Three months remain in a GOP-led effort to find Planned Parenthood contractors guilty of breaking the law, but as Republicans keep searching for evidence, their Democratic colleagues are waiting for the clock to run out.
“It’s unclear if we’re going to participate anymore,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the panel’s top Democrat, told the Washington Examiner.
House Republicans created the “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives” last year to centralize investigations following a series of undercover videos showing how some Planned Parenthood clinics provided aborted fetal tissue to biomedical companies.
The panel has subpoenaed hundreds of pages of documents from some of those companies, especially targeting the California-based firm StemExpress, trying to prove the firms profited from selling fetal tissue to researchers, which is against federal law.
But just months before the committee is due to disband, Republicans haven’t been able to prove wrongdoing. Nor has the investigation prompted any public efforts by authorities, including in GOP-led states, to investigate StemExpress, even though the company does business in all 50 states.
And Democrats on the panel have reached such a boiling point of frustration that they walked out of the panel’s most recent hearing and now say they might not participate for the rest of the year.
“It should die an ugly death,” Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., told the Examiner.
Republicans recently have been charging that they can’t complete their investigation without more documents from StemExpress, although Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn says the company has provided more than 1,700 pages.
She is accusing StemExpress of withholding documents that could show whether the company is turning a profit off its fetal tissue, leading the Republican members in a vote last month to hold the company in contempt of Congress.
But that could dead end, as Rep. Fred Upton, who is chairman of the full House Energy and Commerce Committee that houses the special panel, is unlikely to advance a contempt finding.
Upton has been working hard with Democrats to get a medical cures bill made law by the end of the year. Holding a vote to find a biomedical company in contempt of Congress, without any clear evidence of wrongdoing, would raise the ire of Democrats and could hamper progress on the cures bill.
In a midyear report, Republicans used figures from StemExpress showing its overhead costs for procuring, preparing and transferring fetal tissue to conclude that the company “may have made a profit” off the tissue. But they wrote that they couldn’t determine whether the law was actually broken unless they received additional documents beyond accounting summaries written by StemExpress attorneys.
The company’s president, Cate Dyer, has said fetal tissue comprises less than 1 percent of its business and that it loses money by providing the tissue to researchers. The company told the Washington Post that its 2015 revenue from fetal tissue totaled about $26,000 but the cost of preparing the tissue was about $33,000.
Dyer has offered to testify before the panel but was turned down by Blackburn, who says she would want more documents from StemExpress first.
Blackburn told the Examiner she’s unsure whether her panel will hold a fourth hearing before it issues a final report. But there’s limited time for holding another hearing, as Congress won’t return until after the elections and is scheduled to be in session for only a few weeks before the end of the year.
The main goal for the rest of the year, Blackburn said, is to obtain more information to complete a final report the panel has been commissioned to present.
“I think one of the things you’re going to see us do is focus on filling in the gaps on some of the information that we are still needing to complete the report,” Blackburn said.
In the meantime, the panel’s six Democrats are intensifying their objections. For months, they asked Republicans to disband the panel, accusing them of holding a “witch hunt” that might hurt medical research efforts using fetal tissue. They participated in several contentious hearings, but walked out of the last one as Republicans voted to hold StemExpress in contempt.
Schakowsky told the Examiner she’s considering additional actions to register Democrats’ discontent with the panel, but wouldn’t say what those might be.
This week, she released letters from the University of California Los Angeles and Rockefeller University that reported halting or delaying lines of research because of new pressures against obtaining fetal tissue.
And Speier said she thinks Blackburn, not StemExpress, should be held in contempt of Congress for an investigation she sees as an “affront to our Democratic process.”
“We’ve all been around the block a few times,” Speier told the Examiner. “Politics is politics and there’s lots of shenanigans that are played out here, but this is impacting the lives of Americans suffering with dreaded diseases, and that’s offensive to me.”
