Things exploded in Congress as a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing melted down as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin got into a heated back-and-forth confrontation with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) over his cancellation of hundreds of EPA grants that had been awarded during the Biden Administration.
All it took for Administrator Zeldin to send Sen. Schiff into a loss of composure meltdown was calling him an “aspiring fiction writer” when Sen. Schiff insisted that cutting various forms of wasteful contract would cause massive amounts of cancer and that Zeldin didn’t care a bit about it.
What happened was that Administration Zelding, flipping through a pile of paperwork while trying to look up a grant about which Sen. Schiff was asking him said, referring to Schiff’s involvement in the infamous Steel Hoax dossier on Russia, “By the way, I understand you are an aspiring fiction writer.”
That sent the woke senator into a total tailspin and he started rambling near-incoherently about how cutting waste would lead to cancer and that the increased rates of cancer would be Administrator Zeldin’s legacy with the American people.
Rattling off various forms of cancer while angrily shouting at Zeldin, exhibiting a total loss of composure as he did let loose with a ridiculous ramble, Sen. Schiff snapped, “Oh, yeah. Well, I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency and it won’t affect people’s health, or their water, their air. That, to me, is a big fiction, Mr. Zeldin.” Continuing, Schiff snapped, Your legacy will be more lung cancer — it’ll be more bladder cancer, more head and neck cancer.”
Continuing his rant, the senator went on to snap, “There’ll be more breast cancer, more leukemia and pancreatic cancer, more liver cancer, more skin cancer, more kidney cancer, more testicular cancer, or colorectal cancer — more rare cancers of innumerable varieties. That will be your legacy. … My kids are gonna be breathing that air, just like yours.”
Still not done with his composure-lacking rant, Schiff started attacking Zeldin for supposedly not caring about his children, saying, “I think Mr. Zeldin, if your if your children were drinking water, if your children were drinking water in Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn’t be so cavalier about whether there was lead in their water.”
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Further, Schiff claimed that Zeldin didn’t care about the future of his children because he was beholden to the oil lobby, claiming, bizarrely, “Maybe you would give a damn instead of coming in here and suggesting that any grant that takes lead out of the water must be waste, fraud or abuse, because you need the money for a tax cut for rich people, because you’re totally beholden to the oil industry. You could give a rat’s ass about how much cancer your agency causes.”
Concluding, as Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) banged her gavel and told him that his time was up, Sen. Schiff let his voice rise and was practically shouting at Zeldin about the cancer issue, declaring, “You could give a rat’s as* about how much cancer your agency causes.” Watch the meltdown here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video