A Biggs deal over nothing

After some relative unity on the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, Republicans in Congress have returned to form. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Biggs is asking House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to boot fellow Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican Conference. Why? Not for making racist, conspiratorial, or terroristic threats—as several other GOP congresspeople have done this year—but for…serving on the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Um, what?

• — It's true. In a draft letter dated today, Biggs asks McCarthy to consider a change to conference rules that would "immediately" remove members if they accept a committee assignment without a recommendation from the party. Wait, it gets better. "Congresswoman Cheney and Congressman Kinzinger are two spies for the Democrats that we currently invite to the meetings, despite our inability to trust them," Biggs writes. Hoo boy.
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• — Not the first time. Republicans have sought to punish the only two Republicans to vote in favor of forming the committee before. In late July, Biggs tried to exile Cheney and Kinzinger behind closed doors for joining the panel. "We cannot trust these members to sit in our Republican Conference meetings while we plan our defense against the Democrats," Biggs says, revealing that he sees the committee's work to uncover the facts about the insurrection entirely through a political lens.
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• — "The American people deserve answers surrounding Jan. 6, and the non-partisan select committee…is committed to uncovering the full truth and making those facts public," said Maura Gillespie, a Kinzinger spokesperson. "When a member makes repeated calls to remove Reps. Kinzinger and Cheney from the conference, it certainly calls into question their true motives. Especially when that member pushes conspiracy theories to their constituents and outright lies for their own personal gain." Indeed. —The Hill

Milbank: The United States of Texas?

"Texas became a 'majority minority' state more than 15 years ago—and the country as a whole will follow in about two decades. But White voters still dominate the electorate. Latinos are about 40% of the Texas population, but only 20-25% of the electorate. Texas legislators aren't answering to the people but rather to the White, male voters that put the Republicans in power. The new voting law, by suppressing non-White votes, aims to keep White voters dominant. As demographics turn more and more against Republicans in Texas, their antidemocratic actions will only get worse." —Dana Milbank on The Washington Post

Dana Milbank is an author and columnist at The Washington Post.

MORE: Supreme Court declines to block restrictive Texas abortion law —The Wall Street Journal

'Who can impose their will on the other side?'

One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump's supporters to push for overturning the 2020 presidential election results was his former adviser Steve Bannon. "We're on the point of attack," Bannon pledged on his far-right nationalist podcast on Jan. 5. "All hell will break loose tomorrow." When the insurrection failed, Bannon began encouraging his listeners to seize control of the Republican Party from the bottom up, by flooding into the precincts, the lowest rung of the party structure. Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, but collectively, they influence how elections are run—some choose poll workers, others pick members of the boards that oversee elections. Bannon's strategy is working: of GOP leaders in 65 key U.S. counties, 41 report a surge in signups since the campaign began. "It's going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won. We don't have an option," Bannon said in May. "We're going to take this back village by village." —ProPublica

MORE: How GOP election reviews created a new security threat —The New York Times

Accountability in McClain case

A Colorado grand jury yesterday indicted three police officers and two paramedics in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who had been walking home when he was stopped by police, put into a chokehold, and injected with a powerful anesthetic. He passed away six days later, after being taken off life support. Attorney General Phil Weiser, who had been named as a special prosecutor in the case, announced the 32-count indictment almost two years to the day after McClain's death. The five defendants will each face one charge of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, as well as a variety of assault charges. "Our goal is to seek justice for Elijah McClain, for his family and friends, and for our state," Weiser said. —The New York Times

MORE: Billy Binion: Police reform without qualified immunity reform is worthless —Reason

Boot: The GOP's short memory

"[Sen. Josh] Hawley is calling for Biden to resign for implementing Trump's [Afghanistan] policy—as if the hopelessly incompetent Trump could have done it any better. And Hawley is far from alone. Even before the [Kabul airport] suicide bombing, a plethora of Republicans who praised Trump for leaving Afghanistan were demanding that Biden be removed from office for leaving Afghanistan. These are the same people who insisted that two impeachments of Trump for committing 'high crimes and misdemeanors'—which are not in evidence in Afghanistan—were an assault on democracy and a grievous distraction from more urgent priorities." —Max Boot in The Washington Post

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

MORE: Biden pushed Afghanistan president to 'project a different picture' —USA Today

Focus on Afghanistan

Senate Republicans are pressing President Biden to account for how many Americans, green card holders, and special immigrant visa applicants remain in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal earlier this week. Led by Sen. Tom Cotton, a group of 26 Republicans wrote Biden today to request information by next week about who remains in Afghanistan. "Our immediate priority is the safety and well-being of American citizens, permanent residents, and allies who were left behind in Afghanistan," the senators wrote. "We are also concerned by reports that ineligible individuals, including Afghans with ties to terrorist organizations or serious, violent criminals, were evacuated alongside innocent refugee families." Stay tuned. —Politico

• — Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mitt Romney are also calling on the Biden Administration to step up their work to protect Afghan journalists, who need urgent aid to resettle and continue their work. In a bipartisan letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, the senators said the journalists now face new, dire risks under Taliban rule. "There are concerns that given their long history of attacks on journalists, the Taliban will eliminate a free and open media and continue to suppress, imprison, and violently target the press," they wrote. —NPR
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• — "The president is not going to be removed from office." Despite calls from members of his own party to seek Biden's impeachment or to pressure his resignation over the Afghanistan withdrawal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says it's a no-go. "There's a Democratic House, a narrowly Democratic Senate. That's not going to happen," McConnell said when asked if he would support an effort to impeach the president. Instead, he's looking ahead to the midterms. "The report card you get is every two years," he said. "I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box." —The Hill

1. — Far-right praises the Taliban. Since the withdrawal, White supremacist and anti-government extremists back home have expressed admiration online for what the Taliban accomplished. "[They're] framing the activities of the Taliban as a success" and as a model for a potential civil war in the U.S., according to John Cohen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The praise has also been coupled with a wave of anti-refugee sentiment. Together, they mark a worrying development for officials grappling with the threat of violent domestic extremism. —CNN

Collinson: What McCarthy's threat tells us

"[House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy] appears to be signaling that a Republican House would be an extension of Trump's political machine, ready to do his political dirty work ahead of another possible presidential bid in 2024. The threat may also be a preview of a return of the crushing of constitutional norms that characterized Trump's White House. The idea of using power granted by voters to intimidate people or entities who don't share radical political goals not only raises the possibility of abuses of power and the abandoning of rules and accountability necessary for a corruption-free economy. It is the kind of shakedown tactic that would be more expected in an autocracy like Vladimir Putin's Russia than in a supposedly functioning democracy like the United States." —Stephen Collinson on CNN

Stephen Collinson is a CNN political analyst.

Certainly President Biden inherited a mess, essentially Vietnam redux, as we and our allies were propping up a corrupt and ineffective government facing a determined, capable, and ruthless indigenous opposition. And the recent death of 10 civilians due to our drone-strike against ISIS-K was, if anything, another example of why this mission failed.

As far as the competence of our withdrawal, I reserve my opinion, but it seems that we left many Afghans twisting in the wind. I refer readers to this opinion piece: https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/my-nightmare. And as for what prominent members of the GOP and their media toadies are saying, I give no credibility whatsoever to those who attempted to overthrow this democracy and still stand behind the main perpetrator. They all belong in jail. —Barry L., Massachusetts

A quote from Kaiser Wilhelm on Adolf Hitler: "But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians and artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics..."

Does that sound like what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party? —Ron T., Texas

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