In a weird twist, Mark Meadows is now being taken down by his own words

For the uninitiated, a significant difference between the House and Senate is the structure of how each chamber debates legislation.

Senators, for the most part, can speak for as long as they want, and can do so on any particular subject — even one that has nothing to do with the matter under debate. The “people’s house,” however, operates by strict rules which limit how long a particular measure can be debated, and generally must pass rules for debate on each individual piece of legislation specifying such things the number of amendments that are permissible, restrictions on the sorts of parliamentary tactics that could slow down a bill’s consideration, and how much time each side will have to speak in favor or in opposition to the measure.

But in the House, what’s left unsaid is often as important as what is said.

Today, the matter at hand was a weighty one: whether the House would, for the first time in nearly two centuries, hold one of its own — ex-White House chief of staff and former North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows — in contempt.

Meadows became just the second ex-House member to face a contempt vote by his former colleagues after he, in the words of January 6^th select committee chairman Bennie Thompson, told them to “pound sand” by skipping a deposition last week.

The last time a former member so angered his colleagues, the year was 1832. The member in question was Sam Houston (yes, that Sam Houston), who served as the representative of Tennessee’s seventh district from 1823-1827. Five years after he’d left the House, Houston decided to resolve a dispute with a former colleague, Ohio’s William Stansberry, by beating him with a cane.

Meadows, by contrast, has refused to give evidence in the House’s investigation into an assault on its entire membership — the worst attack on Congress since Major General Robert Ross ordered British troops to set the Capitol ablaze in 1814.

Yet when it came time for the House to debate the rules for debating the resolution finding Meadows in contempt and recommending that be charged with a crime for failing to honor a subpoena from the body in which he once served, Republicans could not be counted on to say a word in his defense.

Instead, the Republican tasked with arguing against approving rules to debate the contempt resolution — Minnesota’s Michelle Fischbach — used the 30 minutes allotted to her to talk about anything but her former colleague’s newfound disdain for the idea that a House committee had the right to demand testimony from those witnesses it deemed relevant to a matter under its jurisdiction.

After reciting a Trumpian rant against her colleagues’ probe into how a mob came to storm their place of work with the aim of murdering the vice president and the Speaker of the House, as well as stopping Congress from performing its duty by certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory, Fischbach used the remainder of her time to spell out a litany of grievances against the Biden administration.

Her talking points would’ve been recognizable in any Fox News personality’s teleprompter, with the “supply chain crisis” and the “Biden border crisis” making prominent appearances in her remarks. At one point, she even said Republicans would use the one procedural tool available to them to attempt to replace the resolution against Meadows with a bill requiring the Biden administration to finish the border wall with Mexico that his predecessor failed to construct.

But not once did she or any other Republican acknowledge what Meadows himself might have spoken about at length, had the debate in question taken place in 2018 rather than 2021.

It fell to Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who managed debate on the measure for the Democratic majority on the House Rules Committee, to state the obvious. But Raskin — who led the push to bring Trump to trial for his second impeachment after he incited the mob that stormed the Capitol nigh a year ago — didn’t even have to come up with his own argument against Meadows’ position. Instead, he borrowed one from a Republican Congressman who had once been the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.

“This level of conduct paired with the failure to even feign an interest in transparency is reprehensible. And whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, this kind of obstruction is wrong,” he said.

The member he was quoting? Mark Meadows.

And the fact that it was a Democrat who had to bring up what Meadows had once said in defense of their institution while Republicans pretended that he’d never said it said more than any of them ever could.