Dem
51
GOP
49
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) brought his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to New York City yesterday, with the idea that he and his fellow Republicans could score some meme-worthy soundbites at the expense of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the supposedly out-of-control crime that he's personally responsible for (well, him and George Soros, according to Committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-FL).
The stunt appears to have bombed. It's true that the editorial board of The New York Post shed tears of joy, but they hate Bragg, and the hearings were only 3 miles from their main office. Otherwise, even the right-wing media, which is who the performance was staged for, seem to have responded with a collective yawn. Here, for example, is Fox's website last night:
As you can see, there's no main page story, there's no mini-link at the top, there's nothing.
Meanwhile, the witness who is getting most of the attention is someone who was not exactly on board with Jordan, messaging-wise. That would be Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the think tank Third Way, which describes itself as "modern center-left." Instead of railing against the hellscape that is NYC, Kessler said:
New York City is safer than most of the states of the members sitting on the dais on the majority side. In 2020, for example, New York City's murder rate was 18% below the national average for the entire United States. Mr. Chairman, Ohio's murder rate was 59% higher than New York City's...
A hearing about the ravages of crime could be in Alabama with its towering homicide rate and a mass killing that just happened yesterday, or Louisville, where five people were murdered in the blink of an eye at a downtown bank. Or the murder capital of California, which is not Los Angeles or San Francisco or Oakland, but in Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy's district of Kern County with its county seat of Bakersfield. And it has been the murder capital of California for six years running.
Kessler also mentioned Texas, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, and Arizona as high-crime states. And in response to his remarks, several Democratic members of Jordan's committee made motions to adjourn and reconvene in Ohio.
In other words: Oops! It's an early-in-the-week helping of schadenfreude. While we are not attorneys, we are familiar with the adage that you don't put someone on the stand unless you know exactly what they are going to say. We would assume that Jordan, who actually is an attorney, has heard that. We also assume it applies to Congressional hearings that are being held for benefit of the cameras. Certainly, the 1/6 Committee knew what their witnesses were going to say.
And there's the rub. Jordan has failed, once again, to make the sort of impression that the 1/6 Committee made over and over. Maybe he's just not as good at this as Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney were. Or, just maybe, there's no substance here, and so he's got nothing but smoke and mirrors to work with. (Z)