Tag: House Judiciary Committee

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Congress GOP

Eric Swalwell Drags Jim Jordan During House Judiciary Hearing And Social Media Is Loving It

 

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was in session today, and testifying before the committee was Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and while Jordan and others members of the GOP on the committee tried to suggest that the secretary needed to be impeached and replaced, the best lines of the day came from committee member Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and were aimed directly at Jordan.

CNN reports that the hearing was contentious from the get-go.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan lambasted President Joe Biden’s border policies, calling it a “Biden border crisis” and describing them as “open border policies” in his opening remarks Wednesday at a hearing where Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is testifying.

“I know that today Secretary Mayorkas is going to try to paint a rosy picture of this disastrous mismanagement of our border,” Jordan said. “But the numbers don’t lie.”

[…]

Mayorkas is facing House Republicans who have been making the case to potentially impeach him over his handling of the US-Mexico border in a House panel hearing Wednesday. He maintained in his opening remarks that the administration’s approach to the border is “working.”

When Swalwell’s time came to speak, he made it clear that it was more than a tad ironic Jordan is complaining about someone not doing their job and not taking their oath of office seriously because the Ohio Republican resolutely refused to testify before the House Select Committee on January 6.

“Frankly, sir, I think you’re too nice because if I had a chairman who failed to honor his own lawful subpoena about 500 days after it was submitted to him, I would say catch me when you’re serious. Come talk to me when you follow the about whether or not you think I follow the law. But that’s not who you are, you take your job seriously even in front of a lot of unserious people.”

Swalwell then noted that just six days ago Republicans on the committee had invited Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to sit before the panel and spread all sorts of absurd and dangerous conspiracy theories.

“In fact, the chair that you are sitting in, you may not know this, but the last person who sat in that was called by the chairman an anti-vaccine, anti-Semitic witness in RFK Jr., so you have brought immediate credibility to the chair that you are sitting in just by being here. They’re not serious people. They chide people for their pronouns. They obsess and display in the committee and in other committees a private citizen’s non-consensual nude images. We’re not talking about serious people. We’re not talking about people who are on the level.”

That set off a wave of appreciation and applause on social media.

 

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Congress GOP

Jim Jordan And Matt Gaetz Get Burned To The Ground Over A ‘Pledge Of Allegiance’ Amendment: Video

The House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing Wednesday since Republicans took control of the lower chamber of Congress, ostensibly to discuss the U.S.-Mexico border, but it quickly devolved into an attempt by Republicans on the committee to prove they’re more patriotic than their Democratic colleagues.

Business Insider reports that committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) recommended a change of the Judiciary Committee’s rules which would mandate beginning each meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Rep. Gerry Nadler (D-NY) the ranking Democrat on the committee rightly noted why he felt no such change was needed, remarking:

“I would oppose it simply on the grounds that, as members know, we pledge allegiance everyday on the floor,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel. “And I don’t know why we should pledge allegiance twice in the same day to show how patriotic we are.”

That led Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) to suggest that language should be added to the amendment that would specifically ban insurrectionists from leading the pledge, an obvious dig at Gaetz and committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). Gaetz sought a pardon from failed one-term former president Donald Trump for his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection and Jordan was in contact with Trump via telephone prior to and during the attack on Congress.

Cicilline explained his rationale:

“If we adopt this amendment, then we will be truthful in representing that stating this pledge is an affirmation of your defense of democracy and the Constitution. It’s hard to take that claim seriously, if in fact, an individual who in any way supported an insurrection against the government of the United States is allowed to lead the pledge.”

Cicilline’s amendment didn’t pass. Gaetz’s did. But the Rhode Island Democrat still managed to make his point and troll his GOP colleagues to their faces.

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Congress GOP Justice Department

Jim Jordan’s 1,050-Page ‘Report’ On The DOJ Gets A Brutal Fact Check From The Washington Post

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee (led by Ohio’s Jim Jordan) told the media on Friday that they would be releasing a “1000-page report” documenting the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and FBI.

And yet, when the report came out and was examined by Philip Bump of The Washington Post, it soon became clear that Jordan had just dumped a massive nothing burger that was little more than attachments, letters, and other worthless information that has been public knowledge for months.

News broke early Friday: The Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a “1,000 Page Report” on alleged politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department. The length was mentioned in the group’s tweet and in its press release, reinforcing the heft that 1,000 pages of documentation would obviously convey.

There’s just one problem with this assertion: The report itself was less than 50 pages. Most of the rest of the document was letters sent by the minority members of the committee to various people. In fact, there were more than 1,000 pages of material that wasn’t the report itself, instead mostly those letters.

Included were pages with nothing but signatures on the letters: There were more than seven times as many pages that had nothing of substance on them except signatures than there were pages in the report.

Letters. Signatures. A 50-page missive that had been hyped as a giant tome that would blow the lid off the DOJ.

As Bump notes, the entire thing was laughable and suggests just how desperately Republicans are clutching at straws in the final days before next week’s midterm election.

Here’s a graph breaking down what was in the ballyhooed report:

Impressive, huh? A lot of fluff and not much actual content.

And a quick fact-check by The Post also put a serious dent in the report’s credibility.

This is an intentional tactic, of course. Conservative media outlets like the Daily Caller (“ ‘Rotted At Its Core’: House Judiciary GOP Releases Massive 1,000-Page Report On Alleged FBI Misconduct”) and Fox News (“House Republicans release 1,000-page report alleging politicization in the FBI, DOJ”) included the purported length of the document in their article headlines. The idea is that the Judiciary Republicans either have 1,000 pages of analysis to share with the country or, at least, 1,000 pages of evidence to bolster their claims. At most, they have about two dozen.

So what exactly did we learn Friday as a result of Jim Jordan’s pathetic bid for attention and relevance? That the GOP is running (yet again) on lies and misinformation. It’s all they have.