It appears most Americans aren’t thrilled with the political decisions made by House Republicans, who are newly in the majority.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who is newly on the House Oversight Committee, recently outlined in a Twitter post some of those decisions for the House GOP’s focus — and, surprise! It’s Hunter Biden’s laptop, again. “On February 8th, three former Twitter employees will be coming before the Oversight Committee to discuss the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and much more,” she said. “The accountability begins.” What portion of Americans actually cares about “censorship” that in actuality was non-existent on the kind of systematic scale some Republican leaders claim? According to a new CNN poll, a full 73 percent of Americans say House Republican leaders “haven’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems,” as that outlet summarized.
Although majorities disapproved specifically of each major party’s leadership in the chamber, disapproval of the Republicans at the helm of their party’s House conference was higher than disapproval for Democratic leaders, who now include Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Katherine Clark (Mass.), and others. Disapproval for Republicans was at 67 percent, while disapproval of Democrats reached just 59 percent. Some of the high levels of opposition to the course taken by Republicans leading the party’s presence in the House are further buoyed by substantial levels of opposition from Republican voters themselves. A full 46 percent of the respondents either registered with or, among independents, leaning towards the GOP identified the party’s House leaders as failing to show a commitment to “the right priorities,” as CNN reported.
Looking at the question through another rhetorical lens, almost a simple majority of Americans identified economic issues as the personal concerns they felt had the most import — not whatever was done with Hunter Biden’s laptop.
A key point of contention for Republicans has been that coverage of the device’s purported contents was temporarily restricted on major social media platforms, but the coverage still remained easily accessible elsewhere, and it’s not as though the story didn’t still get out. Someone could have posted snippets of or references to the information, even if not direct links. A sweeping scheme revealing some kind of plot to swing the 2020 presidential election just wasn’t present. Elsewhere, Republicans are also further shaping their specifically political focus for the next two years, including with investigations among the party’s members on the oversight panel into the Biden family themselves, although that’s not going as well as Republicans might hope.
In line with a letter from the Justice Department to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is leading the House Judiciary Committee, that rejected the prospect of providing him with broad swathes of information about ongoing criminal investigations, oversight chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) also recently faced another delay in his demands for financial records held by the federal government related to the Bidens. Comer is pursuing what are called suspicious activity reports, which are required to be filed in circumstances like cash transactions across a single day totaling above $10,000 — a remarkably thin basis to conclusively allege some kind of corruption. The point of making the reports is to proactively provide a basis for seeing if there is something worth pursuing further, and a past letter to Comer about the documents from the Treasury Department outlined the tentative nature of the info and the strict obligations around keeping it secret.
