After Republicans and Democrats spent 90 minutes whipsawing between alternate realities, the top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis paused for a fleeting display of humanity toward each other.
“If the distance between me and you on any issue were five steps, I’d be happy to take three of them,” House Majority Whip James Clyburn said to his GOP counterpart, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, as the panel’s first meeting came to a close Wednesday.
“I’d be happy to take the other two,” Scalise replied.
In fact, the parties started the day miles apart and ended it even further away. The first meeting of the new panel tasked with probing the government’s coronavirus response won’t be remembered for unearthing groundbreaking new policy information — and might not be remembered at all. But it was a visual distillation of the increasing dysfunction that has gripped Congress amid the coronavirus response and threatens to undermine oversight efforts going forward.
For starters, Democrats beamed into the briefing from their living rooms while most of the Republicans gathered in the Capitol and lambasted Democrats for refusing to convene in Washington. At Scalise’s first chance to speak, he turned his camera around and panned the hearing room, which he said was a spacious venue where lawmakers, staff, the public and press could safely social-distance while appearing in person.
“With just 12 members, we can achieve model social distancing,” Scalise said, as the camera showed three staffers gathered closely together at the rear of the room, and GOP lawmakers disregarding the attending physician’s request that they wear masks. He added, “A virtual briefing unnecessarily send the wrong message. Congress should be leading the way. We should not be the last to come back.”
Republicans also slammed Democrats for hastily convening the briefing — which featured five expert witnesses, including former FDA Commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan — and declining to offer Republicans a chance to choose their own witness.
But the stark divide between the parties extended to the substance of the briefing as well. Democrats — echoing the predictions of public health experts — described a crisis that could linger for another year until a vaccine is developed. They worried about shortages of medical equipment, coronavirus tests and the prospect of renewed outbreaks that could erupt if the country reopens too quickly. They also repeatedly laid the crisis at the feet of a slow-going federal response that has at times left states to fend for themselves.
“We’ve lost 82,000 Americans to coronavirus in less than three months, 21 million Americans thrown out of work, more than 1.3 million infections,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “I can understand our colleagues’ desperate efforts to distract form the crisis and to talk about almost anything else and to plunge us into partisan conflict.”
Republicans, meanwhile, emphasized the skyrocketing unemployment rate and suggested the ills of mass unemployment could outweigh the efforts to guard against the virus through stay-at-home orders.
“The key to all of this is perspective,” said Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), describing suicides and postponed health procedures as a grave threat. “I don’t minimize [coronavirus] risk at all. It’s there. The problem is, the rest of society has certainly got a health problem as well.”
Conservative Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) slammed one of the witnesses, Harvard University Global Health Institute Director Ashish Jha, as a partisan for suggesting that federal failures to ensure enough testing were the reason for the nationwide economic lockdown.
Jha retorted: “Every expert on the left, right, and center agrees that we had to shut our economy down because the outbreak got too big. The outbreak got too big because we didn’t have a testing infrastructure that allowed us to put our arms around the outbreak. And so testing was the fundamental failure that forced our country to shut down.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed the House to establish the coronavirus select committee last month, amid slow-going efforts to police the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus response. She tapped Clyburn, the Democratic caucus’ third-ranking member, to lead it and dismissed Republican claims that it would be used as a bludgeon against Trump in the heat of his 2020 reelection campaign.
Regardless of whatever political theater the committee engages in, it’s also already proved that it may be able to wield real power. The panel took its first official action Friday, when it moved to name-and-shame five publicly traded companies that had obtained small business loans but have more than 600 employees. Within hours, one company had announced it would repay the loan.
Still, at Wednesday’s briefing, Republicans relished a divide among Democrats over the move, highlighting a bipartisan letter that included signatures from Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), asking the panel to back off a steel manufacturer called out by the committee.
The seven Democrats who run the panel made a concerted effort to project bipartisanship despite the GOP criticisms.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who has been one of the House’s fiercest advocates for Trump’s removal from office, opened her remarks somberly, mentioning the recent death of her sister from coronavirus.
“While I’m sitting here, my sister’s viewing is going on today in St. Louis,” she said. “I’m hopeful that we can all get together, Democrats and Republicans, and deal with this pandemic.”
The witnesses largely lined up behind Democrats’ view that the crisis is far from over, even if there have been glimmers of hope that the spread is slowing in some regions.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime pathogen. There’s a lot of challenges that remain ahead,” Gottlieb said. “People rightly want to know when this will be over. The reality is we may need to define a new normal.”
For Congress, the new normal, looks a lot like the old.