A Major Schiff of Power

There are currently three excellent candidates in California for the Unites States Senate – Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee.  Yesterday, the Republican Party gave a major boost to Rep. Schiff and came close to guaranteeing that he would win the election.

At the moment, the race is close between Schiff at 15% and Rep. Porter with 14%.  There’s a large drop to Rep. Lee who has 6%, however 47% are undecided, and it’s still almost a year-and-a-half before the general election.   (In California, the top two candidates in the primary have a run-off in the November election, if no one gets 50.1% of the vote.)  The highest Republican currently sits at only 4%.)

But on Wednesday, for reasons known only to them, House Republicans voted to censure Adam Schiff by 213-219.  And it’s hard to imagine that this won’t benefit Schiff in the Senate election, in part to show the gravitas with which House Republicans hold Schiff, but at the very least in part for California Democratic voters to send a huge “screw you” back to Republicans.

The reason that House Republicans voted to censure Adam Schiff was – honestly, I don’t have any idea.  I know what the resolution says, but it makes absolutely no sense, providing one lives in the Real World.

This is what I mean:  the resolution says that when Trump was president, Schiff “abused this trust by saying there was evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.”  And it adds that “Representative Schiff purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people.”

Here’s the problem.

The Mueller Report actually, literally says that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.  I know it says this because I read the Mueller Report.  Apparently 213 Republicans in the House didn’t.  Or didn’t understand that when it said the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, it meant that.

The Report said that it couldn’t prove that the Trump campaign “conspired” with Russia (which is a crime) – though it noted that the reason it couldn’t prove this was not because it didn’t happen, but because too many people refused to cooperate with the Special Prosecutor’s office, and so they were unable to get the information they were asking for.  Though it also said that there was evidence of a conspiracy, just not enough to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.  Further, “collusion” is a separate matter, an action not specifically a crime, and the Mueller Report did say specifically that there was evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.  In part, it went into detail about a lengthy meeting with Russians that Don Jr. and Jared Kushner attended.

Furthermore, multiple Trump officials were convicted, in part for their dealings with Russia.  Including Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort who admitted he gave internal Trump campaign data the Russians.

Whimsically, as it happens, just yesterday, as well, Adam Schiff grilled lawyer John Durham at a House “Durham” Committee Meeting and got him to acknowledge all the things that were – in fact -- in the Mueller Report.

And House Republicans yesterday censured Adam Schiff for “saying there was evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia” – which there was.  And that he “purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people” by saying the truth about the reality that actually existed.

Which is why I honestly don’t know why Adam Schiff was censure.

To be clear, in the Republican sense, I know why they censured him – because Donald Trump hates Adam Schiff, largely for leading the first impeachment against him, and therefore House Republicans are required to hate Adam Schiff -- and scared for their jobs because Trump said publicly that he would make sure any House Republican who didn't vote for censure would get a primary challenge.  But I’m not aware that any of that is actually a reason for censuring someone.

But what I also mean by not understanding why House Republicans censured Adam Schiff is that they had to know that doing so would help him become a United States Senator.  But they did it anyway.

By the way, putting aside the Senate election, this was a reprehensible and fascist action by House Republicans (yes, fascist, since one of the major tenets of fascism is to try to undermine opposing centers of power, and Adam Schiff is one of those for House Democrats – and they already stripped his membership on the House Intelligence Committee).

But, of course, you can’t separate this from the Senate election.  And as reprehensible and fascist as the action was, House Republicans yesterday may have helped Adam Schiff become a U.S. Senator.  It will make him a symbol of defiance fighting against Trump for Democrats, it will give him more TV air time to be interviewed and show very specifically and personally the fascist dangers of Republicans, it will give him important fodder for TV ads and more.

On the other hand, hey, despite being under actual criminal investigation, Republicans still are okay having "George Santos" sitting with them in the House.  So, it's not like they want to censure just anybody​...