WASHINGTON, D.C. - In sometimes testy testimony before the House Rules Committee, Champaign County GOP Rep. Jim Jordan denounced a Democratic proposal to create a select panel to oversee the federal coronavirus response as nothing more than an election-year effort to discredit President Donald Trump.

“This is just one more attempt by the Democrats to go after the president,” declared Jordan, who argued that eight different entities including several other House of Representatives committees are already scrutinizing disbursement of several trillion dollars in federal aid to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on Americans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that she envisions the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis as “a very bipartisan initiative to stop waste, fraud and abuse, price-gouging, profiteering and the rest” that would not be about the Trump administration, but would focus on how the relief efforts are being implemented. She said the full House of Representatives would have to vote on its implementation. A House floor vote on the subcommittee’s formation is scheduled today.

Jordan argued at the Wednesday Rules Committee meeting that the measure should not come before the full House of Representatives. He said the fact that Pelosi asked South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn to chair the panel shows it “is going to look out for the Democrats’ candidate for President, Joe Biden," because Clyburn is Biden’s “biggest supporter,” who helped him clinch the Democratic party’s presidential nomination by endorsing Biden before his state’s primary.

He had a testy exchange with Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who upbraided Jordan for not wearing a mask to the hearing. The chair of the committee, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. James McGovern, said the Capitol physician recommended that Congress members wear masks but isn’t requiring them.

“It’s obviously not a sign of bravery not to wear a mask," said Raskin. “It’s a sign of irresponsibility towards other people because when we wear a mask, we’re protecting them. When they don’t wear a mask, they’re not protecting us.”

Jordan said he was following the rules by maintaining six feet of social distancing from others in the hearing room.

Raskin also said the coronavirus has now killed 15 times more Americans than were lost in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and accused President Trump of minimizing its dangers as a “hoax” and “fake news,” which “cost us precious weeks and months in trying to organize and mobilize the country to deal with this pandemic.”

Noting that Trump has refused to cooperate with past congressional oversight efforts, Raskin called it a “commonsense suggestion” to set up a committee to track the trillions of dollars in aid that Congress approved “so it’s not set up as a money making operation by an administration that has tried to forestall every form of oversight this Congress has tried to exercise.”

He accused Jordan of expressing “counterfeit outrage,” noting that Republicans in Congress launched 10 investigations into 2012 attacks by Islamic militants on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Jordan participated in several of the investigations where he repeatedly accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing as she ran for president.

Raskin said a House Select Committee that Jordan served on to investigate the Benghazi incident cost more than $6 million over 2 1/2 years and “could not find anything wrong that Hillary Clinton had done" and didn’t produce any prosecutions. Its final report - which was endorsed by Republicans on the committee but not the Democrats - criticized the CIA and various Obama administration officials for incompetence but didn’t find wrongdoing by Clinton.

“This is money to rescue the American economy and rescue the American people and of course we should have oversight,” Raskin continued. “We should be proud to have oversight over it. So why would they politicize this? It strikes me as the most basic thing in the world that we would have oversight. To my mind, it seems like a distraction from the fact that the president has no plan to get the country out of this. No plan at all.”

Jordan responded that the new committee would probably “be talking a lot like Mr. Raskin did, ranting and raving and going after the president of the United States" who suspended travel from China to the United States while the disease was centered in China. He defended the Benghazi investigations and said Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election found no collusion with the Trump campaign after spending $30 million, and “all kinds of taxpayer resources.”

McGovern noted that just $2 million would be spent on the proposed special committee, a tiny fraction of the more than $2 trillion in expenditures it would examine, and that Mueller’s investigation resulted in several criminal convictions and jail sentences.

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