Voices: The GOP’s hearing circus comes to Washington

House Republicans began their second day of score-settling hearings on Thursday with the inaugural session of a new committee focused on the “weaponization” of the federal government.

The subcommittee, led by GOP Rep Jim Jordan, perhaps the most pugnacious of House conservatives, ostensibly started in response to Republicans’ anger over the federal government supposedly targeting former president Donald Trump and other conservatives.

But the hearing quickly unraveled. Almost as soon as the first witness, Senator Chuck Grassley, opened his mouth, the octogenarian started rambling with sound and fury about his investigation into the Biden family.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin quickly followed by unleashing a word salad rife with complaints about former FBI Director James Comey’s response to Hillary Clinton’s emails and parroting conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and vaccines. Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who has recently filled in as a substitute host for Tucker Carlson, aired her grievances about how Ms Clinton and Mitt Romney had criticised her. That wasn’t all – she went as far as to compare governmental efforts to combat disinformation to attempts by the Bush administration to convince the American public that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Republicans on both sides of the dais homed in on the Twitter Files, internal communications from the social media company that date back to before Elon Musk took the company private. And predictably, GOP members complained about the fact that Twitter briefly prohibited the sharing of The New York Post‘s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Representative Elise Stefanik, who long ago shed her moderate image to move up the ranks to become the number three Republican in the House, claimed that polling showed that Democrats would have changed their vote had they known about the story (Mr Trump mentioned this at rallies I have attended and watched). That claim has always been dubious.

At this point, it’s fair to say there is little daylight between the MAGA and moderate wings of the GOP, since much of Ms Stefanik’s comments mirrored Matt Gaetz’s railing against a Democratic witness over work for Pfizer and Google (it’s true his firm represents those companies, but he did not).

This was House Republicans’ second hearing focused, at least partly, on Twitter; on Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing about Hunter Biden, which Chairman James Comer said would be a “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”

But as my colleague Andrew Feinberg reported, that hearing also devolved, with Representative Byron Donalds asking about why Twitter entertained requests from the Biden campaign to remove non-consensual nude photos of the president’s son. Representative Clay Higgins literally threatened to arrest some of the witnesses who worked at Twitter for supposedly interfering with the 2020 election.

Much of the rhetoric Republicans used at these hearings has been circulating in conservative media and Mr Musks’s newly right-wing friendly Twitter. Conservative Republicans at this point have convinced themselves that the general public is just as extremely online as they are.

And that leads us to the central issue for the new Republican Congress. It exists largely within a right-wing echo chamber, bolstered by conservative media. This creates a feedback loop. While House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans likely would rather hammer Joe Biden over China, inflation and a litany of other issues, the conservative members of the GOP are running the show.

But it’s unclear whether the GOP’s most boisterous grievances will actually resonate with the general public. The public might care about the president’s son trading off his family’s name. But screaming “help, help, I’m being repressed,” and crying about conservative persecution on social media sites might fall flat. Furthermore, Republicans run the risk of blowback if they get too into the extremely online weeds.