Democratic Rep. Gerry Conolly tried to subpoena Elon Musk yesterday in the House Oversight Committee, and as Rep. Maxwell Frost detailed, Republicans were not there. The Democrats are not a majority but they had a chance to sneak attack a majority into the room along with their ranking member. The Republicans scurried in like rats to save the man who took their jobs by illegal fiat, and the vote narrowly lost 19-20. Someone who didn’t scurry in to vote was Democrat Ro Khanna. To hear him tell it, Khanna would have been a yes if he just had enough time along with all the rats to get in there and vote to subpoena the man leading a coup of the United States government.
To hear reporters on the Hill tell it, is a very different story. Politico reports that “three Democrats familiar with the run-up to the vote who were granted anonymity to describe what ensued said Democrats were given a heads-up about the maneuver to try to catch Republicans by surprise,” and they note that “because of that prior notice and the congressman’s ties to Musk, the three Democrats accused Khanna of making an intentional decision to miss the vote.”
Further detailing how much Khanna knew about this vote is their reporting that “Democrats also announced the motion to all staff and his staff was present on that call — and that the top Democrat on Oversight, Gerry Connolly, told the Democratic Caucus about the plan this morning, two people said.” Khanna’s spokesperson told Politico that no one from their team was present on a call with this announcement, so someone here is clearly lying.
On one side, we have Politico’s reporting and their internal legal processes clearing reports from three Democrats citing a party-wide conference call. On the other, we have Ro Khanna, a man with a long history with Elon Musk who a couple months ago was telling everyone that Elon and DOGE are good-faith operators Democrats should work with. This not the only recent instance of Khanna’s slavish devotion to the most fragile ego that mankind has ever seen, as he said on CNN in October that “I think where the Democrats started to lose Elon was actually personal. We should have celebrated his contributions to electric vehicles, even though he was against unionization and stood up to unions. We should have said, ‘Look, Starlink, great product. That needs to be used.’ We should celebrate the fact that he’s had the first commercial success of private people in space and — and I think a lot of people — instead, we didn’t celebrate it and he felt offended.”
Khanna has long been a meat shield for major capital, as the Daily Kos noted in their 2016 writeup of his race against widely respected civil rights hero Rep. Mike Honda, “Khanna was the #1 Democrat with Wall Street donors as well as #1 overall with “Fat Cat” donors in the entire country.” In that race, Khanna had 130 right-wing donors, and as the Daily Kos noted, “Khanna lost the 2014 race, a race that cost seven times the 2012 election in which Honda and his opponent, Evelyn Li, together raised the same amount over the course of the entire election as Khanna did in the first three months. And within one month of Rep. Honda’s inauguration, Ro Khanna was back to raising money for a rematch.”
Hamilton Nolan interviewed Khanna for Splinter in 2019, pressing him on whether he thinks lefties are skeptical of him because of how much money he gets from Silicon Valley and his pro-billionaire politics (“no”), and even asking him “can you see a day when Silicon Valley’s politics shift much farther to the right, because of the amount of money being generated there?” to which Khanna responded “No, because a lot of them are talking about income inequality, and they tend to believe fundamentally in pluralism.” I wonder if Khanna still believed this after watching Elon do a Nazi salute behind the presidential seal, a moment that crystalizes how consistently Khanna has found himself on the wrong side of his donors’ history.
In December 2020, Ritu Khanna, Ro Khanna’s wife, divested from weapons companies after Sludge revealed that she held as much as $376,000 worth of stock in companies who supposedly do not represent Ro Khanna’s political values. Later disclosures revealed that she did not sell all of them, and the couple purchased more defense contractor stock for a child. Nancy Pelosi is held up as the avatar for Congressional stock trading greatness, but no one makes more trades than Ro Khanna does. If anyone is the epitome of America’s braindead and cynical hustle culture in Congress, it’s Khanna.
Rep. Ro Khanna is fundraising off the failed vote (19-20) he did not show up for to subpoena Elon Musk
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— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 8:44 AM
It is long past time that the Democratic Party identify this man for who has long proven himself to be. It’s always hard to know what to believe in Washington D.C., but it’s clear as day that both the much-maligned Beltway press and feckless Democratic Party have far more credibility than Khanna and there is no reason to believe his word over all of theirs. Everyone screaming at the Democrats to do something must understand that House Democrats almost did, with no help from this fucking doofus. Primary this schlub on to his inevitable Fox News gig ASAP.
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