Reps. Biggs, Gosar get plum committee spots on the Isle of Misfit Republicans

The Republicans who now control the House of Representatives decided to send the worst of their conspiracy theorists, Trump cultists, election deniers, QAnon quacks, subpoena defiers, insurrection supporters and friends of white nationalists to the Isle of Misfit Republicans, which these days is called the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Among the kooks and cranks assigned to the committee are Arizona’s own Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, who will spend the next two years with their crackpot cohorts wasting time and taxpayer money chasing conspiracies and conducting vendettas while getting nowhere and doing nothing useful.

In other words, the same way Biggs and Gosar have occupied their time since getting elected.

Biggs ignored a subpoena. This is different?

Biggs is positively giddy about his new position, tweeting: We are starting immediate oversight in the @GOPoversight committee. On Wednesday, we are holding a hearing on the waste, fraud, and abuse found in federal pandemic spending. We’ll make sure bad actors who blew through this money are not let off the hook.

This is actually quite humorous coming from an individual who spent the better part of the last legislative session ducking a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

They had questions for Biggs and members of Congress about the lead up to the insurrection. Questions about what those representatives did and said, whom they met with, whom they spoke to. Something a tough guy like Biggs apparently was afraid to answer under oath.

They might have wondered about his asking Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers to decertify Arizona’s lawful presidential electors.

They might ask him to deny, under oath, that he (or someone on his behalf) requested a presidential pardon, as was claimed – under oath – by Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs.

Gosar supported Jan. 6 insurrectionists

But Biggs simply refused to comply with the committee’s request.

Given that, why should anyone comply with a request from his committee?

Congressional shift:How did Arizona get here and what happens next?

Particularly since it also includes Gosar, who also tried to disenfranchise Arizona voters, and who tweeted his undying support for the criminal insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an event that led to at least four deaths, injured 150 or so police officers and caused millions of dollars in damage.

A man whose own brother calls him a “traitor to this country.”

Also among the misfits is Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, like Gosar, has appeared with Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist and Holocaust denier.

She also has spread QAnon conspiracies about elites running a human trafficking child sex ring, with cannibalism, out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, referred to the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting that left 17 students and staff members dead as a “false flag,” and said of the Jan. 6 insurrection, “I want to tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.”

Like Al Capone investigating Eliot Ness?

Then there is Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, another election denier on the committee who was said to have communicated with organizers of the insurrection before Jan. 6, tweeted “Today is 1776” on the day of the attack on the Capitol, and who has referred to Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as a terrorist, resulting in numerous death threats to the congresswoman.Essentially, the GOP roster on the oversight committee is filled with unhinged extremists.American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein described the group by saying, “It’d be like if we gave Al Capone the power to investigate Eliot Ness.”

It’s a colorful description, but I wouldn’t use a Capone reference to in any way characterize Biggs and Gosar.

They are much more like Harry and Marv.

From “Home Alone.”

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar were sent to the Isle of Misfit Republicans