On the recordDecember 1, 2016
I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Republicans today are asking us to spend more than $1.5 million to conduct a radical, dangerous inquisition that targets and intimidates private citizens. To satisfy their seemingly unquenchable obsession with rolling back women's reproductive rights and access to basic health care, this overreaching panel recklessly has demanded names, and interferes in the lives of law-abiding students, scientists, and researchers whose private lives and jobs have been turned upside down by their own government. What do we have to show for this display of government abuse? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it is worse than nothing. Today, they are invoking institutional responsibility to ask the taxpayers to foot a bill for $800,000 of their own cost overruns. This is money that could have been used to help families, feed the hungry, help our veterans and military families, and go toward education. I urge my colleagues to reject this dangerous abuse of power and taxpayer funding.
