U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) today joined his colleagues to introduce a resolution to ensure all members of the U.S. House of Representatives have access to impeachment hearing documents. The Let Everyone Access a Copy of the Transcripts Resolution would make a change to House rules to require all closed hearing documents and recordings to be available to all members on the same schedule and basis. Currently, only members who serve on the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Government Reform Committees have access to these documents and hearings.
“It’s ridiculous that less than a quarter of the members serving in the U.S. House of Representatives currently have access to impeachment hearing documents and recordings,” said Davis. “I believe the American people deserve to have this entire process done in the open and with rules that follow precedent and allow for due process. At the very least, every member of Congress should have access to hearing documents and other related information.”
Davis spoke about increasing transparency of the impeachment inquiry on CSPAN last week. Below are excerpts from his interview. Click here to watch the full interview.
When asked if impeachment is keeping the House from passing bipartisan legislation:
“It’s really interesting. I heard a statistic right before I got here that the Democrat majority in the House has issued more subpoenas than House bills have been signed into law. That’s really not what the Democratic majority promised the American people when they gave them control. They said they were going to fix our broken healthcare system. They have yet to put a bill on the floor that is leaving 60 million Americans uninsured or underinsured or having coverage they can’t afford to use. We have a bipartisan trade agreement that if Speaker Pelosi put on the floor today, it would pass overwhelmingly in a bipartisan fashion. It’s not that the bills aren’t out there. Sometimes it’s just that Speaker Pelosi didn’t put the bills that are bipartisan on the floor. Yesterday was a prime example of that. Why in the world when you have a bill that’s co-sponsored by many of my Republican colleagues, and why wouldn’t you just mark that bill up in the House Administration Committee and put it on the floor and get a bipartisan win. No, instead they wanted to add other provisions that they knew would result in just a partisan roll call.”
When asked about the impeachment process from the Democrats and what is coming out of the proceedings:
“That’s the problem, I don’t know what is coming out of these hearings. There are selective leaks coming out of the hearings. I want to hear the perspective of every one of the witnesses. Each witness has their own perspective on what they feel did or did not happen with the issue that they’re in there giving the deposition about. I want to hear from anybody. Let’s open it up. I mean as the Washington Post says, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” There is no way we should have an impeachment inquiry in the leadership appointed secure facility that we have in Washington, D.C. with the Intelligence Committee, Let’s bring it out to the open. If I was Chairman Jerry Nadler, I would be pretty upset this is going through the Intelligence Committee instead of going through the rightful Committee of Judiciary.”
