EXCLUSIVE: House Republicans and Democrats joined together last month to create a new committee focused on U.S. competition with China, but that single balloon deflated that lofty idea.
When House Republicans and Democrats joined together last month to create a new committee focused on U.S. competition with China, supporters of the project expressed confidence it could show Beijing that American leaders weren’t hopelessly divided along partisan lines.Last week, the suspected Chinese spy craft began floating across the U.S. at an altitude of 60,000 feet, just days after the House’s new China committee was officially organized.
By the time the balloon dropped languidly into the ocean off the Carolina coast on Saturday—felled by a F-22 fighter jet and perhaps a few chest-thumping tweets from politicians—the opportunity that the select committee had presented just days earlier had seemed to diminish. Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jake Auchincloss , said he was still optimistic about the “generational opportunity” the committee presents, but found himself disappointed by “the tenor of the response from the GOP.”
Rep. Ro Khanna , another Democrat on the panel who expressed broad confidence in the possibility of bipartisan work, said it doesn’t help that Republicans “go on television and say that the president had a dereliction of duty when the president was simply following what the military suggested.” Gallagher said while some other established committees might have jurisdiction over issues like the spy balloon, he’s hoping the panel can find ways to “elevate it, put it in a geostrategic context and also use the incident to illustrate something fundamental about the Chinese Communist Party.”
Others suggested it could be a means of toying with top U.S. officials; Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was slated to visit Beijing as well as Taiwan this week. His trip has now been postponed—though Blinken says he still intends to visit the region.
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