Washington, DC – Today, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held another immigration and border-focused hearing – the sixth official Republican Committee hearing on the subject in the first six weeks of the GOP’s majority.
The most notable news about the hearing occurred beforehand. As Newsweek reports, “Full List of 26 Republicans Who Refused To Denounce White Supremacy,” the entire GOP membership of the House Oversight Committee, “refused to join their Democratic counterparts in signing a letter denouncing white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories.” The Independent also had the story, “Oversight committee Republicans won’t sign Democrats’ letter denouncing white supremacy.”
The letter, sent by Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) earlier this week, called on Republicans to join Committee Democrats in “denouncing white nationalism and white supremacy, and the use of related conspiracy theories, including the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, during Committee hearings and in all our work together.”
While refusing to join with the push to denounce white nationalism, at least six Committee Republicans, including Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend, which featured an ugly and overt embrace of “replacement” and “invasion” conspiracies.
As America’s Voice details in a new blog post, “CPAC 2023: Conspiracies, Bigotry and Courting Violence”:
“From start to finish, the stage was littered with election conspiracies, eliminationist rhetoric, and references to the white nationalist “invasion” and “replacement” conspiracy. Leading figures in the Republican Party shared the stage with bigots and wanna-be despots with thinly veiled xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry casually woven in from speech to speech. The conference presented a party engaged in an almost entirely self-referential debate boiling with rage, paranoia, and grievance directed at an alleged imminent existential threat posed by migrants, “globalists,” “communists,” and “gender ideology.”
According to Zachary Mueller, Political Director of America’s Voice:
“Denouncing white supremacy should not be a difficult task for our elected leaders. Blatantly refusing to do so is a searing indictment of where the Republican Party is at. The reality is that House Republicans are either embracing, elevating, or refusing to denounce dangerous white nationalist conspiracies that are directly linked to examples of real world violence. This isn’t an idle request, as the U.S. Attorney General, the DHS Secretary, and the FBI have warned that white supremacy is an urgent lethal threat facing the nation. Yet Republicans are actively refusing to admit this reality.”
- Read the America’s Voice blog post, “CPAC 2023: Conspiracies, Bigotry and Courting Violence”
