Congress has never enjoyed stratospheric esteem among Americans, who long ago came to understand that their elected representatives include a fair share of lightweights, airheads and demagogues. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress,” Mark Twain postulated. “But I repeat myself.” In the musical “1776,” John Adams decried his hapless fellow members of the Continental Congress thusly: “We piddle, twiddle and resolve; not one damned thing do we solve.”
But there’s piddling, twiddling and resolving, and then there’s other stuff. The debasement of Congress to which we were treated last week was something else again, not merely a national embarrassment but one which made us a global laughingstock. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had blown up and then displayed for television cameras photographs of President Biden’s son Hunter nude, having sexual relations with various women. This was for the simple purpose of humiliating the son and inflicting pain on the rest of his family.
Everyone knows by now that Hunter Biden, who lost his mother and sister tragically as a young boy, almost lost his father several times and then lost his brother to brain cancer, spent several years in the depths of a severe drug addiction, and went through everything that goes along with it. Millions of American families have suffered the kinds of agony the Bidens have suffered.
Neither Greene nor her GOP colleagues who control the House of Representatives care a whit about any of that. The flimsy pretext for Greene’s “presentation” of photographs of Hunter Biden having sex was a hearing of the House Oversight and Accounting Committee, on which Greene, remarkably, sits, into whether or not the younger Biden should have been charged with more serious tax crimes than the ones to which he has agreed to plead guilty.
Never mind that it was Donald Trump’s Justice Department that initiated and spearheaded the prosecution of the younger Biden. Never mind that it was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney who decided what charges were warranted. Never mind that the son’s crimes have nothing to do with his father. Never mind any of that: the indecency reflected in this hearing was that of Congresswoman Greene. As Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez put it: “I don’t care who you are in this country. No one deserves that.”
Greene may be appalling, but she is no rogue operator. The Republican-controlled committee’s Twitter account tweeted out her photographs.
GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz is a bird of similar feathers. In 2019, the day before Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen was scheduled to testify about his former boss’s payoffs to a porn star, Gaetz sent him this mob-like warning: “Hey @MichaelCohen212,” Gaetz tweeted, “Do your wife and father-in-law know about you and your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for a chat. I wonder if she’ll be faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot.” The House Ethics Committee reprimanded Gaetz for “not [meet]ing the standards by which Members of the House should govern themselves.”
In 2021, Congressman Paul Gosar posted an animated video of himself murdering Ocasio-Ortez. He was censured by the House, then controlled by Democrats, with only two Republicans prepared to agree that this was conduct unbecoming of someone in Congress. The rest of the Republican conference gathered around him after the censure vote to affirm their support for him.
These are the same folks, of course, who continue to support their colleague George Santos, the indicted fraud artist soon headed for an extended vocational course in license plate-making. They have turned Congress into a national zoo, and their fellow citizens can only stop, shake their heads and point.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission