House Republicans will be staging another made-for-television show trial on Tuesday evening, and the big question for tomorrow will again be, "How many of the resulting crackpot statements will Republican leadership scramble to distance themselves from this time around?" In theory, this new hearing will be the work of a select committee probing the "strategic competition" between this nation and China; in practice it's likely going to be a storm of conspiracy mongering and straight-up racism because that's what House Republican have delivered in their "select committee" hearings so far.
That the hearing will be scheduled for primetime hours, starting at 7 PM ET, is another clue that Republicans intend to make an absolute circus of this thing, and select committee chair Rep. Mike Gallagher and ranking Democratic member Rep. Raja Krishamoorthi were both on Face The Nation on Sunday to preview the panel's focus on "the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party," which is a more conspicuously loaded phrase than "the threat posed by the Chinese government" would have been.
If you want a preview of how the evening session is going to go, here's Rep. Matt Gaetz, an alleged sex trafficker and newspaper-confirmed participant in Florida drug-and-sex parties, getting schooled by a witness today after quoting from a Chinese government-controlled propaganda site in his attempts to disparage U.S. support for Ukraine:
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Yeah, this one’s is going to be a tire fire.
With that said, now it's time to meet the tires. Among the four witnesses scheduled to be questioned during tonight's hearing are Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Trump deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, and anytime anyone is propping up the people scraped up to staff the clusterf--kery that was the Trump regime for some advice on what We Folks Ought To Do, rather than asking literally any other person on Planet Earth, you know you're in for a treat.
The likelihood of openly racist conspiracy statements during the hearings is also in the range of one hundred percent. Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas last week groused that he was "really disappointed and shocked that someone like Judy Chu would have a security clearance and entitled to confidential intelligence briefings" until she could be investigated for "loyalty"; Rep. Judy Chu is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, and Gooden's comments caused such fury that committee head Gallagher had to condemn Gooden's statement as "beyond the pale."
The topics of the evening, then, will be the "spy balloon" that drifted over the continental U.S. and resulted in an extraordinary military scramble to shoot down high-altitude science projects, the undying theory that the COVID-19 virus did not cross over from wildlife to humans but was instead "manufactured" by the Chinese Communist Party, possible new laws to prevent Chinese immigrants from owning property, and questions about the loyalty of any Chinese American who has opinions a House Republican doesn't like. There's literally no part of this that won't see a parade of House Republican conspiracy theories attached to it.
House Republicans haven't been in power long, but the compromises House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to make to win support from the most conspiracy-drenched and sedition-supporting members of his caucus resulted in some plum committee spots for the worst people in Congress, even if he had to invent new committees to put them on. The results are what they are.
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