The latest House Republican investigative boondoggle has lumbered into existence with the first hearing this week. It went off the rails nearly as much as the Benghazi committee’s Hillary Clinton interrogation, but with the added dash of crazy of it being about “baby parts.”
Four of the six people called to testify at Wednesday’s hearing were openly anti-abortion, and the discussion often veered into territory that left lawmakers at a loss for words.
“In our society, have we reached a point where there is an Amazon.com for baby parts, including entire babies?” Rep. Diane Black (R) asked at one point. No one knew quite how to answer.
Because how do you answer that? The special investigative committee, chaired by Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, was formed to keep abortion at the top of the Republican agenda this election cycle, and was nominally going to be about the videos released by an extremist anti-abortion group trying to show that Planned Parenthood illegally trafficked in fetal tissue. Since the videos didn’t show that and every subsequent investigation of Planned Parenthood failed to turn up any wrongdoing and in fact the only indictments to come down have landed on the anti-choice activists, this committee has kind of lost focus. So yesterday’s hearing “focused on the ethics of simply donating fetal tissue from aborted fetuses for scientific research, an act that’s been legal since the 1970s.” Democrats on the committee were quick to point out the extent to which the whole thing is bullshit.