The two-year tit-for-tat battle between the parties over who is qualified for particular positions on Capitol Hill intensified on Tuesday when Speaker Kevin McCarthy formally rejected two Democrats — Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) asked McCarthy in a letter on Saturday for Schiff and Swalwell to join the Intel panel, which is made up of people chosen by the Speaker.
McCarthy, however, asserted that Schiff and Swalwell are unfit to be members of a panel with authority over and access to delicate national security matters because of their prior conduct.
In a letter to Jeffries on Tuesday, he stated, “I am hereby rejecting the selections of Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell to serve on the Intelligence Committee in order to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities.
The action was expected.
Since Democrats forced votes to remove Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) from their committees in 2021 over allegations that they had encouraged violence against some of their Democratic colleagues, Republicans have been outraged about the matter. After McCarthy declined to discipline either senator internally inside the GOP conference, where such disciplinary proceedings are usually administered, the eviction votes followed.
However, McCarthy refuted claims that his choice of Schiff and Swalwell was an act of retaliation against Greene and Gosar on Tuesday.
“This is not anything political. This is not similar to what the Democrats did,” McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday evening just outside his office in the Capitol.
In addition to working as the chief impeachment manager of Trump’s first impeachment, Schiff, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, had spearheaded a number of investigations into the former president. This increased his national profile and made him unpopular with Trump’s fans.
Regarding Trump’s ties to Russia, McCarthy has accused him of misleading the public, a claim that Schiff has dismissed as political retaliation.
“His objection seems to be that I was the lead impeachment manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment and that we held him accountable for withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from Ukraine in order to try to extort that country into helping his political campaign,” Schiff told reporters on Tuesday.
Schiff claimed that McCarthy was made dependent on those conservatives as a result of the process and that his path to the Speakership was only successful after he won over former detractors like Greene.
“I think it’s just another body blow to the institution of Congress, that he’s behaving this way, but it shows just how weak he is as a Speaker that he has to give in to the most extreme elements of his conference, in this case the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Paul Gosars,” Schiff said.
Swalwell is facing numerous types of claims. McCarthy has said that a private FBI briefing on the incident has convinced him that Swalwell is a national security danger. The California Democrat was connected to a suspected Chinese spy who had donated money for his 2014 campaign, a revelation that was not made public until 2020.
Schiff, Swalwell and Omar issued a joint defense minutes after McCarthy sent his letter, tying the GOP leader to the right flank of his party.
“It’s disappointing but not surprising that Kevin McCarthy has capitulated to the right wing of his caucus, undermining the integrity of the Congress, and harming our national security in the process,” the trio said. “He struck a corrupt bargain in his desperate, and nearly failed, attempt to win the Speakership, a bargain that required political vengeance against the three of us.”
