Washington D.C. -Today, Rep. Elijah. E. Cummings issued the following statement in response to the announcement by House Speaker John Boehner that he will be resigning his post as Speaker and leaving the House of Representatives:
“Today is a sad day for the House of Representatives. The Republican party is at war with itself, and although an extreme minority of ideologues has won this battle, the American people are losing. Yesterday, the Pope urged Congress to work together, but today Speaker Boehner apparently determined he cannot achieve this goal, particularly in the face of relentless and reckless attacks by extremists in his own party whose actions will lead to more chaos, not compromise. I thank the Speaker for his service, and I urge all of my colleagues to put the American people before partisan politics."
This past Monday, all 18 Democratic Members of the Oversight Committee warned that the campaign by the conservative House Freedom Caucus to attack Planned Parenthood was in fact “part of a broader power struggle to unseat House Speaker John Boehner, led by an extreme wing of the Republican Party that is using this issue to force a government shutdown unless the Speaker bows to their demands."
These warnings proved prescient.
More than half of the founding members of the House Freedom Caucus are also Members of the Oversight Committee, including Rep. Mark Meadows, who introduced the resolution to unseat Speaker Boehner on July 28, two weeks after David Daleiden, the head of the Center for Medical Progress, publicly released the first of his secretly-recorded videos.
The next day, on July 29, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Chairman of the Freedom Caucus and also a Member of the Oversight Committee, joined 17 other Republicans in sending a letter to Boehner warning that they “will not support any funding resolution-an appropriations bill, an omnibus package, a continuing resolution or otherwise-that contains any funding for Planned Parenthood, including mandatory funding streams."
Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz then teamed with Jordan to launch the Committee’s investigation, sending five letters together over the past month seeking documents and other materials. Jordan stated previously that he and other conservatives are “fed up " with the current Republican leadership and that he founded the Freedom Caucus with the goal of “moving things in a conservative manner."
