What will the White House do if House Republicans subpoena President Biden to testify at hearings on his son Hunter Biden?
Get ready.
If Republicans win a House majority in the midterms, the current minority leader, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is openly making two promises.
First, the GOP majority will investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Next, there will be hearings on Big Tech’s alleged censorship of conservatives.
And get ready for House Republicans to investigate the Jan. 6 committee.
With no proposals to ease inflation, stop gun violence or reform immigration, the House Republicans are set to govern as sensation-seeking, right-wing talk radio hosts.
At the top of their agenda is revenge for House Democrats’ investigation into Trump-inspired mob violence against Congress.
A CNN poll released last week indicated that 79 percent of Americans believe Trump acted either “unethically” or “illegally” in trying to hold onto power after his defeat in the 2020 election. Also, 61 percent now agree he “encouraged political violence in his public statements” during this period.
Republicans want hearings to whip up a frenzy in the Trump media echo chamber by provoking the president and Democrats.
And the gold ring in the Hunter Biden hearing will be to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy if his father, the president, won’t comply with a subpoena.
They will threaten to jail the president and everyone else in the Biden family if they resist testifying.
They will charge any news outlet that is not conservative with hiding information and silencing conservative voices.
McCarthy and two other House Republican leaders recently made these plans in public:
“A Republican [House] majority will be committed to uncovering the facts the Democrats, Big Tech and the legacy media have suppressed,” McCarthy wrote in a New York Post column. He shared the byline with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.
Let historians note that Republicans undermined hopes of an independent investigation into the Jan. 6 riot by Trump supporters.
Then McCarthy tried to blow up the House hearings by appointing polarizing political members, including Jordan, intent on derailing the investigation.
Having failed to stop the Jan. 6 hearings, McCarthy now wants to counter with hearings into the president’s son, an admitted drug user with emotional problems.
Somehow, he failed to suggest hearings into Trump’s son-in-law. Jared Kushner recently won a $2 billion investment deal with the Saudis despite lacking major experience in non-real estate investment.
But McCarthy and his two Republican colleagues claimed in their New York Post op-ed that investigators have “found Biden family members used their connections with [President Biden] to enrich themselves through expectations of access and promises about what a Biden administration might do.”
If McCarthy had any convincing evidence of actual crimes, he would have made it public.
McCarthy’s plan for revenge fits with former Trump White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s sinister warning against the members of the Jan. 6 committee.
The evening of his criminal conviction for defying the committee’s subpoena, Bannon appeared on Fox News to announce plans for future GOP House majority hearings.
“I will tell the Jan. 6 staff right now, preserve your documents, because there’s going to be a real committee and this has to be backed by Republican grassroots voters,” Bannon said.
With such a sad prospect looming, it is useful to remember the reason why McCarthy was forced to drop his bid for Speaker back in 2015.
He slipped up and said the quiet part out loud by admitting that the Benghazi hearings had nothing to do with concern over a U.S. military operation in Libya.
The hearings, he explained, were about bloodying up Hillary Clinton politically so she would be easier to beat in 2016.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee,” McCarthy told Sean Hannity. “What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
Then as now, these hearings have nothing to do with truth. They are empty political theater.
This is the reason Americans tell pollsters government is broken.
Expect the same shenanigans if the GOP gains majority control of the Senate.
It is plain for all to see that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants to skewer Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser.
All signs point to Paul using his subpoena power on Fauci as he seeks to counter memories of Trump’s failure to keep Americans safe from COVID-19.
“When we take over in November, I will be chairman of a committee and I will have subpoena power,” Paul said in April. “And we will get to the bottom of where this virus came from.”
So, there you have it.
The GOP may win the midterms because voters, upset about inflation and gun violence, register anger at the party in power.
But once the GOP wins, its focus will be revenge.
Let’s get back to Hillary’s emails and Benghazi.
Has anyone seen Obama’s birth certificate?
How low will a GOP House majority go in pursuit of payback and Twitter likes?
Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.