Eugene Robinson: The Republican clown-car caucus is undermining itself

Already, it is safe to say that the brand-new House Republican majority is off to an awful, abysmal, amateurish and appalling start. And those are just the applicable adjectives that begin with the letter A. Their embarrassing performance at Tuesday night’s State of the Union address — where President Biden handled their boorish heckling with ease, making them look both obnoxious and ineffectual — put them in a hole. And then, for some unfathomable reason, they kept digging. On Wednesday, Republicans’ first made-for-television, MAGA-themed public hearing fizzled and then backfired. The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), set out to prove the conspiracy theory that Big Tech social media companies have colluded with Democrats and the “deep state” to censor conservative views. But the former Twitter executives they hauled in to testify told a different story.

As the company acknowledged at the time, Twitter was wrong to briefly squelch an October 2020 story from the New York Post involving a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. But the suppression lasted only one day, witnesses said, and was both imposed — and lifted — in an internal attempt to follow company policy. There were no orders from the FBI, as Republicans have claimed. But one of the former Twitter executives, Anika Collier Navaroli, said she knew of a government attempt to censor content: In 2019, she testified, a White House official leaned on the company — unsuccessfully — to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen that insulted then-President Donald Trump in vulgar terms. Navaroli also testified that when Trump posted a tweet that clearly violated a policy against demonizing immigrants, Twitter relaxed the rule to avoid having to paste a warning label on the offending missive. Meanwhile, MAGA loudmouths on the committee made sure that no one could confuse the hearing with an actual search for truth. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) threatened the former Twitter execs with arrest. Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) complained endlessly about their own accounts being “shadow-banned.” I try to keep track of polls that show what issues U.S. voters care most about. The alleged shadow-banning of Boebert and Greene doesn’t show up on any of those lists, I’m afraid.