Hunter Biden. Anthony Fauci. Afghanistan. The border.
As Senate Republicans feel increasingly bullish about November, where they are fighting to regain control of Congress, they are floating using a new majority to dig into President Biden and his administration starting in 2023.
The potential probes underscore both the headaches awaiting Democrats if the House or Senate flip heading into 2024, but also the shifting power dynamics within the Senate GOP conference where a stream of retirements of more pragmatic-minded senators is elevating newer, more combative Republicans.
“I’m sure there will be plenty of ingenious individuals thinking about what to do on those committees,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.).
Braun, while noting he didn’t have a pet investigation, pointed to GOP Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) as two examples of GOP senators who could have “some real interest in looking into stuff that has not been attended to.”
Johnson, if he wins his reelection bid in November, is poised to chair the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations. Johnson is prevented because of term limits from chairing the full committee again, but the subcommittee gavel comes with a crucial element: subpoena authority.
Asked if there were overlooked issues that he would want to probe, Johnson appeared eager to dig in.
“Like everything?” he told The Hill. “It’s like a mosquito in a nudist colony, it’s a target rich environment.”
Johnson pointed to the administration’s handling of the coronavirus as one area ripe for investigation. Johnson himself has caught flack, and fed Democratic campaign attacks, as one of the most vocal skeptics within the Senate GOP conference of public health measures amid the pandemic, which has killed more than 970,000 people according to Johns Hopkins University data.
“There’s so much more in terms of what happened with our federal health agencies that we need to explore,” Johnson said
Johnson views himself as having broad jurisdictional boundaries and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s boundary lines are more amorphous than other panels because it combines homeland security with a much broader category of government oversight.
Johnson isn’t alone in wanting to dig into the coronavirus response.
Paul, a libertarian-leaning GOP senator who at times is a gnat for Senate GOP leadership, is in line to become the chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee if Republicans win the majority.
Paul atop the committee would be a significant shift. Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), currently the top Republican on the panel, is retiring after this year and has broken with Paul on a number of key issues. Former Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who preceded Burr as the top Republican on the committee but retired after 2020, was a close ally of Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and known for his ability to cut bipartisan deals.
Paul has had high-profile tangles with Fauci during committee hearings and promised to investigate and subpoena Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, if he finds himself with a gavel next year.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said earlier this year.
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NEW: Senate GOP eyes Hunter Biden, Fauci probes after midterms https://t.co/Lqcaxc5AaC
— The Hill (@thehill) March 20, 2022
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