House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month established a so-called select committee with the stated purpose of conducting oversight over the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. In an interview with “The Jeff Poor Show” on Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN on Wednesday, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the committee was not necessary given the already-existing oversight elements of the CARES Act.
According to Rogers, the creation of the committee was meant to be a tool for House Democrats for political purposes.
“There was no need for that,” Rogers said. “We put, literally, three different oversight entities into the CARES Act — two that are committee-driven, one is an inspector general. We’ve got plenty of oversight. We just need to get back to Washington and start exercising it. What she set up is nothing but a fourth entity that is going to be purely partisan, and all it is going to be doing is slapping the President around. That’s not what we’re up there for. If they want to do that through their political campaign arm, that’s fine. But we’re not going to be doing it with federal tax dollars.”
The Alabama Republican predicted the effort would eventually come to backfire on Democrats.
“We can’t stop what the Democrats are going to do,” he continued. “On the House side, they’ve got the majority. But when they start acting up with all this political business in the middle of a serious crisis, I think it’s going to come back to bite them.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor