Crockett ‘ready to rumble’ as Oversight games begin, Fallon defends focus on Hunter Biden

WASHINGTON – Republicans are eager to make the president squirm over the classified documents in his garage, his son’s “laptop from hell” and a host of other topics. The House Oversight Committee has quickly emerged as the main arena, with Texans among the pugilists.

They’ll “finally face a reckoning,” said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, who’ll chair one of the subcommittees. “It’s in the national interest to find out what’s there and let the evidence lead us where it may.”

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a rising Democratic star assigned to the panel as a freshman, chastised Republicans for prioritizing “political theater or political warfare” over keeping government honest. They see Hunter Biden’s laptop as a treasure map pointing to a web of corruption. She views it as an unhealthy obsession.

“You have to look at the motivation…. So many of them are on record saying, basically, `they went after Trump and they went after Trump’s family, so we’re going after Biden’s family,’ ” said Crockett, who took office last month.

“It sounds more like retribution” than a justification for unleashing the panel’s vast authority, she said.

A month into the new Congress, the skirmishes are well underway.

The new chairman declared “influence peddling” by the Biden family his top priority, though hardly his only target.

“We have evidence… where this family has taken in millions and millions of dollars from our adversaries, mainly in China,” Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said during an appearance at the National Press Club last Monday. “What was that money for. Who supplied that money?”

Republicans make no apology for channeling years of pent-up frustration over Democrats’ harsh treatment of former president Donald Trump, and the kid-gloves treatment Biden enjoyed during two years of undivided government.

The first hearing focused on waste and fraud in pandemic spending. Others will soon follow on classified documents found at Biden’spersonal office and home, and on border security lapses, energy price spikes, and the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

One side will be playing to Fox News viewers, the other to the MSNBC crowd.

Oversight is where conflicting worldviews will be laid bare by some of the most strident partisans from each party.

The hardliners who threatened to derail Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to the top job in the House demanded a generous helping of seats. The majority’s roster includes firebrand Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert and Scott Perry.

“It’s an all-star cast of the people that opposed McCarthy, and conspiracy theorists,” Crockett said.

The minority didn’t exactly assign its most conciliatory and pugilism-averse members, either. The Democrats’ roster includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and freshman Dan Goldman, lead counsel at the hearings that led to Trump’s impeachment.

The top Democrat is Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, lead prosecutor at Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Two other Texans also serve: freshman Rep. Greg Casar of Austin, one of the most progressive Democrats in the House, and veteran Rep. Pete Sessions of Waco, a former member of the GOP leadership team.

“There’s only certain people that can jump into the fire on this kind of committee,” Crockett said. “They’re either safe Ds or safe Rs, because this is a highly partisan committee.”

Biden won four of every five votes in her district. Trump won two-thirds in Fallon’s.

Fallon, elected to a second term in November, will chair the subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs.

“It’s a huge umbrella,” he said.

Like Crockett, he served in the Legislature, though he got to Congress during her first and only term so they never overlapped and hadn’t interacted before the first committee meeting.Fallon is eager to spotlight the perils associated with a $31.5 trillion national debt. He’ll use his perch to discuss Biden “vilifying the energy sector” and selling fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve “for political reasons.”

He hopes to spark serious discussion about expanding the use of nuclear energy, as a carbon-free path. He’s optimistic about finding environmentalist allies.

He’s eyeing a post mortem on pandemic shutdowns and their economic effects, to determine “what was the right amount of restriction and what was too much.”

Fallon sees these as commonsense goals, and rejects allegations that the GOP will flex its muscle unfairly.

“President Trump was the most investigated person in history. The fact of the matter is that the Biden family didn’t have any money. And then suddenly they got rich once Joe Biden became vice president,” Fallon said.

“That happens, I guess,” and maybe there was no graft involved, Fallon said. But “suddenly magically this guy becomes a multimillionaire, a guy that has no experience at all in the energy sector, becoming an energy sector millionaire with foreign governments.”

“That’s concerning when your daddy is the VP and then the president.” Fallon said, “and it’s Oversight’s job to hold the administration accountable, whether it’s a Republican or Democratic administration.”

Although Democrats haven’t adopted Trump’s oft-used term “witch hunt,” that’s how they view the suspicions about Hunter Biden. The White House calls it a conspiracy theory fueled by wishful thinking.

“We’re ready for this,” Crockett said, vowing to “call out the propaganda [and] the lies” she expects to hear, and to point out “the hypocrisy of what the Republicans are up to.”

They weren’t exactly eager to delve into Trump’s family businesses, she said. They seem unfazed by the much larger trove of classified documents the FBI recovered from Trump’s Florida resort that he – unlike Biden – insisted he had every right to keep.

“They want to use this committee to further whatever conspiracy theories they have, whether it’s on vaccines, whether it’s on Hunter Biden,” Crockett said. But in the midterms, “They didn’t run on Hunter Biden. What they ran on was [that] they will fix the economy, because somehow the Democrats were the reason for inflation.”

It didn’t take long for frictions to surface.

At the committee’s first meeting on Tuesday, Republicans shot down Crockett’s push to reverse the elimination of a a subcommittee focused on civil rights. She noted the recent indictment of Memphis police officers who beat to death Tyre Nichols, a Black man, after a traffic stop,

Chairman Comer swatted aside her complaint, noting that he can call hearings “on anything we want,” including topics not assigned to any subcommittee.

Greene, the Georgia Republican known for anti-Semitic rants and QAnon conspiracies, echoed Crockett’s concern about the Nichols case but said Congress should be just as appalled at the “murder” of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter shot trying to break through the last set of doors between the mob and U.S. House members fleeing to safety.

“It was very weird,” Crockett said later.

Denouncing Greene’s “false equivalency” between vastly different deaths at the hands of law enforcement, she predicted that

Republicans will come to regret putting Greene on such a high profile committee.

“The more that she talks, the more the world will be convinced that she is just not equipped to serve as a legislator,” she said.