Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

GOP willing to risk national security for the sake of petty vengeance

mccarthy

Jose Luis Magana / AP

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., speaks during a news conference in Statuary Hall at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023. McCarthy rounded his first full week as House speaker in the most outwardly orderly way. There was hardly a hint of the chaotic, rebellious fight it took for the Republicans to arrive here, having barely installed him as the leader with the gavel.

Click to enlarge photo

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., center, with Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., left, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of N.Y., has nominated the two California lawmakers for the Intelligence Committee in open defiance of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's vow to block them. Jeffries asked that Schiff and Swalwell be reappointed to the Intelligence panel.

To find further evidence of the Republican Party’s callous disregard for governance and national security, look no further than the ongoing saga of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership of the House of Representatives.

Tuesday marked three full weeks since Republicans took control of the House. After a four-day circus that led to McCarthy’s election as speaker, we had hoped the GOP leader would get down to the business of governing, or at least getting his chamber in order. After all, with a divided government, a war in Ukraine, a looming debt ceiling and a lack of water for 40 million people in the West there’s no time to waste.

Instead, 20 days into his speakership, McCarthy’s latest accomplishment was to exile 11-term Rep. Adam Schiff and five-term Rep. Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee while arguing that they are not fit to serve.

Schiff was the previous chair of the committee and was its ranking member for six years prior to that.

McCarthy’s decision is being widely viewed as tit-for-tat retribution for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to remove Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from congressional committees in 2021. Pelosi’s decision came only after Greene and Gosar made public social media posts advocating violence against other members of Congress.

McCarthy’s decision, on the other hand, is so clearly about partisan politics and revenge that even his own colleagues took issue. Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana even went so far as to say that “Speaker McCarthy needs to stop ‘bread and circuses’ in Congress and start governing for a change.”

We agree.

For McCarthy to claim that Schiff and Swalwell are “unfit to serve” while simultaneously giving multiple committee assignments to GOP freshman George Santos is an insult to all Americans.

Santos faces multiple civil and criminal investigations after it was revealed that he repeatedly lied about his qualifications for office, campaign finance disclosures and even his relationship to atrocities like 9/11, the Holocaust and the Pulse nightclub massacre.

On the same day McCarthy formally exiled Schiff and Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee, new questions arose about Santos’ acceptance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in potentially illegal campaign contributions. Yet Santos continues to have McCarthy’s blessing to sit comfortably on the House Committee on Small Business and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Today’s GOP leadership is so far through the looking glass that speaking in favor of armed insurrection (Greene), spewing a wild array of violent and racist fantasies (Gosar) and lying about essentially everything (Santos) will earn the reward of committee seats. It’s as if the “G” in GOP today stands for guttersnipes, goons or grotesque.

Moreover, McCarthy’s attack on Schiff and Swalwell is hurting his own constituents. All three representatives, McCarthy, Schiff and Swalwell, are part of California’s congressional delegation.

Anyone from California will tell you that McCarthy’s largely conservative central valley district has little in common politically with Schiff’s suburban Los Angeles foothills district or Swalwell’s East San Francisco Bay Area district. Yet when it comes to issues of national security and terrorism, Californians from all corners of the state share common threats to their food, water, power and even air due to interconnected infrastructure, transit, economies and ecosystems.

Threats to these systems are directly under the jurisdiction of the Intelligence Committee and, by removing Schiff and Swalwell, McCarthy has diminished his own state’s voice in the halls of the Capitol and increased the danger posed to his own constituents.

After all, the same air currents that carry pollution from Schiff’s Los Angeles district directly to Bakersfield, the largest city in McCarthy’s district, would be just as effective at carrying the nuclear fallout of a dirty bomb.

California’s water system is also interconnected, with the 444-mile California aqueduct beginning just outside of Swalwell’s district, traveling south through McCarthy’s district and into Castaic Lake just outside Schiff’s district. The same too of economic activity and transit, with the three districts connected by Interstate 5.

But McCarthy doesn’t appear to care about the economic and physical safety and security of his country, his state or his constituents. He only cares about using his newfound power to seek revenge.

In pursuing that revenge, he has also increased the danger posed to us. California and Nevada not only share a border, but we also share a power grid, portions of our water supply, local air currents and are directly connected by multiple paths of transit.

McCarthy’s recklessness with a committee as important as Intelligence increases the risk to all of us. Yet Nevada’s own Republican representative to Congress, Mark Amodei, has remained largely silent in the face of the circus of nightmares McCarthy calls governance. McCarthy recently appointed Amodei to serve as chair of the Committee on Appropriations, a position that will bring many benefits to the people of Nevada but has also apparently bought Amodei’s compliance with chaos.

Nevadans deserve more from Amodei. Californians deserve better than McCarthy. And the American people deserve better than the GOP.

This is just the beginning. In the coming weeks we expect the GOP will descend directly into destroying the American economy as the debt ceiling confrontation develops. Too many red states voted for chaos candidates in the last election. We’re all about to suffer for the rage and ignorance of those officials.