New York Democrat Chuck Schumer was the U.S. senator who decided that a group of tea partiers couldn’t meet in a Capitol hearing room with lawmakers on Thursday, new video shows.
“The chairman tells us this event has to be moved,” Lynden Armstrong, the chief clerk of the Senate Rules Committee told Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee in the video.
When Lee then asked Armstrong who the chairman is, the staffer replied: “Schumer.”
The meeting that Schumer said couldn’t happen in the Russell Senate office building had long been scheduled for tea party activists and lawmakers to discuss the results of the “Tea Party Debt Commission,” a project of the tea party-aligned FreedomWorks organization.
The meeting was moved to a private location at the nearby Hillsdale College when the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration told Lee the gathering violated the rules of the body.
Lee said committee staffers told him that the meeting violated rules that outside groups may not use Senate office space for the purpose of conducting simulated legislative hearings. He also said he was told that because activists were calling the meeting a “hearing,” it violated those rules.
The video was captured by Julie Borowski of FreedomWorks.
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