Rep. Nancy Mace’s attempted grilling of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz embarrassingly backfired during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The Minnesota governor appeared before the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee on Wednesday morning to testify on the state’s alleged welfare fraud scandal. But things took a bizarre turn when Mace tried to steer her questioning to a completely different topic.
Mace set a combative tone for her questioning by almost immediately telling Walz, “I hope you learned some lessons from your last hearing.” The governor, who has clashed with President Donald Trump and his administration over their deadly ICE tactics in his state, appeared before the same committee in January, but it is unclear exactly what her barb meant.
After inquiring about funding for autism, she went on to abruptly change her line of questioning and asked, “Governor Walz, what is a woman? Have you learned that lesson? Do you know what a woman is?”
“I’m the governor of Minnesota, congresswoman,” he shot back. “I’m not here to be your prop for your obsession.”
Mace responded by arguing the governor “can’t define fraud” if he was unable to define “what a woman is.”
Walz, the 2024 vice presidential nominee, has pushed back on claims from congressional Republicans that he failed to do enough to stop fraud in his state. Committee Republicans released a report alleging that Walz and the state’s attorney general “knew about the fraud in federal programs administered by the State of Minnesota much earlier than they told the American people.”
Mace, while questioning Walz, accused him of “enabling” fraud by “Somali pirates,” echoing a line used by Trump and his allies to vilify the state’s large Somali population.
Mace herself, meanwhile, is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that she may have improperly claimed more than $9,000 in reimbursements intended to offset housing expenses for members of Congress.
On Monday, Mace said in an X post that she is “not taking seriously” the complaint.
