House Republicans are planning a series of investigations into President Joe Biden, his family, and his administration if they retake the majority.
The GOP seems poised to retake the House in November's midterm elections, and they intend to spike the Jan. 6 Select Committee and turn their attention instead to Hunter Biden, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the origins of COVID-19, inflation and the Mexican border, reported Politico.
"We're going to spend a lot of time in the first three, four months having investigation hearings and then we're going to be very active in the subcommittee process, focused on substantive waste, fraud and abuse type issues," said Rep. Jamie Comer, R-Ky., who's expected to chair the Oversight Committee if the GOP regains the majority. "I'm going to bring the Oversight Committee back to what its original intent was."
Republicans have already made document preservation requests to the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden officials involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal and Twitter officials involved in the attempted sale to Elon Musk, and they say the biggest challenge is limiting the scope of the topics they plan to investigate.
"It's not something where we're having to drum up, 'Okay, what are we going to do?'" said Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas. "It's more of a limiting factor of, we only have 50 weeks a year."
Republicans understand they won't be able to pass much legislation given Biden's veto power, even if they retake the Senate, so they intend to put the president and Democrats on defense by flooding the zone with investigations into topics conservative voters care about, including border security and related topics such as fentanyl.
"If you can't get to 60 in the Senate, you can make it a real issue … going into the next election," said Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D.
GOP lawmakers are already in talks with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and other conference leaders to determine which committees would tackle various topics.
"I've been really impressed with leadership — both from [Rep.] Jim [Jordan], from [Rep.] Jamie Comer, from Kevin's office — in already starting to talk about that," Armstrong said.
