Report: House Republicans Plan to Investigate Chamber of Commerce for Supporting Left-Wing ESG Investments

House Republicans are reportedly planning to investigate the United States Chamber of Commerce if they retake the House in this year’s midterm elections over its support for leftist Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investments.

According to a report from the Intercept, House Republicans want to open investigations into the Chamber’s backing of ESG investments which are driving multinational corporations to go woke on environmental and social issues that have little to do with their services.

In particular, Republicans are interested in the Chamber’s support for ESG investments that are crippling American energy companies while simultaneously boosting foreign energy corporations.

The Intercept reports:

Republicans plan to launch a variety of investigations into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many of its largest member corporations if they retake the majority in the House of Representatives this November. The probes, said a GOP member of Congress and multiple Republican operatives who requested anonymity to discuss plans that have yet to be made public, will marry Republicans’ newly formed hostility to the Chamber with the party’s mission to undermine the growth of the ESG investment sector. [Emphasis added]

…

The congressman highlighted what he saw as the downfalls of that approach. Republicans accuse ESG advocates of using ESG criteria to punish American energy companies, only to then give an advantage to large, foreign energy companies over which the U.S. has little oversight anyways. [Emphasis added]

“How is it again that you can discourage investment in American energy when you own, or when you’re controlling board seats, of an American energy company, but you’re pushing it offshore to a Chinese energy company? Tell me you didn’t violate your fiduciary duty somehow,” said the congressman. “Then you throw that over into Judiciary [Committee hearings] and say, how do you reconcile this from an antitrust perspective? How can somebody actually be duty-of-care to the shareholders of one entity when you’re duty-of-care to the Chinese Communist Party’s-controlled energy company?” [Emphasis added]

Such investigations would come as Rep. Jim Banks’s (R-IN) Republican Study Committee hopes to pass through a Republican-controlled House a number of legislative measures to clamp down on ESG investments and the corporations promoting them.

“Ground zero for the Biden war on energy is the weaponization of financial regulation to redirect capital away from American energy producers,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) told Breitbart News months ago. “We need to stop these regulators from driving up the cost of energy by politicizing access to capital. Republicans will keep fighting this every step of the way.”

Investigations into the Chamber’s backing of ESG investments would be set against a backdrop where House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has made clear that he wants the big business lobby to have little-to-no involvement with Republican lawmakers and their economic agenda.

“The Chamber left the party a long time ago. In the last election, the Chamber supported Democrats,” McCarthy told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview in January, referencing the Chamber’s endorsement of 23 House Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.

Similarly, last October, House Republican leadership booted Chamber officials from their political strategy calls.

The divide between the Republican Party’s newfound base of working-class Americans, especially white non-college-educated voters, and the corporate interests of the Chamber has widened further throughout the last five years.

In particular, while the Chamber continues lobbying for a return to the free trade policy consensus that reigned in Washington, DC, for decades, most Republican voters say free trade has hurt the American economy and cost American jobs. At the same time, while the Chamber lobbies to double legal immigration levels, a majority of Republican voters want current legal immigration levels — at roughly 1.2 million — cut at least in half.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.