Representative Derrick Van Orden (J6 - Wisconsin) is continuing to receive fallout from his drunk raging at teenaged Senate pages last week.
Representative Mark Pocan (D - Wisconsin) sent a letter to Representative Bryan Steil (R- Wisconsin) asking him to release the security footage from the incident. Steil is the Chairman of the House Committee on Administration and therefore as jurisdiction over matters of Capitol security. After summarizing the incident, Pocan continued with a sound rationale that is on a lot of people's minds:
If the widely shared reports are accurate, Representative Van Orden’s behavior toward the pages on July 26 was completely unacceptable and further calls into question his fitness for office. It is critical that members of the public, including his constituents in Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, know the truth of what happened that evening. As the Chairman of the House Committee on Administration, you have already provided security footage to members of the public, including the media. In fact, in February of this year you provided over 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the insurrection on January 6, 2021 to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and stated at the time that the move was made in an effort to be transparent and that “this majority is focused on accountability, transparency and restoring the People’s trust. ”
Representative Van Orden’s constituents deserve to know the truth about the man elected to serve them and releasing this footage would provide much-needed transparency into this potentially very disturbing incident. Therefore, given your past demonstrated support for transparency and the serious nature of the allegations surrounding Representative Van Orden’s threatening behavior toward a group of minors, I call on you to immediately release the security footage from inside the Capitol Rotunda on the evening of July 26 and early morning hours of July 27, 2023.
It was quite an astute move on Pocan's part. Not only did it keep Van Orden and his boorish behavior in the spotlight, it put Steil in an uncomfortable position since he and Van Orden are both Wisconsin Republicans.
Surprisingly, Steil reached out to Capitol Police to ask about the footage:
House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil says he has reached out to Capitol Police about surveillance footage from an incident in which freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden berated a group of Senate pages in the Capitol — a move that came after a fellow Wisconsin congressman called on Steil to release the video.
Steil, a Republican from Janesville, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a statement that he “requested input from the US Capitol Police due to the footage in question involving minors employed by the Senate."
In another new detail, Van Orden has once again proven that he is a few French fries short of a fast food value meal:
In an interview on the Dan O'Donnell Show last week, Van Orden attacked Democrats and the media over the story and speculated that the pages could have been “politically connected.”
“You gotta ask yourself there, Mr. O’Donnell, why is this a thing?” Van Orden said. “Were those pages related to anybody? Were they? If they weren’t politically connected — maybe, I don’t know. Look into it.”
He later added: “I’m not going to apologize for making sure that anybody, I don’t care who you are and who you’re related to, defiles this House. That can't happen on my watch, man."
Van Orden is saying that he sees nothing wrong with drunkenly cussing kids out and physically intimidating them but that it's only a story because one of the kids is politically connected. In other words, he admits that he is OK with verbally and emotionally abusing kids.
Just when a person thought their opinion of him couldn't get any lower.
