The disturbing origins of the Republican House weaponization committee in Trump-land.

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A longer version of this post originally appeared on “Can We Still Govern?” Substack.

The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government began its business last week with an opening hearing replaying old grievances about how Donald Trump has been mistreated. It’s too old-fashioned to hear that the star witness is an FBI whistleblower who turned out to have left the government in the last century.

What’s more interesting than the hearing is the way in which the idea of ​​”arming” itself arose and became, well, weaponized.

The idea of ​​weaponization is not new. You can find the term in past Fox News coverage, for example, including in 2017.

Of course, “weapon” implies a martial aspect. It is akin to the linguistic trickery of calling the Biden administration the “Biden Regime” to evoke an illiberal approach to governance. It carries the whiff of a rogue state implementing Stasi-like operations to suppress dissent. “Federal agencies have a long and sordid history of illegally targeting American citizens to gain political advantage,” wrote the Center for Renewing America in a recent example. “Government agencies such as (but not limited to) the FBI, DHS, and DOJ actively work to silence and suppress citizens who subscribe to ideas that differ from the regimes.”

You’ve probably never heard of the Center for Renewing America, but it offers valuable insight into both the origins and meaning of the weaponization trope.

The Center for Renewing America is a Trump-aligned think tank. As far as I can tell, the center promoted the idea of ​​an armaments committee in the form it has taken today before anyone else. Last October, introducing the idea as a “Church-style” committee, the center said: “We call on Members of Congress to assemble a stand-alone committee with broad investigative powers focused on vigilante and armed agencies and personnel within the federal government.” GOP hardliners who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid used similar terminology when they successfully requested it, in a Dec. 8 letter , that McCarthy: “Form a ‘Church Commission’-Style Committee to Target Weaponized Government.”

The Center for Renewing America is led by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and the former head of Trump’s budget office. Not only does Vought help popularize the “weapon” trope (he’s been using this language since 2021), but he also embodies its purpose and hypocrisy.

Vought was an extreme partisan who, when given the chance to govern, destroyed the institutions of government. He armed the government in the worst possible way while in power:

• As head of the Office of Management and Budget, Vought pushed through the Schedule F executive order that would have made it possible to fire career employees for political reasons.

• Revealed it was OK to withhold aid to Ukraine even though his career OMB lawyers warned him it was illegal.

• Weeks after Trump clearly lost the election, Vought blocked race officials from cooperating with the Biden transition at a crucial moment during the pandemic.

So that’s Vought when working in the government.

Once out of office, Vought referred to legitimate uses of government power as “snooping,” such as when the FBI, under a court order, searched the home of a key player in Trump’s efforts to subvert the election . Vought is now building an “army” of far-right ideologues with a “biblical worldview” to control federal agencies when a Republican administration returns to power. Vought told Axios: “We are deliberately bringing in the toughest and bravest fighters with the knowledge and credibility to crush the deep state.”

Therefore, the “weapon” trope originates from the far right of American politics. It serves the conspiratorial and anti-statist element of the Republican Party in many ways.

On a prosaic level of politics, an oversight committee generates headlines that damage your political opponents and show your base that you take their concerns seriously. The formalization of troop arming does this in a way that gives Republicans an opportunity to mainline conspiracy theories.

“Weaponization” also serves to reinforce a narrative of victimhood that is the hallmark of dangerous populist movements, reinforcing the idea that the deep state seeks to steal not just your elections, but your entire means. of living.

Accusations of weaponization largely help to “refrigerate”—that is, to give policy decision makers reason to pause whether to take action against legitimate targets. For example, during the Obama administration, the IRS targeted political groups that claimed a tax deduction under the pretense that they were “social welfare” groups that were not actively involved in politics. It targeted both conservatives and liberals, but the anger was on the conservative side. IRS budgets have been cut. As a result, the agency has largely given up on policing tax law violations by political activists, to the point that seemingly obvious wrongdoings go unpunished.

Policymakers will find that if they take regulatory, investigative, or police action that interferes with conservative stakeholders, they will be accused of weaponization. Hearings and subpoenas will follow, like those now facing Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona over investigations into harassment of school officials that Republicans describe as a violation of free speech. speech

Arming troops also helps choose to ignore the abuses of government power, especially by Republicans, that have fueled America’s democratic decline. Supporters focus on the alleged misdeeds of their enemies, while the media gets into a perpetual cycle of whataboutism if they accurately portray one side as more culpable than the other for abuses.

Discrediting government also gives Republicans a populist logic to discredit those within it they distrust, such as the career bureaucracy, and justifies insistence on loyalty to narrow partisan values ​​as the primary governing value.

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This, in the end, is the price of arming troops: To save the government, we must burn it down, and rebuild it from the ashes. Illustrating these anti-statist tactics, Russ Vought released a budget blueprint for the new GOP House to follow. It relies on culture-war tropes as a way to deconstruct most states. While mentioning “wake” 77 times, and “weaponize(d)” 42 times, it calls for massive cuts to federal discretionary programs: $9 trillion over a decade.

Vought’s budget is also blatantly pro-gun. While calling for cuts to parts of the FBI that track extremist groups, it advocates a $618 million increase for FBI investigations of progressives: “to prevent the increasing social destruction caused by progressive state policies and local levels that defund the police, refuse to prosecute criminals, and release violent criminals into communities.”

Vought reflects the emerging view on the far right that the era of small-government conservatism is over: Instead, hard-right populists feel they must actively control government to pursue their goals. This helps explain the right-wing cult of Victor Orbán in Hungary, and serves as the basis for DeSantis’ rise in the Republican Party. John Daniel Davidson wrote an essay in the Federalist summarizing this view, titled “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives”:

To stop Big Tech, for example, would require using antitrust powers to break up Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. To prevent universities from spreading poisonous ideologies would require state legislatures to kill them with public funds. To stop family disintegration may require a return to no-fault divorce, accompanied by substantial aid for families with young children. Conservatives need not be ashamed of making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It’s time to clear our minds.

In other contexts, the exercise of government power would mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It would not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation in the abortion regime, agreeing to “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be cut off with impunity.

All of this is an awful lot like arming the government, with no concerns about individual rights.

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