Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said someone should probe whether alcohol caused Thursday night’s oral fracas.
Lawmakers speculated that liquor was being consumed before or during the hearing, but it was unclear if members on the Oversight Committee or in the room were imbibing.
“I didn’t see the drinking, but the gentlelady from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury, raised [the issue],” Mr. Raskin told Fox News. “She said there are members drinking in the room, and that’s something that is worth investigating if there was in fact drinking taking place.”
Indeed, Democrat Rep. Stansbury complained during the hearing that lawmakers were boozing it up.
“We have some members in the room who are drinking inside the hearing room … who are not on this committee,” she said.
Other Democrats on the panel, like Rep. Robert Garcia of California, similarly added to the speculation that alcohol was flowing.
“They were talking, they were laughing, quite frankly, some folks were drinking,” he said. “I don’t know that they were doing it in the room, but certainly they were having a good time.”
Thursday night’s House Oversight Committee hearing was already ripe for dysfunction, with Democrats and some Republicans annoyed that the meeting was pushed back until 8 p.m. because a handful of conservative members made the pilgrimage to former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York that morning.
The circus turned wild when Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Texas Democrat, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, battled about the nature of the meeting and Ms. Greene insulted Ms. Crockett’s “fake eyelashes.”
The Texan fired back, calling the Georgian a “beach blonde” while Rep. Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, joined the fray.
Much of the substance of the hearing was lost in the drama that unfolded Thursday and into Friday.
House Republicans were pushing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over the audio from special counsel Robert Hur’s October interviews with President Biden.
The hearing, which saw the panel vote on party lines to advance the contempt resolution, came after Mr. Biden invoked executive privilege to shield the tapes from the House.
The tapes were part of Mr. Hur’s probe into the president’s handling of classified documents, with the prosecutor choosing against charging Mr. Biden and describing him as a “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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