Over the course of the last year, Donald 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 I explained last month, short of defunding special counsel Jack Smith’s office, Congress can’t simply make ongoing criminal cases disappear at will.
It’s against this backdrop that Republican Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is leading a new push — to defund special counsel Jack Smith’s office. Roll Call reported on the Georgia Republican’s clash with House Speaker Mike Johnson, and what she wants in exchange for letting him keep the gavel.
… Greene’s top priority, she said, was a promise to “defund” the office of special counsel John L. “Jack” Smith, who is pursuing the prosecution of former President Donald Trump on charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election and retaining classified documents.
This dovetails with related legislation from Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida that would have the effect of stripping funding from the prosecutor’s office.
Johnson, not surprisingly, hasn’t committed to defunding anything, though the Louisiana Republican appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference yesterday, dismissed the overwhelming evidence prosecutors have assembled against Trump, and insisted that Congress would “address” the former president’s prosecutions “in every possible” way.
Johnson: President Trump has done nothing wrong… it has to stop and you’re going to see the Congress address this in every possible way because we need accountability. All these cases need to be dropped because they are a threat to our entire system pic.twitter.com/Vvg6pQRU52
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 7, 2024
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was last summer when more than a few GOP lawmakers sounded quite serious about using “the power of the purse” to effectively shut down Trump’s federal prosecutions. It was a move that garnered predictable support from the former president himself.
Now, evidently, the issue has made a comeback.
In a way, I suppose there’s something oddly refreshing about this approach: We’ve grown increasingly accustomed to seeing Republicans endorse defunding federal law enforcement in general. Some in the party, however, are prepared to narrow their focus: They don’t want to defund all of federal law enforcement, just one small part of it.
So, how concerned should Smith and his team be? Will federal prosecutors and investigators soon be asked to work for free? By all appearances, the answers are “not very” and “probably not.” Simply as a matter of procedure, such a move would need to pass the Democratic-led Senate and be signed into law by President Joe Biden, and it’s probably safe to say that they’d have some concerns about defunding Smith’s office. What’s more, it’s an open question as to whether such a measure could even pass the House: The GOP’s majority is tiny, and some Republican incumbents from competitive districts would likely be reluctant to link arms with their radical colleagues on such a gambit, especially knowing it would be ignored in the Senate. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that for some Republicans, this is a serious idea worthy of their time and consideration. Confronted with compelling evidence of alleged felonies, these GOP members believe the proper response is to not only intervene in ongoing criminal cases, but also to use the levers of power to defund prosecutors. We continue to learn quite a bit about the contemporary Republican Party’s approach to the rule of law, and none of it’s good.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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