When Home GOP leaders introduced Wednesday which members acquired new seats on the highly effective Home Oversight and Accountability Committee, most protection centered on well-known extremists like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).
However loads of different lesser-known Republicans have been simply given seats on this committee who even have trafficked in conspiracy theories and lies. In actual fact, it’s just about all of them.
Of the 15 new Republicans tapped for this panel, 13 both voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election based mostly on former President Donald Trump’s lie about it being stolen from him, or are freshman members who've rejected or questioned the validity of President Joe Biden’s win.
New GOP committee members Lisa McClain (Mich.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Scott Perry (Pa.), William Timmons (S.C.), Tim Burchett (Tenn.), Gary Palmer (Ala.), Greene and Gosar all voted to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. And all 5 of the GOP freshmen on the committee — Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.), Russell Fry (S.C.), Nick Langworthy (N.Y.), Chuck Edwards (N.C.) and EricBurlison (Mo.) — have both absolutely denied that Biden gained, raised questions on his win or just refused to say what they assume.
Reps. Kelly Armstrong (N.D.) and Mike Turner (Ohio) are the one new GOP members on the panel, out of 15, who haven’t dabbled in lies and conspiracies concerning the election.
The highly effective committee, which underneath each events has held high-wattage hearings about numerous authorities misdeeds, is already primed to go down some far-right rabbit holes. The chair, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), has declared that his “high precedence” is a probe into an online of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, Massive Tech and the concept that they suppressed damaging details about Biden’s household companies forward of the 2020 election.
In different phrases, earlier than it’s barely off the bottom, this panel is already positioned to be a gas-stove-fueled vector of conspiracies for the subsequent two years.
A few of the new and previous Republicans on the committee include different baggage and weird claims, too.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), a returning committee member and former cop, was fired by the Richmond Police Division in 1998 for causes together with mishandling of proof after which destruction of proof. This element is hanging on the market at a time when Comer is vowing to analyze Biden over his ordeal with mishandled categorized paperwork.
McClain, in the meantime, falsely claimed final yr that Trump “caught Osama bin Laden,” the al Qaeda chief who was killed in a 2011 raid ordered by President Barack Obama. Throughout a pro-Trump rally final yr, she additionally recommended that Biden didn’t win the 2020 election as a result of, motioning to the gang, “He couldn’t have this many individuals at a rally, the State of the Union mixed.”
Timmons has made some particularly wild claims previous to touchdown his seat on the committee. In January 2021, he recommended that simply earlier than the 2020 election, wealthy folks colluded with liberals and state and federal judges to govern election legal guidelines in swing states to make it simpler to vote and harder to problem the outcomes of an election.
“These efforts have been quite a few, focused, and in open contravention of authorized norms,” Timmons mentioned on the time.
The actions by liberals and judges have been “unprecedented and unconstitutional,” he continued, and what made it extra scary was that “Massive Tech, the media and ‘pollsters’ piled on” to vary the result of the election. All informed, these components have been “drastically worse than the supposed (and debunked) ‘Russian collusion’ within the 2016 election,” he concluded.
None of this makes any sense. Nevertheless it’s the conspiracy Timmons pushed proper earlier than voting to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcomes based mostly on Trump’s conspiracies about widespread voter fraud ― the identical conspiracies that fueled a violent revolt on the U.S. Capitol simply hours earlier.
Post a Comment