Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says that Senate Republicans will conduct thorough oversight of President Trump’s use of executive power and predicted there could be additional “explosive” Senate hearings with senior Cabinet officials, similar to the fiery exchanges between senators and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month.
Thune said Wednesday that Republicans senators “have a responsibility as an independent, coequal branch of the government to make sure that we’re doing appropriate oversight of these decisions.”
He pointed to what he called the “explosive” Senate Finance Committee oversight hearing with Kennedy earlier this month, and predicted that his GOP colleagues wouldn’t shy away from asking senior Trump administration officials tough questions at future hearings.
“There was a very, rather, I would say argumentative, explosive hearing a few weeks ago in front of the Senate Finance Committee,” he said. “I expect that will continue.”
Thune made his comments during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, who pressed the Republican leader about Senate committee chairs not doing more to push back on President Trump’s threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of television networks that criticize him or the president’s exhortation that Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute his political opponents.
Bash read off a litany of Trump’s most controversial recent actions, including firing the heads and board members of independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, and the pressure on Bondi to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. She asked whether Americans should take the “silence” of GOP senators as support for those actions.
Thune laughed slightly and said “there’s a lot of rhetoric” but Republican senators will wait and see what actions Trump and his administration will take in the wake of the president’s bombshell statements.
Thune said he has “every confidence” that Bondi “is going to make good decisions with respect to how she uses her prosecutorial powers,” and he pushed back on Trump’s efforts to pressure Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates.
“I think we ought to have an independent Fed. I’ve said that, I’ve made that abundantly clear,” he said.
The South Dakota senator argued it’s not unusual for presidents and members of their party to clash from time to time on the scope of executive branch power.
“I’ve been around several administrations, several presidents. Every one of them tries to assert as much executive power as they possibly can. And sometimes that gets tested in courts and obviously sometimes there’s oversight that happens through the Congress, through the power of the purse,” Thune said, referring to Congress’s power under the Constitution to raise revenues and spend federal funding, something that Trump has challenged by trying to claw back billions in already appropriated dollars.
Source: The Hill - News
