Let’s face it, you’d have to be a few tics below the IQ level of Mortimer Snerd to dispute the proposition that the 118th Congress is broken, perhaps irretrievably so.
And guess which delegation has wholeheartedly contributed to this disaster. Kentucky, you should be so proud.
This Congress has been entertaining, in a peculiar sort of way, inducing the sort of muffled laughter you might encounter watching a Laurel & Hardy short where Ollie falls several stories and breaks his leg. With such stalwarts as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-FL, gaining influence within the Republican majority, it’s a wonder that lawmakers have the wherewithal to so much as gavel themselves into session.
Given the results, or lack thereof, their collective absence would have been a preferable outcome.
The House is so weird that, as noted earlier this year, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, the Gun King and attention hog who knocked out two House speakers — who were members of his own party, mind you — somehow managed to force himself into the Republican mainstream, landing a coveted spot on the House Rules Committee and a subcommittee chair.
The fact that Massie, who wants to chop the Department of Education into mincemeat and won’t be happy until every American household is allotted its own AK-47, is now a revered member of the institution tells you all you need to know about the current status of the House GOP.
There are a lot of delegations in Washington that could vie for the worst. Texas and Florida are like Alabama and Georgia in college football — annually producing an atrocious stream of winners, or, better put, losers. But it’s fair to say, looking back on 2023 during these closing hours, that pound for pound, the group Kentucky is dispatching to the hallowed halls these days is certainly in the running.
Some modest exceptions should be noted. Rep. Rep. Brent Guthrie, R-Bowling Green, is so indistinguishable that he’s more like a ghost than a congressman. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, is the dean of the House of Representatives after 42 years in the chamber and served well a few years back as chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He could possibly be considered an exception to the indictment except he: a) voted almost three years ago, for some inexplicable reason, against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election; and b) got into an altercation last year with Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-OH, allegedly poking her and telling her to kiss a certain unexposed region of his anatomy after she told him to wear a mask because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, gets a pass because he’s a rookie and barely has had an opportunity to express his zany side.
Any discussion of the abysmal state of the Commonwealth’s delegation punching above its weight class has to start with our old pal, Rep. Jamie Comer, R-TheFrankforthook, who has managed in a relatively short period of time to not only spring ignominy upon the Commonwealth but the nation as a whole.
A double threat.
To his credit, Comer Pyle is living proof of the old adage that in this country anyone is capable of becoming a member of Congress, even someone without principles or the sense God gave to a goose.
Jamie, as chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has made it his life’s work to expel President Biden from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The biggest obstacle to his frothy desire is a lack of any sensible rationale for doing so. Lacking anything approaching a justification, with the facts mounting against him, Jamie has displayed a propensity for, well, making things up, like asserting Biden received a pay-off from one of his son Hunter’s foreign business interests when, actually, the money represented a payback for the purchase of a truck.
We could go on in this vein but the record is clear that Jamie is one of those guys who keeps slapping himself in the face because it feels so good when he stops.
Hopping over to the Senate side, we find that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Bowling Green, is continuing the pursuit of his own white whale, taking up a ridiculous and unquenchable amount of time trying to prove Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to President Biden, who led the nation’s efforts against COVID-19, is actually The Beast from Revelations.
Paul is so bent on exposing the evil that is Anthony Fauci that he wrote a book no one read claiming that the doctor knew from day one about COVID’s origin and tried to cover it up for some odd reason. And that Fauci surreptitiously slipped the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China some cash to conduct gain-of-function research, pumping up viruses to better develop antidotes, a maneuver deemed dangerous.
It’s all the usual Rand Paul horse manure. Paul insists the virus escaped in some manner from the Wuhan lab, probably as a result of the gain-of-function research, and infected those nearby, thus spreading from continent to continent. Fauci maintains that some tax dollars went to Wuhan but gain-of-function research was prohibited. And that the virus spread as a result of exposure to an infected animal, although he doesn’t rule out the possibility of a lab leak.
Paul has gone about this like a mad dog, no surprise there, attacking Fauci in very personal terms and asserting he should go to prison. In fact, he sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
While all this was going on, as reported by the conservative Washington Examiner, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, charged with, among other things, determining the source of the virus, has received a mixed bag of information — the Department of Energy and the FBI assessed that “a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2,” but most of the nation’s intelligence agencies agree that the virus was not laboratory-adapted. All agree that the virus was not developed as a bioweapon.
So, with the true cause still officially undetermined, Paul, in typically stupid fashion, says Fauci should be jailed based on an unsettled question and a disagreement over a medical issue. With the cause still up in the air – and most researchers side with Fauci – it’s kind of hard to accuse the good doctor of a cover-up when U.S. intelligence sources and a majority of the nation’s virologists maintain he might just be right.
Fauci has also cited professional reviews that hold the federal government did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, although, given the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party in the matter and the propensity to follow its own course with other people’s money, anything is possible.
If Rand wants to send Fauci to prison for what amounts to a disagreement – and remember, Fauci is the expert here – he’s going to have to send scores of virologists away with him. It’s typical Rand Paul shoot first, ask questions later, and then shoot some more regardless of the circumstances.
Meanwhile, Paul’s former BFF, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, who has held the job as the chamber’s GOP chief cook and bottle washer for going on a record 17 years, is rapidly losing the confidence of his caucus.
Earlier this year, McConnell maintained that funding Ukraine in its time of need during its war with Russia, was the top GOP Senate priority.
Now he’s switched horses, under pressure from fellow Republican lawmakers, you know, the ones who are supposed to be following his lead. McConnell is now using Ukraine as a bargaining chip in his party’s new top priority — reforming the nation’s immigration laws.
Before this point in time, McConnell was a moderate on immigration, following the path forged by President Ronald Regan who, in 1986, signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration and Control Act (Mazzoli, by the way, being the late Rep. Ron Mazzoli, D-Louisville). The law tightened the southern border but also made immigrants who entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty.
So, under pressure from his increasingly right-wing caucus, McConnell is playing the game, seeking to impose ludicrous immigration restrictions, possibly upending the asylum system, while leaving Ukraine President Volodymir Zelensky abandoned by the side of the road, cup in hand, begging for hand-outs.
It’s unlikely that McConnell wants to push this envelope. But he covets his leadership position beyond all reason and will bow to his rabid right-wing. McConnell has always been a leader good at taking the crowd where it wants to go but comes up short when he tries to take them off the beaten but appropriate path.
McConnell found himself challenged for his leadership position for the first time this year by Sen. Rick Scott, R-FL. And now another resident of Palookaville, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO., is blocking the nominations of two former McConnell aides — Andrew Ferguson to lead the Federal Trade Commission and Todd Inman for a spot with the National Transportation Safety Board – as part of an ongoing dispute.
Earlier this year, McConnell got into an ugly contretemps with Rand Paul over an appointment to a federal judgeship in Kentucky. Things are starting to snowball and Mitch might get caught up in the resulting avalanche.
Finally, just to note that Lexington’s own Andy Barr, R-Emptysuit, the handmaiden of the nation’s moneyed interests, has announced that he is endorsing a rapist, a fraudster, and a liar to become the next president of these United States.
The good news is the first session of the 118th Congress is almost over. The bad news is the second session is liable to be even worse.
Having 2.5 million people crossing the border having zero idea who they are doesn’t strike me as an “ amnesty issue “ just me .