Signs are placed behind seats of committee members at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington on November 13.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Republicans involved in today’s hearing are signaling they are unlikely to engage in the partisan theatrics that have been the staple of past hearings, worried that doing so would shift focus away from their defense of President Trump.
While the GOP lawmakers and aides said yesterday that they weren’t ruling out raising objections to disrupt the highly anticipated proceedings, they were indicating privately and publicly they didn’t want to resort to the kind of antics and process arguments that have so far overshadowed their arguments.
Asked today if they would raise procedural objections to drag out the proceedings, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said:
However: Republicans are still planning to bash House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff over his handling of the proceedings. But Republicans made clear that a hearing beset by procedural or dilatory tactics wasn’t a central component of any hearing strategy.
“Clearly we’ve got a series of questions we’d like to get on the record from both witnesses,” Rep. Mike Conaway, a Republican on the Intelligence panel, told CNN.
While the process argument dominated Republican public comments for weeks, such as when scores of GOP lawmakers barged into the closed proceedings, the public phase has led to a pointed – and some members say natural – shift.
While aides said there would likely be pointed complaints raised about the process up to this point – and that if Democrats took the hearing in a direction Republicans weren’t prepared for, things could shift – there was no central strategy to try and shut down or bottle up the hearings.
“We know everyone’s watching and we think we’re on the right side of the case on the substance,” one senior GOP aide said. “Why would we want to get in the way of that?”