Hunter Biden shows up and Nancy Mace melts down | Opinion

Hunter Biden punked House Republicans without saying a word Wednesday. How do we know? Because Rep. Nancy Mace of Charleston had a meltdown when Biden showed up unannounced at a House Oversight Committee hearing and simply sat quietly in the gallery.

Mace is just the latest in a growing number of powerful people acting like toddlers in public when things haven’t gone their way.

All Biden did was call the bluff of Republicans who have kept up a charade of an “investigation” supposedly to uncover wrongdoing by President Joe Biden. So far, they’ve found literally no evidence the president has done anything illegal or even improper concerning his time as vice president. Because of that, they’ve been left feeding lies to the Fox News set and tried to set Hunter Biden up to take down his father in a transparently dishonest way.

The president’s troubled adult son has agreed to publicly answer Republican questions about his business dealings. House Republicans have demanded it be done instead during a closed-door deposition. Everyone who has been paying attention knows why. Such a deposition would make it easy for bad-faith Republicans, like Mace, to take Hunter Biden’s words out of context and leak them to their buddies in right-wing media to smear his father despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. That tactic won’t be effective during a live hearing likely to attract the attention of numerous national news outlets.

Mace knows this. That’s why she ranted after Hunter Biden showed up Wednesday, ready to speak.

“You are the epitome of white privilege, coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls,” she raged.

She doubled down later in a tweet: “It’s no secret that Hunter Biden is using his privilege to evade any sense of accountability. He showed up in the People’s House as a PR stunt. It’s horrendous that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are standing (with) him as he spits in the face of the American people.”

She tripled down in another tweet, bizarrely claiming he “ran as fast as he could after I confronted him” because Hunter Biden left after House Republicans, once again, refused to allow him to publicly testify. He walked out as a Republican congresswoman from Georgia who had shown nude photos of him during a previous clown show of a hearing began speaking.

Notably, Mace has had little to say about the documented $7.8 million Donald Trump businesses received from foreign governments while he was president, or the $2 billion investment Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was a senior official in the Trump administration, received from the Saudi crown prince only months after they left the White House. (Hunter Biden has never served in public office.)

Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina had a similar temper tantrum a few months ago when someone dared ask her colleague and then-GOP speaker nominee Mike Johnson about his role in attempts to undermine the 2020 election.

Aren’t they tired of embarrassing themselves? Aren’t they tired of embarrassing us?

At some point, you’d think the public would rather the United States not be a laughingstock and stop sending children to represent us in Washington.

Maybe we are nearing that point. Maybe that’s what 2024 will bring, Americans of all backgrounds, ideologies and partisan leanings who agree on little else deciding it’s time to stop empowering and enabling unserious people. Until we do that, we’ll be stuck leaders-in-name-only like Mace.

Issac Bailey is a Carolinas opinion writer for McClatchy.