New House majority using its power to stoke paranoia

WASHINGTON >> A CNN poll last week found that about threequarters of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, think House Republican leaders aren't paying enough attention to the country's most pressing problems.

So this week, GOP leaders set out to rectify the situation. They approved a resolution condemning the Russian Revolution. Of 1917.

But before you call Bolshevik on Republican leaders for being 106 years out of date, I should note, in fairness, that their resolution also took issue with more recent events: Joseph Stalin's Ukrainian famine, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot's “killing fields.”

For those who haven't kept up with current affairs, those events happened, respectively, in 1932-1933, 1958-1960 and 1975-1979. Still awaiting legislative action by the new House majority: a condemnation of Genghis Khan's Siege of Merv in 1221 and the Roman Sack of Carthage during the Third Punic War.

The Republicans' late hit on 20th-century atrocities served a 21st-century partisan aim — specifically, the insinuation that Democrats are trying to import the “horrors of socialism” to the United States. “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States,” the resolution concluded.

It was some good, old-fashioned red-baiting, in the year 2023.

“Socialism is the greatest threat to our economy and freedom and must be defeated,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tex.) warned the House on Thursday, calling the fictional menace “alarming and scary.”

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) joined the caterwauling, saying the Biden administration had seized “control of the means of production” from private industries. “God have mercy on our country!”

And Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) felt qualified after one month in office to declare that the Democratic Party “has been taken over by a radical socialist ideology.”

Most Democrats went along with the resolution — it's not a good look to be on the same side of a vote as Pol Pot — but not before they had some fun with the red-scare revivalism.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) pointed out that the Paycheck Protection Program might qualify as socialism to Republicans, then asked consent to insert into the record the names of all Republican lawmakers who requested PPP loans and forgiveness.

The attempt to draw an unbroken line from Uncle Joe Stalin to Sleepy Joe Biden was downright silly, but it served a deadly serious purpose. It is part of a broader effort by Republicans that encourages Americans to see enemies everywhere within their government.

This week alone, the new majority used its powers in committee rooms and on the House floor to undermine trust in government on various fronts:

• Falsely claiming that lazy bureaucrats are refusing to go to work, denying Americans their tax refunds, passports and benefits.

• Falsely insinuating that the government is forcing Americans to take coronavirus vaccines that are both deadly and useless.

• Falsely asserting that the Biden administration is in effect killing Americans by encouraging fentanyl smugglers to enter the country across “open borders.”

Bureaucrats are cheating you. The vaccine is killing you. Immigrants are drugging your children. Muslims endanger you. And the bloodthirsty socialists are destroying your way of life. The new majority is using the levers of power to stoke paranoia.