House oversight committee6/25/2023 Little focus has been placed on any legislative goals, not with Democrats holding the Senate and White House and most Republicans treating “compromise” as a dirty word. Republicans have already made clear that feeding that cycle is their top priority for the next two years. The Oversight Committee is set to be the loudest, and least productive, show in town. Jason Chaffetz is a Fox News contributor, hosts a podcast on Fox News radio and has guest hosted multiple shows on the network Trey Gowdy hosts a show called “Sunday Night in America,” also on Fox News. The Benghazi hearings, which served as the apex of this fervor, showcased the attention ( and donations) the GOP base was willing to give in the name of “owning the libs.” Small wonder that the two most recent GOP Oversight chairs resigned from the House and pursued media gigs. His observation didn’t exactly make a lasting impact, with the GOP shifting back into investigative overdrive during Barack Obama’s time in the White House after recapturing the House in the midterms.īy then the right-wing scandal industrial complex had fully matured, with lurid investigations grabbing headlines in conservative media and airtime on Fox News, which, in turn, created the need to manufacture new crises to exploit. “Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own,” then-Chair Tom Davis, R-Va., told The Washington Post in 2005, a year during which Bush was under fire for failures surrounding his government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and his prosecution of the Iraq War. “Republicans have long treated Oversight as the land of misfit toys.” So was a seat on Ways and Means, the committee that oversees the tax code. “We always treated it as a dumping ground for our less serious members,” Brendan Buck, a former senior adviser to the prior two GOP speakers, said of the Oversight Committee to The New York Times. A spot on the House Appropriations Committee, for example, used to be considered much more lucrative and prestigious, given the donors who care very much about how their tax dollars are doled out. These are not McCarthy’s favorite people - but making room for them on the committee was apparently one the concessions he was willing to make to get the speaker’s gavel.Ī seat on the Oversight Committee wasn’t always such a plum position. And let’s not forget Anna Paulina Luna and Byron Donalds of Florida, who were members of the GOP insurgency that kept McCarthy out of the speakership for days. There’s also newly minted frenemies Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, two far-right darlings and media hounds. Among the 17 Republicans who will be perched on the Oversight Committee alongside Comer are Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry, two of the most fervent advocates for former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy lies.
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