At a recent hearing of a subcommittee on the House Oversight Committee dealing specifically with issues related to COVID-19, Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) — a physician and the top Democrat on the subcommittee — ripped the House GOP’s record, saying they’ve accomplished simply nothing that actually benefits the American people.
The GOP majority in the House established after the midterm elections in 2022 is more than half over. In some foundational areas of maintaining the government’s financial integrity, Democrats have provided the necessary votes in the House to secure needed deals covering government funding and the debt limit. And what else have Republicans done, exactly? Passed partisan legislation on issues like the border that isn’t going anywhere, fought over who would be Speaker, failed to secure a longer-term government funding package at all, and conducted politically antagonistic “investigations”?
The hearing where Ruiz was speaking was related to compliance by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with pushes from Congress for information.
“Simply put, this hearing is little more than a distraction from the fact that the Republican Majority has failed to accomplish anything to improve the lives of the American people and has chosen politically motivated probes over advancing constructive policies that promote our nation’s public health and pandemic preparedness,” Ruiz said. “Under the guise of determining COVID-19’s origins, the Majority has pursued a politically motivated probe, vilifying our nation’s public health officials and politicizing the Intelligence Community in the process.” Republicans’ interests in this area have included advancing the theory that COVID-19 originated in some man-made process as a political bludgeon against the scientific community.
The argued trend is consistent among House Republicans, who were in the process this week of tanking a bipartisan deal originating in the Senate covering the southern border and security assistance for Ukraine and Israel. Republicans themselves have feverishly demanded action on the border, and rather than taking this offering, they were opting for doing, for now, nothing beyond thumping their most partisan agenda-oriented proposals.
