good. The problem is, where was Mitch McConnell when it counted?
A few months after the insurrection attempt, McConnell opposed legislation creating a Jan. 6 commission to thoroughly probe the event, saying, “It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.”
McConnell’s involvement didn’t end there. He specifically asked GOP senators who were considering support for the commission’s creation to do him a personal favor and vote against it. And he made clear that he would support the man responsible for inciting the riot – former President Donald J. Trump – if he is the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
Such is what passes for political courage these days.
“Corporate welfare” includes the trillions of dollars in corporate tax cuts which the GOP shovels out to big business campaign contributors every time Republicans have a majority in Congress and the Presidency. Once upon a time, that money was used to support the federal budget, but since the 1980’s it’s gone directly to corporate profits and huge salaries and bonuses for corporate officers. So the corporations pay less of the budget, and the rest of us pay a larger share.
What the Republicans DON’T do, even when they have majorities, is cut Medicare, Social Security, and the defense budget, which make up the vast majority of federal spending. They talk a big game about shrinking government, but when it gets down to it, they won’t cut the popular social programs like Social Security and Medicare, because they know they’d be voted out of office.
All of them are doing it for the money. Massie and Rand Paul are playing to their base of Fox/Newsmax- watching, Trump-loving, anti-vax and Big Lie-believers, who will frequently pony up $25, $50, or $100 contributions to anybody who talks about the scary Deep State.
McConnell has a different base — a network of political action committees and tax-exempt “non-profits” that pour millions of dollars into political candidates and causes, as directed by Mitch. He became his party’s leader because of his awesome fund-raising, and his ability to direct that cash into Senate campaigns to elect people who will support him and support corporate welfare and tax breaks that return money to the campaign contributors.
To reassure his base, McConnell occasionally has to put a bit of distance between himself and the Massie/Paul part of his party.