Sen. Adam Schiff?
Like the sound of that?
Twenty Republican U.S. House members who voted against and three who abstained in the vote to censure Rep. Schiff (D-Calif.) may not either, but, inadvertently or not, they have done their best to ensure not only Schiff’s survival but his promotion.
There is nothing more that Schiff, of notoriety for Russiagate lies, would like than to be a U.S. senator from California. And California, being the one-party state that it is, would like nothing more than to elect him, to stick it to us heathens who might believe in such unfashionable items as God and truth.
It’s hard to know what motivated the votes of those Republicans considering that Schiff, for years chairman or ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, used his high position in the world of state secrets constantly to mislead the public about the truth. He did this with regularity, almost daily on cable television. It was said of Schiff that he never found a camera he didn’t like.
In doing so, he aided and abetted the FBI’s pursuit of the Russia Hoax that almost all—including Schiff, as he testified behind closed doors—knew was fallacious propaganda from the start. The Durham Report has explained that all in detail.
The result was massive public brainwashing, the equivalent of what was common in the Soviet era, that has yet to be undone here. Millions still believe the absolute untruth that Trump colluded with Russia.
This prepared the way for those people to be fed many subsequent untruths that they accepted, sheep-like, in the tradition of the original hoax. We have Schiff—among others but still majorly—to thank for that.
We also have him to thank, again among others, for the promulgation of an obvious lie whose investigation cost us taxpayers millions. Schiff was most noteworthy in shoring up the dishonesty when people were beginning to doubt what they were being told.
For this reason, it seems natural and, dare I say, equitable that a fine would be imposed on Schiff along with the censure by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), the Freedom Caucus member who proposed the censure as a privileged resolution.
The Republicans who voted with the (of course unanimous) Democrats to kill the resolution have some explaining to do.
One of them already has—the sometimes-controversial Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)—who claimed this censure was unconstitutional, citing the Eighth and 27th Amendments. The latter is about pay raises and is quite a stretch. The Eighth might apply since it refers to excessive fines but looked at objectively, this fine is far from excessive considering the damage done to our country and its people by a leader of the House Intelligence Committee.
Luna says she picked the number as it’s about half the expenditure of the Mueller investigation. That damage done to our body politic, the country having been torn asunder, is, of course, inestimable.
But at least Massie has given a reason, dubious as it may be. The others so far haven’t.
Looking at the list of Republicans who broke with their own party on the Schiff censure vote, I am reminded once again of one of the disturbing parts of our two-party system.
On the Republican side, we are urged to donate to candidates through a rather opaque system called WinRed. Some of that money goes to the intended candidate, but the rest? It’s out of our control. Some undoubtedly filters down to that list of 20.
Unless I hear a good explanation otherwise, I’d prefer for those representatives to be primaried than to give them a penny.
