On Wednesday afternoon, after two years spent toiling away in the minority, unable to conduct meaningful oversight of a West Wing besieged by scandals of its own creation, House Democrats launched their own wide-ranging investigation into the alleged criminality of President Trump and several dozen of his associates. On Wednesday evening, Fox News reacted to this exercise of legislative power in exactly the measured, well-reasoned manner you'd expect: by warning that the country stands on the precipice of full-blown McCarthyism, which shadowy figures will exploit to usher in our socialist future.

"McCarthyist" is the kind of third-rail charge in American politics that has become so loaded that its actual meaning was long ago eclipsed by its incendiary value. So, a brief history lesson: The term refers to a post–World War II practice pioneered by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who dragged government employees, entertainers, and academics into Senate hearings at the height of anti-Soviet hysteria and accused them, often backed by only the flimsiest bits of evidence, of being communist sympathizers. Hundreds of people went to jail; thousands of people lost their jobs; God knows how many were added to "blacklists" and couldn't find work again. A derivative movement, the so-called "lavender scare," focused on rooting out thousands of gays and lesbians from the federal workforce on the grounds that they posed an analogous threat to American values.

It was a shameful and repulsive period in this country's history—provoking emotions that politicians and pundits alike have exploited since then by deploying spurious retorts of "McCarthyism" in response to allegations of any misconduct. But the wholesale transformation of the term, aided by right-wing media's purposeful conflation of "communism" and "socialism," is notable for its sheer absurdity in this context: To Sean Hannity, something that once described cynical fearmongering about left-wing collectivists by powerful politicians has come to mean cynical fearmongering about powerful politicians by left-wing collectivists.

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Over on Fox Business, spluttering Hannity knockoff Lou Dobbs continued the network's cheerleading efforts, nodding along as Tom Fitton, who serves as president of the right-wing activist group Judicial Watch, blasted Democrats for having "no facts or evidence of a crime warranting impeachment" and yet "launch[ing] an investigation anyway." This process, he groused, is "the exact reverse order of the way our system is supposed to work." Dobbs and his guest apparently believe that in order for a probe of alleged misconduct to be legitimate, accusers must have "facts or evidence" of misconduct in hand before they begin to look for "facts or evidence." Dobbs and his guest could also use a refresher on what "investigation" means.

These gripes are different from those that typically appear on Fox News's programming, because they are not about substance—about any of Robert Mueller's individual findings, for example, or the particulars of Jerry Nadler's document requests, or even the general notion that Donald Trump may have done something wrong at some point in his life. Instead, the Republican Party and its de facto propaganda network have pivoted to process, arguing that the constitutionally enshrined concept of congressional oversight is fatally flawed—and that the president should not be subject to it any further.

As demonstrated by its endless interest in theatrical Benghazi hearings and Hillary Clinton's emails, the GOP is not fundamentally opposed to imposing legislative checks on the executive branch. The conundrum its members face, though, is that the House's new Democratic majority is investigating matters that are the subject of existing law enforcement inquires, which have led to multiple convictions of high-profile Trump affiliates and implicated the president himself in at least one felony. An affair Republicans have been able to dismiss as a baseless, partisan "witch hunt" has yielded a ton of actual criminals, which is why they are now trafficking in this sort of desperate silliness. Attacking something as basic as the existence of investigative and adjudication processes is bad. But for Republicans, standing by as these processes expose behavior they spent two years ignoring would be far worse.