The committee ‘has the broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time”…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Two powerful Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform continued to push a narrative of election impropriety in the Georgia governor’s race, demanding that its winner, Gov. Brian Kemp, hand over massive amounts of documentation from the 2018 election.
On Wednesday, Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jamie Raskin, chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, sent letters to Kemp and to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office Kemp held previously.
The Oversight committee “has the broad authority to investigate ‘any matter’ at ‘any time’ under House Rule X,” asserted the two Maryland Democrats in clarifying how a Georgia matter would fall under their federal purview.
However, the two phrases in quotation marks did not come directly from the section that outlined the jurisdictions of the Oversight committee and appeared to be taken out of context from an earlier portion of the chamber’s Standing Rules.
Kemp narrowly defeated one-time rising Democrat star Stacey Abrams by a margin of 50.2 to 48.8 percent in the November election.
Abrams subsequently refused to concede, even after it became clear that challenges would not overturn the result, nor force a run-off by lowering Kemp’s total below the 50 percent mark.
Among the Oversight congressmen’s accusations, they said Kemp stole the election by canceling the registrations of 1.4 million inactive voters.
Moreover, they said, 53,000 Georgians—many of them minorities—who attempted to register in 2018 had their applications put on hold by the Secretary of State’s Office.
“The Committee is particularly concerned by reports that Georgians faced unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during the 2018 election,” said the Oversight letters.
The Democrats also blamed Kemp for the state’s alleged closure of more than 200 polling places, specifically targeting minority precincts.
They claimed voters were forced to wait in line for hours to cast ballots “even though hundreds of available voting machines sat unused in government warehouses.”
The committee gave the Georgia officials two weeks to furnish the massive trove of requested documents covering a time span from Jan. 1, 2017 to present.
Fishing Expeditions
Opponents have criticized the Congressional Democrats for their preoccupation with partisan investigations.
Last week, the Oversight committee held a public hearing for convicted felon Michael Cohen, the former lawyer of President Donald Trump—despite the fact that Cohen’s criminal charges included lying to Congress previously.
On Monday, House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler mailed out 81 letters pursuant to his investigative threads, prompting Trump to condemn the fishing expedition via Twitter.
Now that they realize the only Collusion with Russia was done by Crooked Hillary Clinton & the Democrats, Nadler, Schiff and the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY. 81 letter sent to innocent people to harass them. They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2019
However, Democrats have retorted that they can “walk and chew gum at the same time”—or in this case that they can continue the partisan impeachment push against Trump while also pursuing investigations of other partisan causes.
Claims of disfranchisement have become a familiar talking point for the Left recently, with a renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act among its top agenda items, along with socialist initiatives like free college, Medicare for all and the Green New Deal.
Democrats hope specifically to derail the efforts of many Southern states to implement voter ID laws, which are intended to prevent fraudulent would-be voters, such as illegal immigrants, from casting ballots.
Abrams has continued to levy accusations of election theft against Kemp, fashioning herself into a figurehead of minority-voter suppression, and has established a political-action committee specifically to advocate for the cause.
Not to be outdone, in a recent speech that ostensibly commemorated the 1960s civil rights march in Selma, Ala., defeated 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton likened her own run to Abrams’ failed Georgia campaign, claiming that both had been the victims of racism.
“I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and I will tell you, it makes a really big difference,” Clinton said.