This has left Senate committees, run by the Republican majority, hosting high-profile hearings for three straight weeks — and over on the House side, Democrats have been largely silent, unable to draw witnesses officially dealing with the crisis.
That’s why prominent Democrats want Republicans to know they have established a precedent that will leave them on the short end of cooperation for oversight requests from any future Democratic administration.
“So all of these things, you know, I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. If this is the way you’re going to operate things in your own majority, then don’t expect that somehow comity is going to return,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Tuesday in an interview.
The standoff threatens to forever alter the balance of power in congressional attempts to conduct oversight of Trump and future administrations.
So far, the numbers are bleak. Since the virus outbreak in early March, House Democrats have sent at least 186 letters to agencies, 156 directly related to the pandemic, and have yet to receive a response, according to data compiled by Democratic advisers.
Nine requests to Cabinet officials for either a formal hearing or just a briefing, sometimes by videoconference, have been rejected.
Consider the House Appropriations Committee, which was forbidden from hearing from Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the administration. And then there’s the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where efforts to get testimony from Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, have been stymied.
Yet Collins spent a few hours May 7 testifying about coronavirus testing before the Senate health committee, where five days later, Fauci also testified.
Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in the short term, he tries to coordinate with his colleagues who run the House Foreign Affairs Committee to shape what questions he asks during Senate hearings.
“Sometimes we create an echo chamber for each other. Sometimes what we do is, when we have an opportunity they don’t and vice versa, we drive questions that are important that we think are in our collective interest,” Menendez said.
House Democrats had already run into many dead ends in their oversight investigations last year relating to the special counsel probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and then the impeachment inquiry connected to pressure on Ukraine to investigate Trump’s domestic political rival.
In those cases, Trump blocked almost every request and instead set the stage for long legal battles in which the Supreme Court is becoming the final arbiter of the executive-legislative showdowns, long after those investigations had lost their steam.
Earlier this month, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows issued a letter to House committees that essentially said no officials connected to the economic and health responses to the pandemic could testify, citing a time crunch due to their critical work. The next day, Trump undercut Meadows, saying he didn’t want his people to appear before Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s committees because they are “a bunch of Trump haters.”
This week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested that he supported withholding information from the chamber he hopes to lead next year because of the political and personality dispute between the president and the speaker, who haven’t spoken since October.
“I will never refer to a president about being morbid, in any shape or form, if I’m speaker of the House,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday, promising not to do that to a Democratic president. He referenced Pelosi’s jab at Trump’s “morbidly obese” weight this week, her tearing up a copy of his State of the Union address and the vote to impeach last year. “No, I would not as speaker use those terms. I will not rip up the State of the Union from a Democratic president, either. I would hold that as the historical document that they were meant to be. I will not impeach just for political praises.”
McCarthy has said that the select House committee created to oversee how the nearly $3 trillion in rescue packages gets doled out is another impeachment inquiry, and in its initial hearing last week, the GOP members of the new panel almost entirely ignored the outside experts appearing by videoconference and excoriated the committee’s formation.
It’s a far cry from the early days of the House GOP majority last decade. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Oversight Committee who is running for Congress again, became a political celebrity with his vigorous pursuit of the Obama administration.
Just two weeks before the 2014 midterm elections, Issa held a hearing on the Ebola outbreak, which was mostly confined to African nations and had a few cases in the United States. Officials from the departments of defense, homeland security, and health and human services testified, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some Democrats took note of several Senate committee chairmen issuing subpoenas and document requests to agencies on investigations into Trump’s political foes, while those from House Democratic committees are ignored.
“President Trump may be weaponizing the executive branch in advance of the 2020 elections by directing agencies to comply with congressional investigations designed to hurt his political opponents while stonewalling legitimate oversight investigations into the actions of his own administration,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote Wednesday to the National Archives and three Cabinet secretaries.
Pelosi voiced her frustration Wednesday at the inability to compel testimony or documents from Trump’s advisers. “It’s very hard to get the administration to honor its responsibilities to the American people by testifying before Congress. As you see, they have sort of cut out the House altogether,” she told reporters.
However, Pelosi then noted that the annual funding bills for these agencies begin in the House, a not-so-veiled threat to use the power of the purse to inflict pain on the most reluctant Cabinet secretaries.
That’s the sort of threat Menendez supports, using power and making Republicans understand what they will face especially when there’s a Democratic administration.
“I think the whole thing is a bad precedent,” he said.
