4 reasons for the MAGA House hearings’ bellyflop

A Newsweek headline Friday laid out a blunt truth: “Republicans’ Big Hopes For Attacking Joe Biden Spectacularly Unraveled.”

That header pretty much captured last week’s serial face-plants by the much-hyped MAGA Republican House Committee hearings, including Thursday’s opening act by Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Here are four reasons why they failed.

“Is that all you got?”

It’s always a problem when you create high expectations and the stage is empty when the curtain rises.

Republicans have promised ferocious action on three right wing cause celebres: Hunter Biden, purported FBI attempts to suppress the media, and exacting vengeance on all who effectively investigated Jan. 6.

They’ve already started their investigate-o-rama, but as for ferocity, they’ve ended up looking less like kings of beasts than injured kittens.

Exhibit A: In Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee, Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) reprised allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden pressed Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general for investigating Burisma, for which Hunter Biden was working. The unequivocal rebuttal came from freshman Congressman Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), a former federal prosecutor: “Categorically false and there is no evidence of it.”

Nonplussed, Comer meekly asked whether Goldman was sure. Without hesitation, Goldman replied, “Yes, in fact, I am . . . [A]s the lead counsel in the first impeachment investigation, we proved that he was actually fired because he was not prosecuting corruption.”

Touche!

Exhibit B: A similar boomerang followed, as to the Republican claim that the “Deep State” suppressed speech on Twitter before the 2020 election.

Company executives testifying Wednesday before the Oversight Committee acknowledged a mistake in pulling down a New York Post tweet about Hunter Biden’s laptop. They refuted committee member Jim Jordan’s conspiratorial claim that they had taken down the tweet at the behest of the FBI.

Then, in response to skillful questions from Democrats, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team, testified that the Trump White House had in fact lobbied the social media company to “cancel” an expletive-laced, anti-Trump tweet by model Chrissy Teigan.

With that, more air went out the Republican investigative balloon.

The media isn’t buying what MAGA hearings are selling

Capturing the point, a CNN story on Thursday was headlined: “Republicans Held a Hearing To Prove Twitter’s Bias Against Them. It Backfired in Spectacular Fashion.”

An NBC commentary the same day carried a similar header: “Why the Twitter, Hunter Biden Hearing Backfired on Republicans.”

And a Feb. 8 Bloomberg headline put it this way: “House Republicans’ Hunter Biden Investigation Begins With A Thud.”

But it wasn’t just the liberal media that found the hearings underwhelming.

Even worse for politicians playing to Fox News, that network’s primetime host Jesse Watters moaned, “I’m sick of these hearings . . . Tell me this is going somewhere.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that even Fox has turned against the Republican hearings, which are all about promoting futures in former President Trump’s presidential stock. After all, Fox’s multi-billionaire owner Rupert Murdoch has already walked away from his former darling and ally.

At Thursday’s “weaponization” subcommittee hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) drove home this point about the committees’ underlying agenda. Back in August, now-Chairman Jordan told the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) that future Republican House investigations would “help frame up the 2024 race, when I hope and I think President Trump is going to run again. And we need to make sure that he wins.”

Americans want Congress to focus on improving their lives

A Jan. 26 CNN poll found that 73 percent of U.S. adults think Republican leaders in the House aren’t paying enough attention to the country’s most important problems, with fewer than one-third of Americans expressing confidence in House GOP leaders to prioritize the country’s primary issues.

Reinforcing the point, a Feb. 2 Navigator Research poll reported that 56 percent of Americans want Congress to focus on inflation, while only 16 percent of those polled said that investigations are important.

Last month, a Pew Research Center poll reported that 65 percent of Americans thought that Republicans in Congress will focus too much on investigating the Biden administration.

An NBC News poll found that 63 percent of those polled expressed little or no confidence in the Republican Congress’ ability to conduct fair and impartial investigations into the Biden administration.

None of this is likely to change after last week’s hearings. Americans aren’t looking for MAGA show trials, but rather for a Congress that does its job.

Democrats have become skilled at answering political stunts

On Thursday, Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.), the ranking minority member on Jordan’s subcommittee, intoned with perfect pitch the Democrats’ concerns about the committee’s partisan mission: “There is a difference,” she told her colleagues, “between legitimate oversight and weaponization of Congress and our processes, particularly our committee work, as a political tool.”

So far, Plaskett, Raskin, Goldman and other Democrats have turned Republican investigations on their head. They have used their time wisely and been adept at exposing the sheer partisan clumsiness that is fueling the hearings.

Like dissenting judges on a court controlled by colleagues with a different ideology, the Democrats are conveying a compelling counter-narrative to the partisan fable that House Republicans are working so hard to tell. In the process, the Democrats are both publicly shaming their colleagues and making a record of the hypocrisy and bad faith that have become the Trumpist party’s stock and trade.

It is sad for the country that House Republicans appear to have learned nothing from the evidence-based hearings of the Committee to Investigate Jan. 6. Those hearings were convincing, in large measure, because the televised testimony came entirely from witnesses of the party out of power.

We can only hope that the scathing reviews of these new committees’ opening acts will prompt a return to authentic oversight.

In the end, however, these Republicans may be just too blinded by Trumpism to notice that they are playing a losing hand.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.