Key House Democrats are accusing their Republican counterparts of holding a Planned Parenthood hearing next week simply as a concession to conservatives who are intent on either defunding the group or shutting down the government.
Democrats say House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, has agreed to a hearing next week in order to keep the issue alive just as Congress is considering a bill to fund the government. The effort is being pushed by members of the House Freedom Caucus, which is leading the charge to strip federal funding from the women’s health and abortion provider, and Democrats note that more than half the members of that caucus are on the House Oversight Committee.
But there’s a sharp disagreement right now between that group and Republican leaders, as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other leaders are hesitant to risk a shutdown over Planned Parenthood.
“This appears to be part of a broader power struggle to unseat House Speaker John Boehner, led by an extreme wing of the Republican Party that is using this issue to force a government shutdown unless the speaker bows to their demands,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and other committee Democrats wrote to Chaffetz.
The oversight hearing is planned for Sept. 29, just days before current legislation funding the government runs out.
The committee is investigating Planned Parenthood after anti-abortion investigator David Daleiden highlighted how some of its clinics provide aborted fetal tissue for medical research, in a series of undercover videos that have prompted mass outrage among Republicans.
The Democrats asked Chaffetz to either cancel the hearing or also invite Daleiden to testify alongside Planned Parenthood officials, saying it’s not fair to allow the maker of the videos to escape probing questions by members of the committee. At the very least, they want Chaffetz to allow Daleiden to attend the hearing as the one witness Democrats are allowed to select.
“In holding next week’s hearing, it is clear that the committee will be relying extensively on the results of Mr. Daleiden’s potentially illegal and covert activities, his secretly-recorded videos, and his documents that have now been subpoenaed,” they wrote. “For precisely this reason, it is critical to hear from him directly at next weeks’ hearing.”
Two other GOP-led committees have held hearings on the Planned Parenthood controversy so far, including the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, which held a panel last week and replayed parts of the Daleiden videos.
