On Sept. 10, Congress went back to deal with a seemingly quaint and antique matter, the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t, of course, to address the toll that the virus is still taking in America — hundreds still die every week from the virus, and it has become endemic. Instead, House members simply relitigated decisions from a moment when people were still applying Clorox wipes to their groceries.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to answer questions about his decisions to push nursing homes to admit patients regardless of their COVID-19 status in late March 2020. In the early days of the pandemic, Cuomo had become an overnight star. Anxious liberals tuned into the Democratic then-governor’s daily briefings, broadcast live on cable news, as an antidote to then-President Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic from the White House. Cuomo was so eagerly watched that articles were even written about his nipples as the result of online speculation from those who avoided COVID-19 but acquired cabin fever. 

Since then, of course, Cuomo has been forced to resign after a sexual harassment scandal and has become persona non grata in Democratic politics. After leaving office in 2021, more than a decade into his governorship, he’s moved into the strange netherworld occupied by disgraced politicians who still maintain ambitions for a comeback. Few Democrats are willing to defend the man who once touted himself as “the Love Gov” on cable news while Republicans still find the erstwhile Trump nemesis to be an appealing political target. 

The result was a hearing where COVID-19 often felt like a sideshow. It wasn’t that the virus went unmentioned, nor was the toll it took on the United States ignored. Sitting behind Cuomo were the family members of people who had died in New York nursing homes in the early days of the pandemic and blamed decisions by the Empire State’s former governor for their deaths.

The hearing instead often felt like a means to revisit cable news panels from years past. Democrats and Republicans pressed Cuomo both on his infamous directive to send over 9,000 potentially COVID-19-positive patients back into nursing homes and on the extended efforts by his administration to shift blame for nursing home deaths in the months after. The Cuomo grilling came a day after a committee issued a staff report arguing that his administration had covered up the death toll in nursing homes in 2020 to avoid political blowback. 

Cuomo himself took a confrontational tone with the committee. Its chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), went so far as to say that the committee had only been threatened twice since it was established — once by the Chinese Communist Party and another time by Cuomo’s lawyers. He went on to bemoan that the former New York governor was treating the committee in an unduly hostile manner.

“Today’s hearings were held to understand the COVID-19 pandemic and nursing home problem for the betterment of the future, but it seems you instead prepared for a trial,” Wenstrup said at the end of the hearing. “This isn’t a trial.” 

However, one could have been mistaken at times with some of the combative tones of questioning, including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who demanded Cuomo apologize to the families of the deceased for “negotiating a multimillion-dollar book deal” as seniors died in nursing homes. She ended her questioning by proclaiming, “There is a reason why you are the former governor of New York state, and you will never hold elected office again.” That won applause from spectators in a scene more befitting the grand finale of a Matlock episode than a congressional hearing. 

Democrats were not exactly friendly to Cuomo either. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) berated him for brushing aside the difference between the reported mortality rate in New York nursing homes and the true toll by saying, “Who cares? What difference did it make?” in a closed-door interview with the committee.

The difference was that, unlike Republicans, Democrats were willing to join Cuomo in blaming Trump for his handling of the pandemic too. The result was a combative serve and volley of questions and responses where Cuomo, who was the housing and urban development secretary from 1997-2001 in the Clinton administration, at times seemed to imitate the lawyerly deflections of his former boss. That is the former president who infamously once answered a question before a grand jury by saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

When Wenstrup asked Cuomo about the language of the March 2020 directive and if the words “shall” and “must” were “permissive or prescriptive,” Cuomo dodged. “It depends on the context,” he said. Needless to say, the cause of protecting the country from future pandemics was not exactly advanced during the hearing. 

There was blame for this to go around on all sides. The coronavirus pandemic subcommittee is not exactly a repository for the best and the brightest on Capitol Hill. Of the three new committees that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy created during his brief 2023 tenure, it is an odd duck. It’s not for serious bipartisan governance like the China select committee, nor is it there to create cable news fodder like the committee on the weaponization of the government.

The result is that while the chairman and ranking member of the subcommittee are both doctors, Wenstrup and Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA), it also includes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who used some of her time on Tuesday to ask Cuomo if he was a Chinese spy.  

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Despite the massive death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S., the disease has ebbed from the public consciousness in the years since it erupted in March 2020. Only hours after the subcommittee hearing, the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, spent more time on the topic of the alleged culinary uses of household pets than the pandemic that reshaped American life in the past half-decade.

Instead, it’s been forgotten as a relic of 2020. Nothing made that more obvious than revisiting it with Cuomo, another political relic of that not-so-distant past. 

Ben Jacobs is a reporter in Washington, D.C.