This GOP congressman just set the gold standard for hypocrisy on Afghanistan
Rep. Andy Biggs was among the first to demand President Joe Biden's resignation over his handling of American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. That was two days before suicide bombings took the lives of 13 U.S. Marines in Kabul.
Biggs, R-AZ, repeated that absurd call today as part of a daily torrent of Tweets about Biden and Afghanistan this week. But Biggs has garnered a special distinction: He ranks at the top of the class of the classless for spewing hypocrisy on Afghanistan.
With no shame, Biggs has conveniently forgotten that he had publicly urged Biden to rush these very troops out by May -- more than three months earlier than Biden acted. That, of course, was the deadline set by Donald Trump as part of his weak negotiations with the Taliban.
Mind you, Biggs wasn't like hundreds of other enablers in Congress to go along silently with Trump's disjointed foreign policy. He made a press release out of a letter he wrote on February 22 to Biden:
"I respectfully urge you to continue to remove United States servicemembers from Afghanistan in the coming weeks, with the goal of ensuring all our brave men and women in uniform return from the theater before May.
"The war in Afghanistan has already lasted nearly two decades. Over the course of that conflict, we have lost thousands of our brave warriors and spent trillions of dollars. Staying in Afghanistan any longer will only continue to place the lives of more servicemembers at risk.
"Furthermore, a continued United States presence in the region is unlikely to lessen the threat of terrorism; in fact, it is more likely to heighten the threat. As the (Afghanistan) Study Group itself concedes, "the Taliban have signaled publicly that if all international forces are not withdrawn by May 2021…they will resume their 'jihad' against the foreign presence and will withdraw from the peace process."
"Let us not delude ourselves: On May 1, Afghanistan will not look like a beacon of democracy and prosperity. Far from it. But at least it will be on a better potential path. Over this past year especially, we have helped the people of Afghanistan to imagine a brighter future. Now the Afghanis need to be responsible for their own destiny going forward."
Well, that was prescient. Does anyone now believe the Afghan military would have risen as a mighty fighting force before May to smite the Taliban? If anything, the chaotic withdrawal would have been far more tragic if the U.S. had three fewer months to pull it off.
Even the conservative Washington Examiner was appalled, as this August 16 headline pronounced: "These prominent Republicans loved Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal plan. Until they didn't." Biggs' support for Trump's May 1 deadline was noted by the newspaper, as was his position as "chairman of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus."
But that's just the tip of the iceberg for Biggs. His 180-degree turn on the withdrawal process was nothing next to the astonishing flip he made over the fate of Afghan refugees endangered by the Taliban takeover of their country.
Interviewed June 17 by Fox News, Biggs said the following of those Afghans:
"We can't leave these folks behind. They helped us when we were over there in that country. We needed them desperately. They answered the call. In my opinion it would be inhumane to leave them behind subject to some brutal attacks and possible death by one of the bad guys. We need to bring home. We need to bring them here to the United States of America, the nation they have been helping. These people were effectively part of our military, and it would not be good for the United States of America to leave these folks behind."
Five weeks later, to the day -- on July 22 -- Biggs would become one of just 16 members of Congress to vote against relaxing visa requirements for the same Afghan refugees. So much for "bringing them home to the nation they have been helping."
Congress passed the "The Averting Loss of Life and Injury by Expediting SIVs (ALLIES) Act" by an overwhelming vote of 407-to-16. It's purpose: "(to increase) the number of special immigrant visas available to qualified Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. government or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) missions in Afghanistan.'
But Biggs suddenly was fine with "leaving those folks behind." He cast his "no" vote in contrast to 192 of his fellow House Republicans who supported the measure.
Biggs joined the likes of fellow House Islamophobes Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks in rejecting the help he had publicly advocated. Even by the low standards of American politics circa 2021, it was a spectacular contradiction of his own words.
But give Biggs this much, though: At least he doesn't pretend to care.
Recalculating Nancy Pelosi’s big win
The preliminary win to advance Joe Biden's huge social services spending bill is being depicted as a parliamentary victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a small group of would-be Democratic spoilers. A day or more later, what looks more the case are two things:
It's our American obsession with winning rather than focusing on the basics.
As The New York Times summarized, "For now, the deal that Ms. Pelosi struck amounted to a precarious détente for Democrats that did nothing to resolve tensions between the moderate and liberal flanks or end the jockeying for political leverage."
It's an important distinction because there is no bill yet for infrastructure spending—small, medium, or huge—in place yet, and, other than general support for the substance over the timing of votes, there are lots of ways that this discussion about investing in our next 10 years still can go south.
As it stands, this contested vote essentially only lays the groundwork for Democrats to force through both a $1 trillion bill to fix roads, bridges, airports and a lot of rural broadband wiring and the three-times larger bill to address spending on "human infrastructure" that includes an array of improvements to universal pre-K education, health and prescription drug access and pricing, expanded Medicare coverage, child-care tax write-offs, paid leave and tax increases for the wealthy and corporations.
It's an important step, of course, but what we should remember is that Pelosi was forced to deal with a handful of "moderates" who basically don't support the full package.
What Pelosi Did
In case you were living your life and managed to avoid worrying about Congress, the group of nine moderates wanted an immediate vote on the already Senate-passed bipartisan hard infrastructure bill. Pelosi wanted to twin the two spending packages. What happed was, according to a variety of press reports and congressional statements, was extended legislative negotiation.
Pelosi's particular way out was to link all the spending under a singular "rule" vote that would set a Sept. 27 deadline for a vote on the roads bill, setting up the possibility for House committees to vet the social services programs and price them for a simultaneous vote. She won the day, but, obviously, there's not a lot of time to assess both the actual cost of these sprawling programs and to ensure the politics for passage.
Basically, Democrats want to use the so-called "budget reconciliation" rules to cram all the spending together in bills that can be passed by as little as a single-vote majority – something that is a real prospect in the Senate. In the House, there was an eight-vote majority for this measure, which is likely the maximum it can achieve in an up-and-down vote for final approval.
Politico and others have attempted to revisit all the back-and-forth conversations and late-night haggling between Pelosi and her closest minions and the group of nine, headed by Rep. Jeff Gottheimer (D-NY). It was a serious enough effort to force delay, and to put the outcome in doubt.
To summarize, it turns out that Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Mad.) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) were able to separate and exploit individual concerns among the nine and to persuade them that they all need to pull in a single direction. We'll never know if there were individual promises.
Afterward, Pelosi praised the rebel group for its "enthusiasm" while announcing her commitment to pass the infrastructure bill it had opposed.
Topping off the 220-212 vote on the eventual spending bill was approval for a voting rights measure that the House passed soon after.
Our Focus
This House showdown reminds us of the power of just a handful of people to hold up approval of legislation – or court decisions, or even who's giving advice within the White House.
We keep thinking that we go to the polls every two or four years with the idea of setting an understandable direction for our democracy. But then we keep tripping up over those one- or two- or even nine-vote groups that decide that they are smarter than the rest of us.
We will go through this same discussion over what constitutes a fitting social services safety net for America when this big Biden spending package comes back to the Senate, and we must depend on the peculiar waverings of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz.
We think we're voting for an agenda when we cast ballots for Biden or Donald Trump only to re-discover daily that there always is a single vote over in the corner of the House or Senate that insists on standing in the way of popular support, whether the issue is more gun control, abortion, environmental rules, or economic issues.
It's bad enough that we have gridlock resulting from near-equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. It seems worse when one side or the other can't line up its own folks – or free them from party commitments to specific legislative agendas. We expect that democracy is messy, but not daily.