Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
Republicans are making investigations and hearings the signature of their time in control of the House, but they’re not doing a very good job of it. That’s not a partisan assessment trying to define the narrative, either—that’s something Republicans themselves increasingly fear.
Rep. Jim Jordan’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government was supposed to be the true centerpiece of the effort, making the case that the federal government has targeted Republicans. So far, though, it has been unfocused and ineffective with hearings that haven’t made much of an impact, and no big bombshells. Again, Republicans are saying this.
“Jordan is overextended and short-staffed, biting off much more than he can chew,” a former Sen. Chuck Grassley staffer tweeted in late February. “This is doomed to fail.” One of the quoted tweets on that came from an EpochTV host, who added, “Is it once again all talk & no action from the GOP - this time from the Weaponization Committee?” And Fox News’ Jesse Watters said, “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail? Can someone get fined?”
Jordan is insisting that he’s doing great. “There have been more subpoenas, letters, interviews, and depositions than any other committee in Congress — and not that those are the measurement of success — but our staff is working their tails off,” he told The Washington Post. “There’s always going to be people who criticize us … We’re just going to do our job. We’re going to get the facts on the table and then we’re going to propose legislation that we think would help remedy the situation.”
He’s also asking for more funding to help staff up. But multiple sources told the Post that’s easier said than done.
“The reality is that there are a lot of people that don’t want to go and leave their jobs and work for this committee,” said one person identified as being “close to the committee.” They continued, “Unlike the January 6 committee, a lot of folks don’t think this will be a career enhancement — they don’t think this will get them on the partner track for their firm. So you will have to pay a premium for talent to support this and the fact that resources aren’t being devoted to it to do it will make it harder.”
And the subcommittee’s first hearings are not going to have made it easier to sell potential staffers on the career-building opportunities here. Jordan is using the hearings to float one false story and conspiracy theory after another—for instance, misquoting his own witnesses, who told Twitter that a possible hack-and-leak operation law enforcement was warning social media companies about might involve Hunter Biden. Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth said under oath that as far as he remembered, the specific warning about Hunter Biden came from someone at another tech company, but Jordan claimed it came from the government. If you’re a lawyer looking to make your career, you have to be pretty far off in Sidney Powell territory to think that being associated with that level of evidence-based claim is going to help.
”There is a feeling right now that this will simply be a Fox News clip generator — this really needs to be a comprehensive, well-resourced examination of the security state,” an unnamed “person familiar with the committee’s operations” told the Post. “It can’t be a way for members to get three- to five-minute hits on the Sean Hannity show. If they want this to be real, it has to be done right.”
But right now all the Republican investigations are exactly that: Fox News clip generators. And Jordan isn’t the only committee chair drawing some internal criticism. Punchbowl News reports that James Comer, chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, is drawing some gripes as he announces one investigation after another without making much of an impact. Just this week his committee has held seven hearings, all on different topics, with yet another one being postponed. That looks like someone throwing things against the wall to see what sticks (or, more precisely, what draws Fox News coverage), not someone conducting serious investigations intended to turn up meaningful information.
“There’s a big difference between oversight where you have expertise and oversight to churn out press releases,” a House Republican aide said. “Everyone thought he’d learn from prior chairmen and work in a more coordinated way. It’s been quite the opposite.”
That basic assessment applies to a lot of the highest-profile Republican “investigations,” the ones that were supposed to show what they were capable of. Then again, maybe they are showing what they’re capable of.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), charged in recent bombshell reports with embellishing his credentials, released a statement on the discrepancy between the educational background he touted on the campaign trail and what he actually studied: “When I pulled out my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken.”
Ogles — a freshman and one of the holdouts in Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)’s speakership bid — faced backlash after a NewsChannel 5 investigation earlier this month questioned Ogle’s claims of being an economist, a former law enforcement member, and even a human trafficking expert.
In an effort at damage control, Ogles told a Nashville radio station on Sunday that he “doesn’t recall ever saying I had an economics degree” because “I've been quite clear that I studied political science and international relations."
However, even that was a lie. Ogles had actually pursued liberal studies, not political science and international relations as he had so often claimed, even since his election -- as NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams reported Monday, citing an MTSU transcript Ogles appended to a job application over a decade ago.
The transcript also revealed that the only formal training Ogles received in economics was a community college Principle of Economics course, in which he earned a “C.” The Republican lawmaker also scored a “C” in American History and failed the nine political science courses he took during college, the transcript showed, per the New Republic.
\u201cHere is Tennessee GOP Rep. Andy Ogles college transcripts from MTSU. Ogles claims to be a world renowned Economist. Ogles only took one course in economics. He just barely passed the one course he took. Ogles is a liar about who and what he is .This is only the tip of the\u2026\u201d— Marty Taylor (@Marty Taylor) 1677537050
Ogles preemptively issued a statement on Sunday night — hours before NewsChannel 5 released its exposé on his college transcript — claiming that it wasn’t until he requested an official copy of his transcript that he realized he had been “mistaken” about his background.
"I previously stated that my degree from MTSU was in International Relations. When I pulled my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken. My degree is in Liberal Studies. I apologize for my misstatement," the statement read.
Ogles said he transferred to Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) during his senior year to pursue a degree in political science and international relations.
“Due to an interfamilial matter, I dropped out of college and returned home to financially support my family during a difficult time. Though leaving school was a difficult decision, it was the right one. I would do the same thing again today, even though withdrawing left several incomplete grades that would ultimately be registered as failing," he wrote.
“After completing the online courses, I was awarded a Bachelor of Science, and MTSU mailed me my college degree a few months later. At the time, it was my understanding I had completed my course of study in Political Science and International Relations.
"Last week, I requested an official copy of my transcript and learned that I was actually awarded a broader degree in Liberal Studies with minors in Political Science and English," Ogles added.
\u201cICYMI: Businessman, economist, cop, international sex crimes expert? The stories of freshman Republican Congressman @AndyOgles from Tennessee 1/\u201d— Phil Williams (@Phil Williams) 1676739610
And as for his claim of being a “trained economist,” Ogles suggested to NewsChannel 5 in an interview that a “historical” link existed between political science and economics.
"It looked at political science from, you know, not only the historical perspective but the economic perspective," Ogles said. "So that was really my first taste into economics and understanding the dynamics that go into place of why certain countries are allies."
Randy Stamps, the former political director for the Tennessee Republican Party, blasted Ogles for exuding a “level of deception” fast becoming rampant in today’s GOP.
“What it shows is the level of deception that he is willing to participate in in order to get elected to the United States Congress — and that’s disturbing,” Stamps told NewsChannel 5.
“If he is willing to run around and say, ‘Hey, I’m an economist,’ who knows what else he is going to tell you that is not true,” Stamps added.
Dear readers, for the purposes of this disquisition, we’ll call her the Congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District. She has, of late, distinguished herself by calling for the secession of red states from the Union, or something akin to that. It is unclear what she’s talking about in this instance, as it is in many others, but amazingly, what she had to say raises an interesting point in our nation’s political life:
Is the professional right wing simply giving up?
“We need a national divorce,” the congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District tweeted on February 20. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
It sounds like she’s calling for secession, doesn’t it? The Civil War gave us our greatest – or worst – example of what happens and why when it comes to states seceding from the Union. The main issue cited by the South as the reason they were seceding in 1860 was slavery, specifically a fight within the Congress over the westward expansion of slavery.
America was growing, and the South desperately wanted slavery to grow with it so southern elites could maintain the death grip they held on their social order, which verged on feudalism, and means of wealth accumulation, which was to reduce most labor costs to zero by enslaving people to do the heavy work for them. I purposefully omitted the word “Black” from that sentence, for it was a certainty that should slavery have been allowed to spread into the western territories and subsequently into western states, that Native Americans living there would eventually have been enslaved, too, alongside of Blacks.
There were other so-called states’ rights issues as well. The Southern states held that they should be free to interpret the Constitution as they saw fit, free from a centralized government which included the Supreme Court, essentially nullifying laws they did not want to adhere to, which was one of the major problems with the Articles of Confederation, abandoned in favor of the Constitution.
Do you detect a central factor here? It is that the South wasn’t going to win these fights legitimately within the governing structure of the United States, nor did they hold a winning hand in what we would call the polls, the South being far more sparsely populated than Northern states. Essentially, then, secession can be looked on as giving up: The South said, if we’re not going to win the political battle over slavery, then we’ll take up arms and win it that way.
The day after the Congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District called for secession, she went again to Twitter – for where else do these sorts of arguments belong? – and tried her best to explain that she wasn’t calling for a Civil War. She wasn’t even calling for a disassembly of the Union, she tried to explain – I ask you to attempt to understand what she was talking about yourselves, because I can’t:
“Why the left and right should consider a national divorce, not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union,” she tweeted.
Do you see an answer to her question “why” in there? I don’t. Abandoning “why” completely, she went on describing what she wants:
“A national divorce would require a much smaller federal government with more power given to the states. Hence, we would solve our debt and spending problems immediately.”
Aha! There it is, the old Southern obsession with wealth accumulation any old way they want to do it. They don’t want to spend their hard earned dollars on stuff like school lunches and pre-natal and post-natal health care, because that would run up a debt. They want to allocate the spending of tax dollars the way they see fit, while of course “maintaining our legal union” so the tax dollars keep flowing from blue states to red ones.
What they would spend those tax dollars on gets very interesting: “We would immediately alleviate the need for departments like the Department of Education. States would have full control of their public education. Education would look different all over the country. In red states, there would be varying degrees of more traditional public education, charter schools, homeschooling, technical training, and college and universities. Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government controlled gender transition schools.”
Whatever the hell “gender transition schools” are. The point being, red states don’t want to pay for them. What do they want to pay for? Listen to this:
“Red state schools would bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance [sic] while blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM. Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools. I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not. Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations would continue.”
And what would be free to continue to trade and travel between the states? Let’s hear from the Congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District:
“Red states would not have to abide by climate cult lies. Red states would be completely free to build and use fossil fuel energy for their citizens. Oil, natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear power would very likely be growing strong energy sources for red states. Red states would be free from complying to green new deal regulations, but obviously all states would still have to comply with certain environmental protective requirements. We love freedom to consume the energy we choose but not pollution, and just to be clear carbon is not pollution.”
See there? In this disunited union of red states freed of obligations to blue states, the wind would continue to blow across the states, the air would continue to be shared among red and blue states, but not to worry: There won’t be any pollution because the Congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District says so.
“Tragically, I think we, the left and right, have reached irreconcilable differences,” she tells us. One of those differences is apparently over product placement on the shelves of – wait for it – Walmart stores: “However, in red states, they could have different rules about store product placement on national store's shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children's toothbrushes."
Thank goodness. Just as we can’t have our children catching Trans from drag queen story hours, we can’t be brushing our teeth with tooth brushes all covered with dildo cooties or vibrator vibes.
Not to worry, however. The Congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District has it all figured out:
“Imagine if America decided to just go ahead and have a national divorce. Hollywood elites and celebrities and all the brainwashed leftist women who watch the nasty women on The View, men who identify as women, and Democrat voters who suffer from the lifelong debilitating disease Trump Derangement Syndrome they caught from CNN wouldn’t have to see, much less tolerate deplorables anymore. They could live in their safe space blue states, own nothing, let their government decide and control everything, and most importantly protect their fragile minds from being shocked and insulted by those of us on the right who believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then Americans could choose which way, left or right, provides them with the best quality of life, and we don’t have to argue with one another anymore.”
See that? No more nasty arguments means no more nasty votes conservatives hate losing so much. Oh, by the way, she’s got the whole voting thing figured out, too. If you want to move from a blue state to, say, the Congresswoman’s 14th District in Georgia, you lose your right to vote for five years.
She doesn’t specify what would happen to your right to vote if it’s the other way around, moving from a red state to a blue state. But I think we can guess what her plan is for that circumstance, too.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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