Providing Amounts for Further Expenses of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, from start to finish, this select panel has abused congressional power in order to intimidate and threaten private people and entities engaged in legal businesses in constitutionally protected health care.

Republicans on the select panel have now spent $1.5 million on this so-called investigation. What do they have to show the American people for spending their hard-earned tax dollars? They have not presented any evidence that any entity broke the law surrounding fetal tissue donation or research. They have not presented any evidence that any entity or physician engaged in the horrifying behavior of which Republicans accuse them. We have heard today on this floor, as we have repeatedly from the select panel, the oft-proven lies that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue for profit. We have heard the lie that the clearly doctored and disproven videotapes bore some relationship to reality.

We have heard today on this floor, as we have repeatedly from the select panel, the oft disproved lies that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue for profit. We have heard the lie that the clearly doctored and disproved videotapes bore some relationship to reality. We have heard the disproved lie that StemExpress procured fetal tissue not for lifesaving medical research, but for profit.

The Republicans have wasted countless hours and millions of dollars running in circles after evidence that doesn't exist. They have insisted over and over again that entities name names, with no promise or plan to protect those individuals; and when asked to explain why they needed names, they simply refused to answer. When Republicans on the panel did get names, they released some of them publicly, even though they knew that doing so would expose the doctors, researchers, and other private individuals to harassment, threats, and even murder.

The Republicans on the panel have repeatedly made baseless accusations of wrongdoing, with no concern for the consequences. They have had a chilling effect on lifesaving medical research through their intimidation tactics. They have flown in the face of congressional rules and abused congressional power to meet their own blatantly partisan ends. And now the Republicans on the select panel have the audacity to ask for more taxpayer money to fund this witch hunt.

In words once addressed to the last Member of Congress to so clearly violate congressional authority, Senator Joseph McCarthy, I ask my Republican colleagues: ``At long last, have you no sense of decency?''

I call on all of my colleagues today to remember their decency. This grotesque and murderous panel should have been shut down long ago. Vote against the previous question, vote against this absurd funding bill, and stand up for the American taxpayer and for the dignity of this institution.

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