UPDATE 12/02/2023:
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to move forward with subpoenas for wealthy judicial influence-buyers, like Harland Crow and Leonard Leo. The vote was 11-0. That’s because, by the time the vote was called, the Republican members had all walked out of the hearing in a performative huff. The walkout came after they spent nearly two hours acting like ill-behaved chimpanzees, figuratively throwing their own feces at the committee and its chairman, Senator Dick Durbin.
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A few weeks ago, the ranking Republican member on the committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, promised a “shit show” should Democrats try to subpoena their donors. It turns out that every Republican on the committee was willing to show their whole entire ass on C-SPAN in order to protect Crow and Leo from public scrutiny.
[T]he promised festivities began to take shape a couple of weeks ago when Republicans began proposing what would amount to over 170 amendments to the subpoenas.
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Thursday, Durbin and the Democrats had their own procedural games to play. The meeting on Thursday started with what was supposed to be the confirmation of a couple of Biden appointments, with the idea being that the committee would only later get to the subpoenas. But Republicans decided to start their objections early by slamming some of the proposed judges. So Democrats invoked a rule to cut off debate.
That’s when Republicans decided to throw a temper tantrum. The rule Durbin used was something that Senator Chuck Grassley has invoked in the past, when Republicans were in the majority.
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Senator John Cornyn threatened, “You understand, what goes around comes around”—because, I assume, he was unable to process that what the Democrats were doing was the coming around part of what Republicans had started.
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And then, of course, there was Lindsey Graham, who whined and seethed and accused Democrats of pulling a political stunt. Graham has a habit of engaging in fits of pique in which he pretends to have acted in good faith in the past while vowing that he will act only in bad faith going forward. It’s a very strange thing to promise to be a jerk when everybody already knows you’re a jerk.
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After every Republican got their turn to mug for the cameras, they left the hearing room. Graham stayed behind to offer some additional procedural objections but, after those objections were ignored, he too left the room.
The point of the walkout, I believe, was to cause more procedural mayhem. After the 11-0 vote, Senators Cruz and Mike Lee claimed that the subpoena was invalid because the committee lacked a quorum when the vote was taken and because, thanks to the Republican histrionics, the vote took place just after the two-hour mark and Republicans claimed to invoke the “two-hour rule.” I’m not a Senate parliamentarian or an expert on the arcane minutiae of how this antidemocratic institution avoids doing the work of the American people, so I cannot fully assess their claims. I think they’re wrong, because there was a quorum at the start of the meeting, and I know from judicial confirmation hearings that merely walking out of the room does not stop the committee from doing business. But who knows? If there is any possible way for Republicans to shield Crow and Leo, they will take it.
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This is all happening because Republicans are terrified of the committee’s putting Crow and Leo under oath and asking them questions.
Elie Mystal @ The Nation
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