House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) revealed this week that she would create a new select committee with subpoena powers that would be tasked with providing oversight on how the Trump administration handled the coronavirus crisis, particularly how it disbursed the trillions of dollars in relief that Congress had approved.
Pelosi’s counterpart on the other side of the aisle, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), said on Friday that the new committee was “redundant” and unnecessary, and he suggested that the move by Pelosi was “politics as usual” during the ongoing public health crisis, Fox News reported.
McCarthy slams Pelosi
The remarks from McCarthy came during an appearance Friday morning on Fox & Friends with host Steve Doocy, and he immediately explained just how duplicative and unnecessary Pelosi’s new committee would be by listing off all of the other existing entities that would already be providing oversight on the coronavirus issue.
“You have the Oversight Committee — that’s all they focus on. But, in the last bill that we just passed — the CARES Act — we created three new oversight entities, right? We created the pandemic oversight that is a setup of inspector generals,” McCarthy said.
“We created a special individual who will be appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate,” he continued. “And then, we actually created a congressional oversight that is appointed by all the leaders from [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer to [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell to Pelosi and myself. This is redundant.”
“What’s most telling is who she appointed here,” McCarthy said. “She didn’t go with the Oversight Committee Chair — her own — she appointed [James] Clyburn. And, remember what Clyburn said, her Majority Whip? He said that this is a time to restructure into their vision: government. This isn’t about oversight. It sounds like pure politics.”
“Really, the speaker should be focused on what we need to deliver to the American public,” McCarthy added. “Let’s take care of the crisis at hand right now. We have five different oversights already looking at this and this is what she comes up with?”
“Just politics as usual”
Later, following some discussion of rumblings about yet another legislative relief effort in response to the economic destruction wrought by the coronavirus, and the likelihood that Pelosi and Democrats would attempt to sneak partisan agenda goals into the eventual bill, the topic of the new committee came back up in the conversation.
Doocy pointed out that, according to a statement from Pelosi’s office, the new committee would “help save lives and taxpayer dollars in real-time” instead of after the fact.
But McCarthy replied, “Well, that’s just not true.”
He added, “It seems to me that this is just politics as usual instead of focused on the crisis that we need to be today, delivering for the American public, making sure we are getting the resources to them.”
The top Republican in the House is absolutely correct in his assessment that Pelosi can’t help but attempt to exploit and politicize the coronavirus response in an effort to further her own liberal goals and that such a transparent ploy is simply unacceptable during a time when partisan aims must be set aside for the good of the nation.
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