Republicans scramble to get Trump his payback -- yet keep coming up short

[marmar]

Republicans scramble to get Trump his payback -- yet keep coming up short
From impeachment to the border, the GOP in Congress made many promises to Trump and now he's getting impatient

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 5, 2024 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) As usual these days, Republicans in Congress are a bubbling cauldron of chaos and dysfunction with wild hearings, inexplicable strategy and internal strife. They are all fighting among themselves trying to curry favor with their party's leader, Donald Trump, and jockeying for power. And it's an election year, which even in placid times turns politicians into preening posers desperate for money and attention. It is a combustible situation.

....(snip)....

The big show was supposed to be the impeachment of Joe Biden, promised to Donald Trump as payback for the two impeachments he endured. That one's not looking good at the moment. The House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who is running the Hunter Biden investigation, keeps punching holes in his own narrative every time he interviews another witness. Just last week, another presumed "whistleblower," Eric Schwerin, a former business associate of the president’s son, was interviewed in closed-door testimony and swore under penalty of perjury that the president was not involved at all in Hunter's business dealings.

....(snip)....

On Sunday night Senate negotiators released the details of their hard-fought bipartisan border agreement which is harsher than we would have seen under any Democratic administration or congressional majority in the last 40 years. (There are some policy improvements as well as laid out here by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy) They agreed to the terms as the price House Republicans demanded in order to fund other vital national security priorities. So naturally, the House Republicans immediately declared it dead on arrival. This was expected since they've been saying that for weeks despite not knowing what was in it.

....(snip)....

We know that Trump and the Republicans don't want to pass any border legislation because they have told us they want to use the "crisis" to beat up Democrats in the election. This is no secret. They also don't want to pass any more Ukraine funding for reasons that are simply inexplicable unless their apparent attraction to Russian President Vladimir Putin is more than simply for show. Speaker Johnson said over the weekend that he plans to take care of Israel in a separate bill (so his evangelical buddies and the hard right Israeli leadership don't need to worry about that.) ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/02/05/scramble-to-get-his-payback----yet-keep-coming-up-short/