Tuesday was quite a day in the United States House of Representatives, which has been under new management since the beginning of the year. Attorney General William Barr appeared before the House Appropriations Committee and made it quite clear that he is the Swiss Army Knife of political tools. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing, purportedly about white-nationalist extremism, that was partly transformed by the Republican members of that committee into an unusually stupid CPAC breakout session.

First up was Barr, who gave a master class in how to be a career apparatchik. It was the first crack that the Congress has had at him since Barr's tricked-up summation of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Barr said that he planned to release some facsimile of the Mueller report "within the week." (Pro Tip: Stay by your TV at about 4:30 Friday afternoon.) But, at the same time, he said flatly that he doesn't intend to give the House Judiciary Committee a full and unredacted copy of that same report. And then he decided that these uppity people had wasted enough of his time on this.

"I’ve said what I’m going to say about the report today. I’ve issued three letters about it, and I was willing to discuss the historic information of how the report came to me and my decision on Sunday, but I’ve already laid out the process that is going forward to release these reports hopefully in a week, and I’m not going to say anything more about it."

Of course, this was not entirely unexpected. Barr was hired to slow-walk the Mueller report.

Barr testifies, gleefully. Tom Williams Getty Images

But it was in other areas, most of them more appropriate to the mandate of an appropriations committee, that Barr proved himself to be a house man of the highest rank. For example, Congressman Matthew Cartwright, Democrat of Pennsylvania, challenged Barr on the Justice Department's recent decision not to defend the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit aimed at its complete repeal.

CARTWRIGHT: Let me be the one to inform you that should the law be struck down, millions of people who get their coverage through the ACA marketplace would lose their coverage, and tens of millions more would see their premiums skyrocket. In addition if you are successful, 12 million people nationally and 750,000 in my home state of Pennsylvania who have coverage under the Medicaid expansion would also likely lose that coverage. Am I correct in that, sir?

BARR: I do think it’s likely we’re going to prevail.

CARTWRIGHT: If you prevail — well, you’re devoting scarce resources of your department to that effort, are you not Attorney General?

BARR: We’re in litigation — we have to take a position — we take position in litigation...

CARTWRIGHT: The answer is yes. You are trying to get it invalidated and if you succeed, that many people will lose their coverage nationally from Medicaid, and 750,000 from Pennsylvania alone, right?

BARR: I’m just saying, if you think it’s such an outrageous position, you have nothing to worry about. Let the courts do their job.

Is that more arrogant, or is it more blithe to human suffering? You make the call. William Barr earned his pay today.

Over at the House Judiciary Committee, we had a remarkable demonstration that the Republican Party will do almost anything to camouflage the fact that white supremacy is a critical part of its essential base. As is customary, the Republican members of the committee—which includes Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz—were allowed to pick their own witnesses. They chose Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, and Candace Owens, a know-nothing flibbertigibbet who has gained a certain amount of wingnut cred over the past several years, basically through the threadbare old argument that it is Democrats who are The Real Racists.

Candace Owens swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Hitler. Zach Gibson Getty Images

Their purpose was to deflect the hearing into attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar and into a stream of Islamophobic scaremongering, and, especially in Owens's case, being the real victims. They did not disappoint. At one point, Klein called Brenton Tarrant, the man who shot up the mosque in New Zealand with white-nationalist shibboleths written all over his firearms, and a guy who specifically cited Owens as an inspiration, a "left-wing ecoterrorist." As for Owens, well, she wasn't going to take the Congress of the United States's specific attack on her right to be stupid lying down.

The hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate-crimes, it’s about fear-mongering, power and control.

Her Dennis-the-Peasant act never has been so fundamentally wacky. She ran through the full syllabus of things she does not know. For example, she stated, flatly, that the Southern Strategy, and its transformational effect on both political parties, was a "myth, which never happened." This is, to borrow a phrase from Willard Romney, moronic. And Owens herself was splattered later when Congressman Ted Lieu played a now-famous soundbite in which Owens said that, "Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great, and make Germany run well, OK, fine." Owens accused Lieu of cutting off her remarks. Her full statement is worse.

The reason she was there at all was because the Republican members of the committee wanted to deflect the hearing from its real purpose. This, of course, comes after the administration* gutted the Department of Homeland Security's domestic-terrorism unit prior to the president*'s choleric decapitation of the entire department. Led by their president*, Republicans don't want to talk about white-supremacist extremism, and they don't want to fight it, either. Makes you wonder.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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