Opinion
GUEST EDITORIAL | Matt Gaetz is embarrassing his district and our state
Posted Oct 29, 2019 at 2:57 PM
St. Augustine Record
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz and his band of delusional Republican House members deserve discipline for their juvenile stunt of crashing Congress’ secure meeting room to disrupt the impeachment inquiry on Wednesday.
This editorial recently appeared in The Palm Beach Post:
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz and his band of delusional Republican House members deserve discipline for their juvenile stunt of crashing Congress’ secure meeting room to disrupt the impeachment inquiry on Wednesday.
There is nothing improper about these hearings, no matter how much Republicans bray about “Soviet-style” proceedings. The impeachment inquiry is taking depositions much as a grand jury does, or as special prosecutors did before the impeachments of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton; in private so as to keep witnesses from collaborating.
More than 45 Republicans are on the three committees holding the hearings, and there’s no reason to think that they or their staff lawyers aren’t asking tough questions behind those doors. If the testimony were somehow weakening the case that President Donald Trump was abusing his power in his dealings with Ukraine, we’d surely be hearing about it.
But as we’re learning from disclosures, each diplomat who comes forward is making clearer that Trump indeed withheld almost $400 million in desperately needed military aid to a vulnerable ally; in exchange, he wanted Ukraine’s public acknowledgment that they were investigating discredited suspicions of corruption against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and a baseless theory that Ukraine and not Russia was the computer-hacking culprit subverting our 2016 elections.
No other U.S. president has ever before usurped foreign policy for his personal political gain as is being alleged here. The evidence is mounting of a political scandal of monumentally historic proportions.
Trump’s defenders are having an ever more difficult time arguing the facts. So they are throwing up distractions about the process.
Gaetz, the Pensacola-area Republican who literally seems to think that a kangaroo court is something run by Captain Kangaroo, is leading the most inane contingent and making the most primitive of moves: physically crashing the proceedings.
Wednesday’s scene of guys in suits going all torch-and-pitchfork in the halls of Congress were disturbingly similar to the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, when a swarm of paid GOP operatives, posing as outraged members of the public, rushed the doors of the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Office so loudly and violently that within hours the presidential ballot recount was halted.
On Wednesday, the best that Gaetz & Co. managed was to delay testimony by five hours.
Gaetz is a real piece of work. Since landing in Congress in 2017, his main preoccupation has been appearing on Fox News as often as possible (more than 70 times to date) to extol Donald Trump and rail against his critics. In February, on Twitter, he threatened to release damaging information about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen because Cohen was testifying to Congress against the president, a threat which caused the Florida Bar to investigate (Gaetz apologized).
And you might remember when Gaetz tried to get two parents of Parkland shooting victims ejected from a House hearing on gun control. The parents had objected when Gaetz claimed that “illegal aliens” are a bigger threat than firearms and that a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border would make the country safer than universal background checks for gun purchases.
Funny, but House Republicans didn’t mind closed hearings when they were endlessly investigating Benghazi and the target was Hillary Clinton.
In fact, as Judge Andrew Napolitano noted on Fox News Thursday, the rules that permit closed hearings at this stage of an inquiry — the initial interviewing of witnesses -- were put in place in 2015 by a Republican majority. The next phase, the actual impeachment hearings conducted by the House Judiciary Committee, will be public.
And for a party so obsessed with the supposed security risks posed by Clinton’s private email server, Gaetz and his gang were awfully cavalier about bringing smartphones into the Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF). This was a major breach of security protocols — and a potential felony.
To say Gaetz’s that actions are unbecoming of the U.S. House of Representatives and an embarrassment to the Panhandle voters that sent him there would be an understatement.
It is certainly within the boundaries of partisan politics to disagree about the Trump impeachment inquiry, but is out of bounds to lead a screaming gang to disrupt a legal House proceeding.
If he follows through on his threat to do more of the same, the House should vote to censure him.
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