by Daveda Gruber:
On Thursday the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced that she is creating a new House committee to oversee the coronavirus response.
The committee will have subpoena power to seek out information from the Trump administration, Pelosi said on Thursday during a teleconference call with reporters.
The Democratic Speaker from California said, “”It would have subpoena power that’s for sure. It’s no use having a committee unless you have subpoena power. And we would hope that there would be cooperation because this is not a kind of an investigation of the administration it’s about the whole [response].”
James Clyburn, the Democratic Representative from South Carolina will chair the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Pelosi said that the committee will be bipartisan and have both Democrats and GOP members appointed to it.
In 1941 a committee chaired by former Senator Harry Truman was set up to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in defense spending in the early days of World War II and Pelosi compared her new committee to that one.
In reference to large stimulus bill that was just recently passed Pelosi said, “With over $2 trillion in emergency relief, we need to ensure those dollars are spent carefully and effectively.”
She went on to say, “The committee will be empowered to examine all aspects of the federal response to the coronavirus, and to assure that the taxpayer dollars are being wisely and efficiently spent to save lives, deliver relief and benefit our economy.”
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-CA., spoke to reporters on a separate call and appeared to have concerns about
McCarthy hasn’t said who would lead his side or who would participate but he did say that he was concerned about the choice of Clyburn because Clyburn had called the COVID-19 crisis an opportunity to restructure things to fit the Democratic vision.
McCarthy said, “The other concern that I have from this standpoint is inside the bill that we passed, we did put in oversight and it seems really redundant.”
If McCarty says that oversight is already taken care of, then this new committee could be a wasteful expenditure.
Unfortunately, the Democrats certainly know how to add expenses to everything that they do. They certainly added expenses (pork) to the stimulus bill and I did explain those expenses in detail in my article on 03.30.2020.
This new Pelosi invented committee is not the same as the one proposed by Representative Adam Schiff, D-CA., and others, which would be more like the 9/11-style after-action committee.
In any case, any committees that are created will ultimately cost us, the taxpayers, more money.
