Jason Chaffetz, Grandstanding Charlatan: What You Need To Know About The GOP’s Shameless Up-and-comer

The news that Utah con­gress­man Jason Chaffetz has decid­ed to throw his hat into the ring for speak­er shouldn’t have sur­prised the denizens of the Beltway as much as it did. After all, it had been Chaffetz week on Capitol Hill. If you had checked in on pol­i­tics for the first time sev­er­al months, you’d have thought Chaffetz was the ris­ing super­star in Republican pol­i­tics. He was every­where. At the begin­ning of last week, it looked as though the he couldn’t win for los­ing. As the chair­man of the House Oversight and Government Reform com­mit­tee, he presided over an inter­ro­ga­tion of the pres­i­dent of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, in a per­for­mance that was both bul­ly­ing and inef­fec­tu­al — which may be the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds. Progressives were out­raged at Chaffetz’s aggres­sive ques­tion­ing of Richards and inter­rupt­ing her before she could answer, while con­ser­v­a­tives were angry that he nonethe­less failed to land any punches.

If you’re won­der­ing why Boehner was days away from get­ting canned, today’s non­sense is why. Case study in inep­ti­tude of fail­ure theater.

Can you imag­ine if this band of incom­pe­tent morons had been in charge of pros­e­cut­ing the Nuremberg tri­als? My good­ness what a farce.

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 29, 2015

It’s unknown what they expect­ed, but pre­sum­ably they had hoped to some­how van­quish Planned Parenthood with one put-away shot that failed to mate­ri­al­ize. At the end of the hear­ings, with Richards hav­ing clear­ly pre­vailed, Chaffetz looked to be the week’s GOP goat. (Well, assum­ing one of the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates didn’t say any­thing dumb.)

But as luck would have it, just as Chaffetz’s rep­u­ta­tion looked to be seri­ous­ly frayed, his star rose once again when the Washington Post report­ed that the direc­tor of the Secret Service had want­ed to release per­son­al infor­ma­tion on Chaffetz in retal­i­a­tion for his con­tentious over­sight of the agency in the wake of the var­i­ous tabloid scan­dals that have plagued it in recent years. Needless to say, civ­il lib­er­tar­i­ans and elect­ed offi­cials on both sides of the aisle were appalled by such an abuse of pow­er and Chaffetz was back on TV, this time as the vic­tim of gov­ern­ment abuse, instead of as the abuser.

And then came pre­sump­tive Speaker, Kevin “Loose Lips Sink Ships” McCarthy, with his now-infa­mous admis­sion that the Select Committee on Benghazi was a polit­i­cal enter­prise which was being used to dam­age Hillary Clinton. (As he said to Jake Tapper on CNN: “Have the select com­mit­tee get all the infor­ma­tion, all the hear­ings, so the pub­lic can see that. You win the argu­ment to win the vote.“)

It was already obvi­ous that the select com­mit­tee was mis­us­ing its author­i­ty since there had already been eight ear­li­er inves­ti­ga­tions which had thor­ough­ly exam­ined the facts and issued numer­ous reports, but McCarthy’s admis­sion pulled back the very thin veil of legit­i­ma­cy and exposed the Republicans to charges of malfea­sance. But among the first to rush to the cam­eras was none oth­er than Jason Chaffetz, the man who had just hours before been just­ly rail­ing against the Secret Service ille­gal­ly using its author­i­ty to dam­age his rep­u­ta­tion, defend­ing the Benghazi com­mit­tee for doing the same thing and crit­i­ciz­ing his friend Kevin McCarthy for acci­den­tal­ly speak­ing the truth.

Everywhere you turned, it seemed Jason Chaffetz was on tele­vi­sion, so much so that if you didn’t know bet­ter you might think he was run­ning for speak­er him­self. Lo and behold, by the week­end, he was. A week that start­ed off with him brow-beat­ing the direc­tor of Planned Parenthood end­ed with him on “Fox News Sunday”and explain­ing to Politico that his ratio­nale for run­ning for Speaker was his supe­ri­or com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. (And truth­ful­ly, com­pared to McCarthy, he’s Winston Churchill.)

Chaffetz is a well-known fig­ure on Capitol Hill but the aver­age mem­ber of the pub­lic, if they know him at all, prob­a­bly remem­bers him main­ly as the guy who sleeps on a cot in his office rather than spring for a room some­where. But he’s been marked for star­dom since he was a col­lege foot­ball star: In the words of Dave Weigel in this 2010 arti­cle, “when [Chaffetz] start­ed to make it in pol­i­tics, his team­mates would recall how, after suc­cess­ful kicks, he would remove his hel­met to reveal a per­fect head of hair for the TV cameras.”

The son of a man once mar­ried to Kitty Dukakis, wife of 1988 Democratic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Michael, Chaffetz start­ed off as a Jewish Democrat, then con­vert­ed to Mormonism dur­ing his last year of col­lege in Utah — and Republicanism when for­mer President Ronald Reagan was hired as a moti­va­tion­al speak­er for Nu Skin, the “mul­ti-lev­el mar­ket­ing” com­pa­ny (think Amway) which employed Chaffetz for a decade before he entered pol­i­tics. He worked as chief of staff for the famous­ly mod­er­ate Gov. Jon Huntsman and then beat the very con­ser­v­a­tive Representative Chris Cannon by run­ning against him from the right in the 2010 Tea Party elec­toral blood­bath. On Election Night, Cannon said, “the extrem­ists who don’t want to win elec­tions have tak­en over the par­ty. We don’t want that to hap­pen in Utah. Politics is way too impor­tant to leave to the boors.” See sto­ry here :Jason Chaffetz, grand­stand­ing char­la­tan: What you need to know about the GOP’s shame­less up-and-comer