With Congress set to return to Washington next week after a very long absence, House Republicans have new targets in mind — Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
The House Republicans have turned the machinery of their committees against the Democratic presidential ticket. It’s a preview of what they’ll face if Republicans keep the House and Harris manages to defeat former President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee subpoenaed Walz’s administration over fraud allegations at a federal food program in Minnesota. The move surprised Rep. Bobby Scott (Va.), ranking Democrat on the committee. “The timing of the Republicans’ subpoena to Gov. Walz is weird,” Scott said.
But that’s just the beginning of what House Republicans have in mind.
— On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a field hearing in Santee, Calif., titled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: California Perspectives.” The hearing has been in the works for some time, but it’s taken on new significance since the California-born Harris became the Democratic nominee.
— House Judiciary will also hold a hearing next Tuesday on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives.” And a Judiciary subcommittee is set to meet the same day on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Noncitizen Voting.”
Democrats note that border crossings by undocumented migrants are at a four-year low thanks to new Biden administration policies, but GOP lawmakers see the issue as a huge political vulnerability for Harris.
— The House Oversight Committee has launched probes into Walz’s “long standing connections” to China and Harris’ “role in effectuating the worst border crisis in American history.”
— An Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee will meet Wednesday for a hearing on energy policy. The session is called “From Gas to Groceries: Americans Pay the Price of the Biden-Harris Energy Agenda.”
— The Judiciary Committee is back the same day with a hearing on crime: “The Consequences of Soft-On-Crime Policies.” This is clearly aimed at Democrats.
— House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, who is in charge of party messaging, sent a letter to Harris in late July expressing concerns about her national security adviser, Philip Gordon, and “his close ties to a known Iranian agent within the Department of Defense.”
— Even the normally staid Veterans Affairs Committee is getting into the mix. The panel has a hearing set for Tuesday called “Accountable or Absent?: Examining VA Leadership Under the Biden-Harris Administration.”
“I’m not going to deny that in this season, with a new top of the ticket, that the hearings may be calling out that it was a Biden-Harris administration and a Biden-Harris candidacy until recently,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Friday’s Judiciary Committee hearing is in Issa’s district, where border security and immigration are huge issues.
Democrats counter that House Republicans, with no major legislative accomplishments to fall back on, need to damage Harris and Walz in order to preserve the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“I think [Republicans] regret having a convention devoted to the facially ridiculous proposition that Donald Trump is a warm and compassionate man,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. “Now, regretting that, they’re basically going to try to have their convention in the House of Representatives with a kitchen sink full of attacks on the Democratic ticket.”
“Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA allies in the House are launching pathetic, false attacks on the Vice President and Governor Walz because they cannot win on their own records of taking away Americans’ freedoms and putting billionaires and corporations ahead of hard-working families,” added Mia Ehrenberg, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson.
Remember, House Republicans already pushed through a non-binding resolution back in July that “strongly condemns the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.” Six House Democrats supported the resolution.
And it also comes as Speaker Mike Johnson is preparing to offer a six-month funding bill with the SAVE Act in order to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1. That measure requires proof of citizenship before registering to vote in a federal election. It’s opposed by both Senate Democrats and the White House, who note that there’s no proof that this is a problem. It’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. But Trump is pressing Johnson to add it to the CR.
It’s hardly new for lawmakers to use their committees or floor speeches to score points against the other party’s nominee. Who can forget Hillary Clinton appearing before a House select committee in October 2015 on the Benghazi attack or being grilled about her private emails? Or the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid falsely suggesting in 2012 that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid federal taxes in a decade?
Yet Republicans are in a unique situation here. After spending 18 months using their investigative committees to go after President Joe Biden, the GOP has been forced to pivot to hitting Harris just months before the election.
That’s not to say everyone in the GOP is ready to let go of their Biden attacks. There are murmurs that conservative hardliners may try to force a bound-to-fail floor vote on impeaching Biden when they return to Washington. And Trump still spends a head-scratching amount of time going after his former opponent during campaign rallies and TV interviews.
— Melanie Zanona and John Bresnahan
