As of yesterday, the House had gone for 17 days without a Speaker. Patrick McHenry, McCarthy’s temporary replacement, says he no authority to do anything but schedule yet more futile votes (and, apparently, evict Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer).
The government has less than four weeks of funding.
It’s not clear anything set up by McCarthy before his deposition should be proceeding.
But all the while — this entire time that House Republicans have been struggling to fulfil the most basic function of government — James Comer and his staffers have been hunched in a dark room somewhere, feverishly pursuing the same delusions of dick pics and … personal loans!! … they’ve been frothing over since January.
And so it was on Friday afternoon, after Jim Jordan’s third humiliating defeat in the House, that Comer ran out, like a child discovering a dead frog in a gutter, waving a check.
It was a check that James Biden — the President’s brother — used to pay off a personal loan on March 1, 2018, over a year after Joe Biden left the Naval Observatory, years before Joe Biden entered the White House, and six weeks after his brother gave him that loan.
As Democrats explained minutes after James Comer ran out waving his dead frog, after 3 million people had already poked around at Jamey’s dead frog, Joe Biden loaned his brother $200,000 six weeks earlier.
James Biden paid it off.
As of this moment, 8 million people have excited themselves with Comer’s transparent bullshit about that check, all the while Comer and Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise have proven themselves impotent to do the most basic things Nancy Pelosi did — in heels and backward — to keep the House running for years.
While millions of fragile-minded dupes glee over a check between brothers, Republicans haven’t managed to keep the House open or fund the Government.
Some guy from Kentucky fiddling while the House burns.
In the weeks since Comer got his stash of (as Democrats described) another 1,400 records payments for, “life insurance policies, doctor visits, holiday and birthday presents, groceries, vet visits and pet care, and plumbing repairs” and Matt Gaetz deposed the Speaker, the Trump Organization fraud trial in NYC has shown:
- Eric Trump claimed he “pour[ed] concrete” rather than dealt with the appraiser who described that he had “lofty ideas” about valuation
- Trump’s retired CFO and co-defendant Allen Weisselberg,
- Professed to be unable to answer 90 questions
- Claimed his $2 million severance had nothing to do with his criminal tax penalty, to say nothing of his forgetfulness
- Was accused, by Forbes, of lying on the stand about his involvement in Trump’s three-times inflation of his penthouses square footage
- Weisselberg’s son Jack was involved in key loans pertaining to Trump Tower and another NYC property
- Mazars complained that Trump Organization, “were not getting us all the documents” they needed to do their work
Every one of these is a scandal worth a congressional hearing. Every one of these should raise questions about whether the guy engaging in so much adjudged fraud while claiming it didn’t matter because he could just find some “buyer from Saudi Arabia” to make him good should be anywhere in politics, much less in the White house.
But instead, James Comer is waving his dripping dead frog around — a personal check for a personal loan between brothers — like he just found a $2 billion bribe from Saudi Arabia.
This is … fucking insane.
Republicans can’t keep their own caucus together. They may not be able to keep government open.
And all the while, James Comer is there writhing around about about easily debunked conspiracy theories about a personal loan.