The House Oversight Committee is full of loud voices. What’s the quiet Kansan saying?
House Republicans said the evidence they had collected on the financial transactions of President Joe Biden’s family members would make the Watergate scandal look like jaywalking.
So in early May, people tuned in to watch Rep. James Comer of Kentucky and other Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee attempt to explain how members of the Biden family had received money from foreign businesses while Biden was in office as vice president through a tangled web of financial ties that fell short of directly tying the money to Biden.
Standing in the background was a mild-mannered Kansan — Rep. Jake LaTurner.
“I had somebody bring it up and say, ‘I saw him standing behind Comer, he looked kind of mean and needs to be the Jake we know,’” said state Sen. Tim Shallenburger, a Baxter Springs Republican who has been a fixture of Kansas politics for decades. “And I said, ‘he is. He just is on a big committee and you stand behind him and you get your picture in the paper. That’s how it works.’”
LaTurner, a Republican from southeastern Kansas, has been on the Oversight Committee since he arrived in Washington in 2021. But since Republicans took control in January, the committee, packed with some of the loudest voices in Congress, has aimed its lens directly at the White House.
In order to get to LaTurner in a committee meeting, one has to sit through comments from some of the most polarizing members of Congress.
There are two members of the progressive “Squad” — Rep. Cori Bush, a St. Louis Democrat, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. And there are several members of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus including Arizona Republicans Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, who has been connected to white nationalists, Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican known for supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who has also supported QAnon conspiracy theories but appears to be currying favor with McCarthy.
LaTurner paints himself as the levelheaded voice on the committee.
“I see my role as being a good committee member that is not distracted by flashy politics, but putting my head down and doing the work and doing the research and making sure that we are that we’re conducting legitimate oversight,” LaTurner said in an interview with the Star.
But his presence on the committee signifies that LaTurner, who was first elected to the Kansas Senate at 24, is aware he is a member of a Congress where public attention can be as valuable as passing meaningful legislation.
“The committee is made up of all kinds of people,” Shallenburger said. “And isn’t it good that they’ve got levelheaded folks on there as well. He’s Republican and he disagrees with the Democrats and he disagrees with Biden on a number of things, but he’s not necessarily mean spirited about it.”
Over the past few decades, more of the major pieces of legislation in Congress have been driven by party leaders, instead of the committee process that used to hand out power more broadly. The top-down approach has shifted the focus for many committees, where they spend as much time on oversight activities as they do on actual legislating.
LaTurner said the focus on government accountability is important in an era where people consistently report that they don’t have faith in Congress.
“Trust in government is at an all time low,” LaTurner said. “People don’t have faith in their governmental institutions anymore, and that has to change. But the only way for it to change is for us to come clean about when something goes wrong. To talk about how money is spent or misspent, to come clean with them, to be honest about it, and to hold people accountable when they do something wrong.”
Oversight becomes even more aggressive under divided government and there’s little chance of major legislation — outside of the required bills Congress needs to pass — making it to the president.
The Oversight Committee is appealing above to some because it has a broad jurisdiction. Recent hearings have touched on everything from artificial intelligence, staffing at the border, regulations on gas stoves and Chinese money laundering.
Because it’s so broad, it allows members of Congress to look like they’re weighing in on the issues of the day while capturing the types of clips that can go viral and encourage supporters back home.
“At the end of the day, members of Congress are people responding to incentives and so they are doing things that they think are going to be rewarded,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “I just think we’ve seen, because of changes in the overall political environment, a change in what kind of behavior members think is going to be rewarded. And right now it is more often this kind of attention getting behavior than it is necessarily legislative productivity.”
LaTurner said when he’s in Kansas people ask him about how COVID-19 money was spent and “Joe Biden and to what extent he was involved in influence peddling.”
He cultivated a relatively noncontroversial reputation in Topeka, where he pushed for more government accountability on open records and for things like term limits and preventing nepotism in politics. But his first vote as a member of the U.S. House was to invalidate the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, an effort that was driven by false claims that the election was stolen by former President Donald Trump.
State Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan. Democrat, said he worked with LaTurner in the state Senate and liked him. But he expressed concern that LaTurner was “lipsyncing” the agenda of more conservative lawmakers in attempt to appeal to his base.
“He’s really a bright study, Rep. LaTurner is, and he’s got tremendous potential,” Haley said. “He’s young enough that he could outlive having had these flirtations with the Trump mentality and I’m optimistic because I really do like Jake. We’ve always worked well together and he’s my congressman now.”
LaTurner was dismissive of the idea that the committee is too political, or that it’s targeting Biden to hurt his reelection chances in 2024. But Comer has remained focused on investigating Biden, particularly his family’s ties to foreign money.
“Jake helps us get answers to tough questions, and never loses sight of our mission to root out waste, fraud, and abuse,” Comer wrote in a statement. “We appreciate his good instincts, knowledge, and expertise as we strive for legislative solutions to ensure our government works for the American people.”
LaTurner has said he thinks the Biden investigation is important and said the public deserves to know about his family’s finances but dodged a question about Trump family’s business dealings by implying they should have been looked into by previous oversight committees. There was an ongoing investigation into Trump’s finances that was stopped when Republicans took control of the committee.
“The payments that were made from foreign countries to the Biden family, is a legitimate issue that we have to talk about,” LaTurner said. “And if that has political consequences for the President, that’s life. That should not be our intention on the committee though.”
In the last redistricting battle, the northern part of Wyandotte County was added to LaTurner’s district, adding Democratic-leaning voters to his conservative district that also represents Topeka.
Haley said he hoped LaTurner would pay attention to the new voters in his district and avoid becoming the type of congressman who focuses on getting attention from the cable news networks.
“You can’t name other congressional members from different states, but the ones you can name, they’re known for acting a fool,” Haley said.
This story was originally published June 12, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
