Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., temporarily shut down a Thursday hearing with Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt to warn protesters to act with “decorum,” and said if they can’t, they’d be escorted out of the building.
Shimkus, who chaired the hearing, cut off Energy and Commerce Committee chairman emeritus Joe Barton, R-Texas, from questioning Pruitt to admonish the protesters.
“We have guests in the gallery,” Shimkus said. “You are our guests,” he added, but warned, “I have some magic words that will then cause you to have to leave.”
“I do not want to say that,” Shimkus said. “We asked for decorum,” but the noise and chanting is “not being decorous, whatever the word is.”
They quieted, and the hearing proceeded without incident.
Most of one group’s protesters were outside the Rayburn building where the hearing was taking place, handing out posters and fliers at all staff entrances. Friends of the Earth, a national environmental group leading demonstration against Pruitt on Thursday, said they had the building surrounded.
“So, there are protesters outside of Rayburn, holding posters, and handing out fliers at all the staff entrances,” a spokeswoman said. “We also have someone wearing a giant plaster Pruitt head and a few people with him doing street theater as Pruitt’s ‘security detail.’”
“We also have a digital truck with the condo poster circling around the Capitol, the House Office buildings and the senate office buildings,” she explained.
Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica was inside the hearing room to hear Pruitt’s testimony.
