Some Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are encouraging leaders to scrap the chamber’s Select Committee on China once their party takes over next year.
“For a lot of what the China committee was doing — we’ve already got a Foreign Affairs Committee, we’ve already got the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific,” California’s Rep. Ami Bera, the top Democrat on that subcommittee, told Semafor. “We could do a lot of the work; I think Ways and Means [Committee] could do a lot of the trade policy stuff.”
A spokesperson for New York’s Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs committee, told Semafor that “we will follow the lead of the incoming speaker on how he wants to handle the China select committee, but the Foreign Affairs Committee is well poised to conduct oversight of this administration’s China policy.”
The committee’s current chair, Michigan Republican Rep. John Moolenaar, released a statement last week urging Democrats not to dismantle it. Other Democrats are pushing for the committee to broaden its focus beyond China if they opt to keep it next Congress. Still others in the party are worried about the politics of axing the committee for parochial committee leadership reasons, given recent China-related controversies.
