What started as a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on transportation nominees turned into a verbal confrontation between Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), with the former accusing the latter of spying on her and her staff.
While questioning Ryan McCormack, President Trump’s nominee for under secretary of transportation for policy, Moreno said he obtained the vehicle identification numbers (VIN), which are typically visible through the front windshield, of his Democratic colleagues’ cars.
Those vehicles, he said, do not have additional driver assistance technologies, a fact that he says undercuts Democrats’ push to mandate such technologies for cars.
Rosen retorted later in the hearing, saying that she does not have a car in Washington, D.C. In fact, the car that her staff drives her to work in is theirs.
Calling Moreno’s move an “overreach” and an invasion of her and her staff’s privacy, Rosen asked for Moreno to submit the VINs he obtained and what he plans to do with them.
A few minutes later, Moreno and Rosen got into it again. After the Ohio Republican implied that Rosen did not care about the safety of her staffers’ car, Rosen objected and called Moreno’s actions “a little creepy.”
“If you came and asked me for my VIN, I will tell you what I have in my car,” Rosen said.
After Moreno said he obtained the VINs to “expose [Rosen’s] hypocrisy,” the argument further devolved into one about the record-long government shutdown.
Moreno noted that Rosen, like all members of Congress, receives a paycheck during the government shutdown, while her staff, air traffic controllers and other federal workers do not. Rosen replied that she is donating her paycheck, and blamed Republicans, who are “in control of the White House [and] the Senate,” for the funding lapse.
“If you went home to a food bank instead of going to Mar-a-Lago, to eat at a gold-plated dinner while people are starving, you might see and hear your constituents, sir. You are blind to the suffering of your people,” Rosen said, referencing the president’s Halloween party at his South Florida club.
A spokesperson for Moreno told The Hill that the senator did not attend the party at Mar-a-Lago and his remarks “speak for themselves.”
Rosen later posted a video of the exchange on the social platform X and said Moreno should “use his time in more productive ways – like coming to the table and negotiating with Democrats on actions to protect Americans’ access to affordable health care and end this Republican shutdown.”
Updated at 10:18 p.m. EDT
