The House’s new GOP majority is ignoring a key principle I learned during my five years working for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee: Manage expectations. Its “make accusations first, get the facts never” approach to oversight is doomed to over-promise, under-deliver and fall flat with the vast majority of voters.
House Republicans begin with a massive credibility deficit. A recent Navigator Research poll found that only 16% of Americans think the GOP’s obsessive investigations are important. And the Pew Research Center found that 65% of U.S. adults believe Republicans will be overly focused on investigating the Biden administration.
Independent voters convened for a Washington Post focus group viewed the Republican majority’s agenda as mostly about revenge against Democrats and showed little interest in its preoccupation with Hunter Biden, the president’s son. When asked about the absurd new House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, most Americans surveyed by ABC News and The Washington Post did not find it legitimate.
Knowing all that, you would think congressional Republicans would do their best to ensure that the first hearings would deliver the goods. No such luck.
Up first Wednesday, Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s Oversight Committee convened a hearing sensationally titled “Protecting Speech From Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story.”