The House Oversight and Accountability Committee keeps on showing off Republican priorities, and civil rights and civil liberties don’t make the cut.
That’s not a subjective statement. They’ve done away with the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which focused on issues like voting rights, criminal justice reform, civil liberties, and other important issues. In 2019, the subcommittee held a hearing on the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act, which prohibited federal jobs from asking questions about criminal history as people applied for jobs. In 2022, it held a hearing on book bans. And now Republicans have abolished it.
RELATED STORY: House Republicans take a break from investigating dick pics to howl about COVID-19
Campaign Action
Oh, Rep. James Comer, the chair of the oversight committee, claimed the committee as a whole could still take up the issues that the subcommittee traditionally handled. “Let me be very clear: Any topic that’s not mentioned in the subcommittee jurisdiction is reserved for the full committee,” Comer said in a committee meeting. “We can have a committee hearing in this committee on basically anything we want.”
But the only ban Comer is interested in so far is Twitter banning the nonconsensual posting of intimate pictures of Hunter Biden. When it comes to books, a committee run by Comer is much more likely to hold a hearing on why more of them aren’t being banned than one treating it as a problem that they are, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a star witness.
Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett is objecting, citing the police murder of Tyre Nichols as an example of the subcommittee’s importance, calling the decision to disband it “reckless and cruel” and “an abject failure.”
“Rather than squandering their authority on investigations of the President’s family,” Crockett said, “the Chairman and House Republicans should use their authority to conduct oversight and investigate the merciless murders of innocent Americans—mainly Americans who look like me—at the hands of law enforcement. Systemic policing and extremist violence are killing people, devastating our communities, and breaking the hearts of families we took an oath to defend and protect at all costs.”
She concluded, “I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to not only reinstate this crucial subcommittee and hold a hearing on the investigation of the murder of Nichols, but to do their jobs and to continue oversight on the issues that this Committee was established to safeguard. The American people are watching, and so am I.”
RELATED STORY:
House Republicans demand to know why they couldn't see Hunter Biden dick pics