The Puppeteer’s Strings: A Solid Schiff and a Miserable McCarthy
If you needed further proof that the GOP, and especially the House Republican Caucus, is firmly in the grip of Donald Trump, then last night’s re-vote to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) provided it.
As I wrote about last week, an earlier effort to censure Schiff and threaten him with a $16 million fine (half the cost of the Mueller investigation) failed by a vote of 225 to 196. Some 20 Republicans broke rank to vote against the resolution, which had been put forth by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). (Luna herself is under a cloud of suspicion for having made up much of her political and personal backstory à la George Santos.)
The first vote was a huge embarrassment for the GOP, with a number of swing district Republican members apparently unwilling to take the extraordinary step of censuring a House member merely for his speech while performing his Congressional duties.
Luna vowed to bring the motion back up, even while quietly shelving the monetary fine part of it. And on Wednesday night, the resolution carried. Schiff became the third House member officially censured by the body in forty years, not for threatening violence like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), nor for financial and ethical improprieties like Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), but simply for pressing the case for Russian collusion with the Trump Campaign in 2016 and as payback for leading the House managers at Trump's first impeachment trial.
What drove the Republican holdouts to switch their votes and support the resolution? And how did things go down when the vote took place? The answer alarms but also gives some hope. Let’s go looking for Republican spines and see why they were in such short supply, and then discuss how this travesty is also a beacon and a roadmap for Democrats moving forward.
The puppet show
As it became clear that the Republicans who had just last week refused to censure Schiff had lost their nerve and would vote to do so this week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi rose to speak, and she captured what had happened perfectly.
Today we’re on the floor of the House, where the other side has turned this chamber—where slavery was abolished and Medicare and Social Security and everything were instituted—they turned it into a puppet show. A puppet show! And you know what? The puppeteer, Donald Trump, is shining a light on the strings. You look miserable. You look miserable.
Pelosi was referring to how, after the first vote to censure had failed, Donald Trump had come out swinging, and the GOP “moderates” buckled quickly.
First, Trump unsurprisingly delivered high praise for Luna. “Anna Paulina Luna is a STAR,” Trump wrote Friday on his “Truth Social” platform. “She never gives up, especially in holding total lowlifes like Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff responsible for their lies, deceit, deception, and actually putting our Country at great risk…”
Then Trump came for the GOP “moderates” who had refused to vote for the bill. “Any Republican voting against his CENSURE, or worse, should immediately be primaried. There are plenty of great candidates out there,” he warned.
Trump’s threats, combined with no actual monetary fine in the resolution this time (which could open GOP members to exposure down the road should the House flip control), were enough to lead the GOP holdouts to capitulate.
Before the vote, Schiff spoke eloquently in his own defense:
To my Republican colleagues who introduced this resolution, I thank you. You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood. You, who are the authors of a Big Lie about the last election, must condemn the truth tellers, and I stand proudly before you.
Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy, and I am grateful.
Schiff noted, however, that the defamatory resolution comes at a cost to the country and the Congress, with Speaker McCarthy using the resources of Congress for two whole weeks to pursue a political vendetta pushed by Trump rather than turn his attention to the problems of the nation.
In the end, the censure motion passed along party lines, 213 to 209, with the former “no” votes from the GOP nearly all flipping to “yes.” (Six Republican members of the Ethics Committee voted “present,” as they will oversee Schiff’s case on referral.) Only one Republican not on the Ethics Committee, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), voted “present,” saying Schiff hadn’t been granted due process and his side of the story hadn’t been heard.
Democrats rally around Schiff
The universe had aligned a bit for Schiff earlier in the day as he was given a unique opportunity to question Special Counsel John Durham, whom Republicans had invited to testify before a House Committee. The GOP had issued that invitation presumably to have Durham help make their case against Schiff, who had been the chief proponent of the idea that Russian collusion with the Trump Campaign had occurred and ought to be investigated.
But the Republican tactic backfired badly when Schiff deftly turned the tables and took a clearly spooked and hesitant Durham to task. Schiff got Durham to admit key points, including that he does not doubt the evidence that Russia had indeed been trying to get Trump elected. At another point, Durham begrudgingly admitted that he was aware the Russians had offered Donald Trump Jr. highly sensitive information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton, and that the president’s son had been eager to receive it. Durham concluded, rather pathetically, “Sure, people get phone calls all the time from individuals who claim to have information like that.”
“Really? The son of a presidential candidate gets calls all the time from a foreign government offering dirt on their opponent. Is that what you’re saying?” Schiff asked, cornering Durham.
"I don't think this is unique in your experience,” Durham mumbled.
In short, Schiff was able to demonstrate, once again, on a live broadcast where he questioned the House GOP’s own witness, that there were very strong reasons to suspect that Russia had colluded with the Trump Campaign. And yet this alleged “falsehood” remained the basis of the censure resolution against him.
That resolution came at the end of the day on Wednesday. As Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced the vote tally, Democrats began to protest, hurling shouts of “Shame!” at McCarthy, who presided over the chamber looking rather miserable, as Rep. Pelosi had pointed out. The protests drowned McCarthy out for a time, until he finally was able to summon Rep. Schiff down to the “well” of the chamber to be admonished officially.
But something extraordinary happened next. Some 200 of Schiff’s colleagues gathered in the well along with him, crying, “Adam! Adam!” and surrounding him with support and respect. As Schiff later remarked, it was as if the real person who had been censured was Speaker McCarthy for allowing and then pressing such a nakedly partisan rebuke. If anything, the attack upon Schiff has now elevated him in the eyes of the Democrats and makes it more likely that he will win his Senate primary and seat to represent California next November.
Some takeaways
I admit to having retained at least some hope that the GOP “moderates” would hold firm on the question of a baseless censure, if only because voting for such a thing could infuriate and motivate voters in their swing districts in 2024. That hope of mine proved not to be true, and it didn’t take much from Trump to make them all fall in line. They are apparently still more fearful of whipped up, angry MAGA voters, whom they must first face in the primaries, than they are of voters in the general.
This demonstrates that House Republicans are so weak and scared that they will never be anything more than Trump’s puppets on the issues that he cares about. That almost certainly means they will need to take his side when it comes to his Next Big Lie about being the victim of a political witch-hunt, even though the facts are crystal clear that he violated the Espionage Act and obstructed the investigation and return of national security documents.
That means a double-wedge approach against the GOP is now possible.
The first wedge divides the GOP internally over policy, peeling away voters who recoil at the extremists’ agenda, which includes deeply unpopular abortion restrictions, book bans, abandoning Ukraine, unrestricted gun culture and hate-filled attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
The second wedge ties the GOP to Donald Trump, who is also deeply unpopular and is already facing very serious criminal charges without much of an apparent defense. Forcing the GOP to pick sides when it comes to Trump is a lose-lose proposition for them: Side against him and infuriate the MAGA base, or side with him and turn off middle-of-the-road voters.
The GOP may have succeeded in censoring Rep. Adam Schiff, but in doing so they have re-exposed their weakness when it comes to Trump and given Democrats a clear avenue of attack. Based upon what we heard from Pelosi, Democrats stand ready to exploit it to flip those 18 most vulnerable seats.
As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries later noted,
Last week the so-called moderate Republicans in New York voted against censuring Adam Schiff.
Trump threatened to primary them in response.
These profiles in courage immediately flip-flopped and bent the knee to their Puppet Master.
We will expose them all.
“I am your retribution,” he said, then threatened GOP House members with their positions if they didn’t vote to censure Adam Schiff, in a move that was pure political retribution.
We need to call it what it is. Fascism. Undeniably and clearly.
"Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), voted “present,” saying Schiff hadn’t been granted due process and his side of the story hadn’t been heard." Hey Buck, Schiff's side of the story has been heard over and over and over again, then proven, inter alia, by Durham's actual words earlier that day. The problem is that the GOP is too scared to listen.