Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee boycotted the committee’s Tuesday morning mark-up meeting, where members were expected to vote on President Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), and his nominee for Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin.
“I am really disappointed that my friends on the other side — our Democrats on the other side are deliberately boycotting this mark up,” Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said at the meeting. Because the committee is not at a quorum, Republicans cannot move forward in advancing the nominees.
“Why that’s an important thing for them I’ll never understand, because these two nominee are going to go through,” Hatch said.
The top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), explained on Twitter why Democrats did not attend the mark-up vote.
Today @SenateFinance Democrats refused to move forward with nominations of Mnuchin & Price.
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) January 31, 2017
Mr. Mnuchin continued to fail to come clean on shady foreclosure practices that hurt Americans.
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) January 31, 2017
Hatch, meanwhile, said that the “honest approach” would have been for Democrats’ to vote against the nominees.
“Now I am hopeful that when we schedule this again, that they’ll be here,” Hatch said. “But we are going to do this again, throughout the day and see if they will come and do the job that they have been elected and sworn to do.”
“And I am very disappointed in this type of crap, I mean my gosh, there’s no excuse for it,” Hatch said.
Pressure has mounted on Democrats to stall Trump’s nominees, particularly after Trump signed a controversial executive order Friday that halted refugee programs and targeted the immigration of those from seven majority-Muslim countries.
In a statement, Wyden pointed specifically to concerns that both nominees, Price and Mnuchin, misled committee members in their testimonies earlier this month.
“I asked Congressman Price directly if he got an exclusive discount on stock in an Australian biomedical firm, and he said no,” Wyden said. “From the committee’s investigation to company documents to the company officials’ own words, the evidence tells a different story. It looks more and more like Congressman Price got special access to a special deal.”
Price’s allies have continued to defend his stock-trading behavior, and rebutted a Wall Street Journal report published last night alleging he got a discounted, privileged deal on biomedical stocks.
On Mnuchin, Wyden pointed to his denial that “OneWest Bank under his leadership engaged in robo-signing foreclosure documents, but that is indisputably false. “
“Court documents and testimony show that OneWest employees processed hundreds of documents a week, spending only seconds on each, and they routinely did so without verifying their contents,” Wyden said. “What OneWest did is the textbook definition of shady robo-signing practices.”
