Rep. Barry Moore attacks Adam Schiff’s partisan power grab

Washington, D.C. — Today, Rep. Barry Moore (AL-02) issued the following statement after voting against the reckless Protecting Our Democracy Act, H.R. 5314, introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a partisan attention seeker whose fabricated evidence and lies used to justify his efforts to impeach President Trump have been repeatedly exposed.

“Democrats are incapable of turning away from their fanatical obsession with President Trump and getting to work to fix the multiple catastrophes the Biden administration has unleashed on American families,” said Moore. “This so-called ‘Protecting Our Democracy Act’ is a blatant politically-charged attack on former President Trump to distract from the fact that Democrats simply do not have any answers for the crime, border, inflation, and supply chain crises plaguing Americans. Instead of trying to deflect from President Biden's abysmal failures, House Democrats need to use the little time they have left in the Majority to help the people we swore an oath to represent.”

Schiff’s Political Power Grab incorporates several unnecessary “reforms” that are nothing but an attempt to validate House Democrats’ baseless investigation into the last Administration. While the bill does include some bipartisan reforms, the majority of its provisions inappropriately curb Presidential powers and inject the legislative branch into the functioning of the executive branch.

• Directs the GSA Administrator, a political appointee, to determine the outcome of a Presidential election and begin transition activities within 5 days of the election, which creates opportunity for political abuse by an incumbent President facing a close reelection.

• Restrains a duly elected President’s legitimate executive power to fill top federal agency acting positions with people of the president’s choosing by requiring a President to select a longer-serving federal bureaucrat to fill certain vacancies.

• Limits the firing or reassigning of an agency Inspector General to nine specific reasons, which artificially constrains the President’s role as the Executive Branch head.

• Infringes on a duly elected President’s constitutionally granted pardon authority by forcing the Attorney General to give Congress deliberative and likely privileged communications between senior Administration officials involving presidential pardons, which will inevitably subject those decisions to politically motivated congressional review.