The seemingly imminent indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has short-circuited a number of prominent Republican officials, causing them to go head over heels in different directions to try to undermine the prosecutor.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, along with New Yorkers who should know better, like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, accused Bragg of ignoring the skyrocketing rate of violent crime, even as crimes like homicides and shootings have declined in Manhattan. in recent months, and this remains one of the safest large cities in the country.
Three Republican House committee chairmen upped the ante on sending Bragg a letter demanding that he testify before Congress and accusing him of a politically motivated prosecution. It doesn’t matter that Bragg is a state-level official elected by Manhattan voters, with no federal role for Congress to oversee. Spurious allegations of misconduct aside, such allegations would be addressed by the Legislature in Albany or by state courts.
It’s particularly ironic that this is coming from the gang that has spent the last few months bragging about weaponizing the government, going so far as to set up a House Subcommittee ostensibly focused exclusively on that issue.
In practice, the committee has been just another forum for promoting the nonsense of the culture war and promoting the fatuous argument that Twitter was involved in some kind of conspiracy with the Biden campaign, all an effort to divert attention from the efforts very real attacks to subvert American democracy perpetrated by Trump and his political allies. If members of the Republican Party really wanted to do the job that the committee’s title implies, they had better call out the inappropriate effort to investigate and intimidate Bragg for doing the job he was elected to do.
Instead, the subcommittee’s chairman is none other than perennial Trumpy horsefly Jim Jordan, who in his capacity as chairman of the Judiciary Committee was one of the people who sent the letter to Bragg in the first place. If Jordan really wants to see the face of weaponizing the government, he only needs to look in the mirror.
