Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), though he behaves with a veneer of respectability and “just asking questions,” acts essentially right in line with his Republican colleagues in terms of antagonizing witnesses to the point of asking the same question over and over and over as the other individual tries to answer.
During a recent Senate hearing, Kennedy targeted Richard Painter. Painter is a lawyer who once held a position in the presidential administration of George W. Bush, and the Louisiana Republican asked him in the Senate Budget Committee’s recent proceedings about past concern Painter had expressed regarding corruption at the U.S. Supreme Court. Stories have circulated about Justice Clarence Thomas enjoying massively pricey favors that went mostly undisclosed, despite the potential indicator inherent in those arrangements of a massive conflict of interest.
“I did not think that Justice Clarence Thomas should be failing to disclose his trips on a billionaire’s yacht and airplane,” Painter said. “I believe that there is grave risk… to the confidence of the American people in our Supreme Court.”
“The American people feel that way when we have Supreme Court Justices on yachts and in planes of billionaires and not being disclosed,” Painter said, as Kennedy relentlessly pestered him about whether he believed current members of the Supreme Court to be “bought.”
“I will just say one thing that I learned in high school debate — that when you have no argument, you simply change the subject,” Painter observed, as Kennedy droned on and on about random tweets from the lawyer that were substantially unrelated to the topic of the proceedings, which was supposed to be climate change. Unsurprisingly, Kennedy just kept complaining about random posts on Twitter that Painter had made. Didn’t the Republicans supposedly like the concept of free speech? Are they now going to come out and clamor for the outright restriction of political statements online from people and with certain content they don’t like? What’s the end game, here?
Check out Kennedy’s meltdown below:
