SUBTRACTING THE INTELLIGENT IS SUPER ON-BRAND FOR MAGA:

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden once cracked to me that the House Intelligence Committee was known around Langley as "the land of broken toys"--a well deserved sobriquet for its long record of partisan bickering.

With the exception perhaps of Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who provided bipartisan leadership of the panel from 2011 to 2015, the committee has been periodically rent by partisan warfare over the past three decades, hamstringing its ability to provide sober, discreet oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. In contrast, its Senate counterpart is widely considered a more contemplative overseer of the spy agencies under the leadership of Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Rogers was succeeded in 2015 by MAGA Republican Devin Nunes, a leading adherent of Trumpian "deep state" conspiracy theories, who in turn was succeeded by Democrat Adam Schiff, who not only chaired the panel's highly charged investigation of Team Trump's ties to Russia but was a leading figure in both his impeachments and the Jan. 6 committee. [...]

After Nunes' departure to run Trump's TRUTH Social media operation in Jan. 2022, however, a manner of bipartisanship re-emerged between Chairman Schiff and the panel's new Republican ranking member, Mike Turner of Ohio. Last month, they guided the FY 2023 Intelligence Authorization Act, part of the National Defense Authorization Act, to congressional approval by a vote of 350 to 80.

Alas, with Kevin McCarthy's hand on the tiller and Turner ensconced as HPSCI's new chair, the committee seems to be tacking back to the status quo ante. One of McCarthy's first moves as speaker was to deny Schiff and fellow Democrat Eric Swalwell seats on the committee (and boot Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs), an obvious retribution for the Democratic majority last year voting to strip Georgia MAGA Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments after she appeared to endorse violence against Democrats. 

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