A congressional Democrat on Sunday said it was "preposterous" that witnesses are still instructed to say "so help me God" in their oaths before testifying before Congress -- after his Democratic-led committee attempted to remove the God reference from its oaths earlier this year.
California Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman made the comments on The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethought Matters†program, which bills itself on its website as "an antidote to religion on the airwaves and Sunday morning sermonizing."
"Well, unfortunately, it's been kind of a sporadic standard," Huffman said. "Some committees have dropped the oath, others have not. I sit on the Natural Resources Committee and in our original proposed rules for the committee, we proposed that we drop the oath or we allow witnesses to simply say it voluntarily if they chose to, which to me makes perfect sense."
The members of Congress presiding over panels have the authority to decide the contents of the oaths for witnesses. In February, Louisiana Republican Rep. Mike Johnson called out House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., for leaving out "so help me God" from an oath he administered. Nadler promptly apologized and re-administered the oath, this time including the reference to God.
Video posted on Twitter by Johnson in March showed that the phrase "so help me God" was left out of an oath administered by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., during a Judiciary subcommittee hearing. When Johnson objected, Nadler intervened, telling Johnson, “We do not have religious tests."
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., similarly omitted the God reference at a February Energy Committee hearing. The New York Times reported, however, that she was reading from a manual that her Republican predecessor used, and apparently was not making a secular stand.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-dem-laments-presence-of-god-in-congressional-oaths-its-just-preposterous
