Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said on Sunday that President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, “was being bullied” by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) during the heated House Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing on Thursday at which Waters told Jordan to “shut your mouth.”
While appearing on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart,” Waters she saw the hearing as an opportunity for members of Congress to learn more about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic from Fauci.
“While he was there, and he has so much credibility, he was being bullied, and there was an attempt to basically shut him down by Congressman Jordan,” she added. “We only have limited time. We only have five minutes each, and he does not respect the chair. He does not respect the other members. He speaks over time.”
During the hearing, Jordan and Fauci both raised their voices as the Ohio representative accused Fauci of promoting policies that “trampled” on personal liberties. Fauci in turn maintained that his recommendations had to do with public health, not personal liberty.
When Jordan’s time expired, he continued to speak, leading to Waters saying to him, “You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth.”
“I simply tried to, you know, intervene in the way that — to tell him what needed to be said,” Waters told Capehart. “I know that I’m different from a lot of politicians, and I do, you know, take the opportunity to say what I think needs to be said at a particular time, and that’s what I did.”
Fauci said on Sunday that comments and accusations like Jordan’s are “quite frustrating” while appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I don’t enjoy those kind of confrontations, but, I mean, it was very, very clear that he was talking about the liberties that were being restricted,” Fauci told host Dana Bash. “This has nothing to do with liberty, Dana. We’re talking about the fact that 560,000 people in our country have died. We’re talking about [60,000] to 70,000 new infections per day. That’s the issue. This is a public health issue. It’s not a civil liberties issue.”