WASHINGTON, D.C. — Representative Jim Jordan is one of five Republicans serving on a new House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis — just a few weeks after he testified against it being created.
- New coronavirus select subcommittee meets for first time
- Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan serves on it, but thinks it shouldn’t exist
- Politics overshadowed witnesses in first hearing
What You Need To Know
The committee met for the first time, virtually, on Wednesday afternoon.
“This select committee was not established to cast blame on past failures, foreign or domestic, or to search for the virus’s origin,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina) said in his opening statement. “But rather to pursue future success.”
But Clyburn’s message was not well-received by the Republicans on the panel.
Jordan (R, 4th Congressional District), who was named to the group by House Republican leadership, has said the committee shouldn’t exist because Congress already has other forms of oversight (Jordan is the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee).
He’s also claimed this new select committee is politically motivated because Clyburn, who was named chair by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a prominent supporter of former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
After Republicans showed viewers watching that some of them returned to Capitol Hill to prove the hearing could’ve taken place in-person while practicing social distancing, the witnesses began testifying.
“It was inadequate testing that precipitated the national shutdown,” Dr. Ashish Jha testified. “We must not make the same mistakes again as we open up our nation.”
Jha, who is the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, was singled out by Jordan minutes later.
“It’s a committee designed to go after the president,” Jordan said. "The very first witness, who just a few minutes ago, said it was inadequate testing that initiated the shutdown. I thought the shutdown was initiated to bend the curve to make sure our health care system wasn’t overwhelmed. But we already got a political statement from the very first witness.”
That prompted Jha to then respond.
“Every expert on the left, right and center agrees that we had to shut our economy down because the outbreak got too big,” Jha said. “The outbreak got too big because we didn’t have a testing infrastructure that allowed us to put our arms around the outbreak. And so testing was the fundamental failure that forced our country to shut down.”
Jordan and his Republican colleagues complained that the Democrats running the committee didn’t consult them on witnesses or format.
The Democrats argued everyone got equal time to speak and that one witness worked under President Trump for a time, while another worked under former President George W. Bush.
But the politics drowned out comments like this from the experts.
“We’re seeing signs of a slowing epidemic nationally, but we’re still going to be reopening against the backdrop of more spread than we anticipated,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
I spoke with Jordan a few hours before the hearing and asked him this: “If there are constituents of yours back home, and I haven’t been in your district so I don’t know if they exist, but if they sit there and say ‘we agree with you that the Democrats are making this new committee political, but we want you to try to rise higher than them and not go into it political yourself,’ because it sounds like you might be, what do you say to them?”
“I say I’m going to focus on the truth,” Jordan said in response. “I’m going to focus on the amazing response we’ve seen from the administration. I’m going to focus on the fact that this president shut down travel from China and all these folks on this committee and Democrats and folks in the media criticized the president for doing it at the time, and it turned out to be a great decision. I’m going to focus on the truth that the World Health Organization took our money and lied to us.”
Jordan did not ask the witnesses any questions during his speaking time.
In various parts of their testimony, the witnesses called for increased testing and contact tracing before the country could safely reopen.
Dr. Gottlieb said there has been a significant reduction of people receiving vaccinations and chemotherapy because patients are nervous to go to medical facilities, showing there are public health consequences beyond COVID-19 from the lockdowns.