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In recent years, a variety of prominent and powerful Republican officials have become a little too fond of defunding offices and agencies that have bothered them to one degree or another. Some in the GOP, for example, have raised the specter of defunding the FBI. Other congressional Republicans have endorsed the idea of defunding the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives).
More than a few GOP lawmakers have also talked about defunding the Justice Department. And the IRS. And the Department of Homeland Security. A couple of years ago, one conservative congressman even suggested defunding the Food and Drug Administration.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene even called for Congress to defund the entire state of New York.
By any fair measure, these efforts are foolish stunts with no credible legislative prospects. But there’s a new, related effort that’s far harder to overlook. The New York Times reported:
Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday announced a “three-pronged approach” for how Republicans on Capitol Hill would push back against the prosecutions of the former president. ... “We’re looking at various approaches to what can be done here,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference, “through the appropriations process, through the legislative process, through bills that will be advancing through our committees and put it on the floor for passage, and also through oversight. All those things will be happening vigorously, because we have to do that because the stakes are too high.”
Just so we’re all clear, the Louisiana Republican’s “three-pronged approach” is, for all intents and purposes, the House GOP’s retaliatory move. A jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies; the former president expects his congressional allies to do something in response; and Johnson, instead of defending his own country’s justice system and acknowledging the evidence of Trump’s criminal wrongdoing, has settled on a new plan to “push back against the prosecutions.”
It’s the prong related to “the appropriations process,” however, that’s of particular interest.
We need not wonder what kind of spending cuts House Republicans have in mind because House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has already fleshed them out in writing. Specifically, the right-wing Ohio congressman wants to scrap funding for the FBI’s new headquarters, funding for special counsel Jack Smith’s office, and federal grants to prosecutors’ offices trying to hold Trump accountable.
To be sure, there’s literally no evidence of any of these agencies doing anything wrong. Jordan and his GOP colleagues want to punish them anyway by defunding these law enforcement offices.
As his legal crises have intensified, Trump has been unsubtle in begging congressional Republicans to somehow intervene in his criminal trials and rescue him from possible accountability. There’s no shortage of problems with the former president’s appeals, starting with the obvious fact that lawmakers’ options are severely limited. As regular readers know, short of defunding prosecutors, Congress can’t simply make ongoing criminal cases disappear at will.
It was against this backdrop that fringe members such as Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed the GOP conference to pursue just such a course. The tactic has now worked its way from the fringe to the speaker’s office.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.