Coming soon to a hearing near you: The Clinton Rules II: Jason's Revenge.

There are few members of Congress so anxious for the spotlight of an investigative hearing than Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah. The man makes Darrell Issa, whom he replaced as chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, look like Deputy Dawg. Anyway, Dave Weigel of The Washington Post ran down Chaffetz at an event in Utah and Chaffetz was more than happy to clue Weigel and the nation in on what's going to be going down over the next four to eight years.

Suffice it to say, he won't be exploring bipartisan solutions to the country's most pressing issues.

"It's a target-rich environment," the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City's suburbs. "Even before we get to Day One, we've got two years' worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain't good."

In 2014, Chaffetz was sent back to the House by 130,717 souls in Utah. But he is announcing his intention to cripple from the start a president who will be elected by north of 60 million of his fellow citizens. This isn't governing. It's more closely akin to extortion. And Chaffetz isn't alone.

"The rigorous oversight conducted by House Republicans has already brought to light troubling developments in the [Hillary] Clinton email scandal," the office of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement to The Washington Post. "The speaker supports [Oversight's] investigative efforts following where the evidence leads, especially where it shows the need for changes in the law." And the Oversight Committee may not be the only House panel ready for partisan battle. While the Select Committee on Benghazi appears to have finished its work, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a committee member who says Clinton might have perjured herself on questions about her email, said recently that he wants the committee to continue.

They aren't going to change. They're going to shuffle Donald Trump off the stage, blame him for himself, and then go right back to the serious work of seriously delegitimizing another Democratic president. The Republican party is as committed to subverting the will of the people as it ever was. What Chaffetz does is give the lie preemptively to any of the hogwash we're going to hear about the GOP learning a damn thing from the experiment in terror that it loosed upon the nation over the last two years.

In terms of their dedication to the common good, and to the good of the nation, the only difference between Donald Trump and the Republicans in the Congress is that Trump has funnier hair.

Chaffetz also suggested that coming Clinton hearings would touch on issues that had not been vetted. He had sent the committee's investigators a weekend article from the Wall Street Journal that asked whether Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) had slanted the FBI's probe of Clinton by helping outside groups put $467,500 into the campaign of Virginia senate candidate Jill McCabe, whose husband, Andrew, later became deputy director of the FBI. "It seems like an obscene amount of money for a losing race," Chaffetz said. "The ties between the governor and the Clintons are well-known. He raises money for a lot of people, but why so much for this one person?" In addition, Chaffetz previously said in an interview with CNN, an FBI agent's suggestion that Kennedy had tried to get Clinton's emails declassified deserved a hard look. "I honestly don't believe they act in the best interests of our country," he said of the State Department. Future Oversight investigations, he said, might depend on whether Clinton tries to put people ensnared by previous probes into her administration. "It depends on who stays and who goes," Chaffetz said. "If Hillary Clinton brings in the same gang — Loretta Lynch, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan — she has her cast of characters. If they put on the same play, she's not going to get good reviews from the critics. Every single time we turn around, this puzzle gets more complicated with more pieces to it. That story about the $12 million from Morocco to the Clinton Foundation? You could take any one of these stories and have a year's worth of investigations."

He is telling you, in advance, that he intends to break the next government. There used to be a phrase for that. If this were some small tinpot country, Jason Chaffetz would be seizing the radio station and putting more braid on his hat.

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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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