The Alaska House voted 39-1 on Monday to remove far-right Republican Rep. David Eastman from the House Judiciary Committee, leaving the Wasilla legislator without a seat on any committee for the rest of the 33rd Legislature.
Eastman is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members and has been such a thorn in the side of fellow Republicans that the Republican House Majority Caucus organized without him. As a legislator without a caucus, he’s not entitled to any committee seats but was invited by the House Majority to sit on the Judiciary Committee.
Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, said she sought out his membership because she appreciated his different “thought process.”
That different “thought process” was put on display when Eastman asked during a hearing last session whether the death of abused kids could potentially be a “benefit to society” because they would no longer be relying on government services.
Eastman was censured but not removed from the committee. It wasn’t the first time that Eastman had been censured, either. He was censured in 2017 for implying that women — particularly Alaska Native women — intentionally get abortions for free travel. Eastman also faced efforts to disqualify him from holding office for his membership in the anti-government Oath Keepers militia group, whose leadership has been convicted of several crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol (Eastman attended the protests, but there’s no evidence he entered the capitol and has not been charged with a crime).
However, with those remarks about abused children nearly a year ago, it’s not immediately clear what motivated the decision to strip him from the committee, and the House Majority leadership didn’t publicly address the decision ahead of the vote.
Eastman made motions to halt the move but found no support from other House legislators. When he asked for some public explanation of the decision, none came.
“We can only speculate on what that answer is,” he said during floor speeches. “The only thing that I’ve been told by anyone in the majority about the vote we took is that my decision last week to stand up for the constitution did not help majority members in voting to keep me on the committee.”
That would be a reference to his support of taking up Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of $87 million of education funding. While Eastman supported the cut, he argued that holding such a vote was required under the Alaska Constitution.
The House Majority hoped to block the vote, sparing legislators who had supported the funding from choosing between it and angering the governor. But Eastman’s thinking caught on with enough far-right Republicans to override the Majority, and the vote was held on Thursday. The vote failed as was expected, given the high bar for budget overrides, but it also saw several Republicans who had supported the funding vote against restoring it.
House Republicans have put forward an alternative plan with a far smaller — yet permanent — increase to public school funding packed with several far-right Republican priorities like increased funding for homeschool students, potentially relaxed rules for public charter schools and the governor’s proposed bonus for teachers.
With thin margins and pre-existing fractures in the House Majority, passing that education package may prove difficult. Eastman’s vote could be needed to reach a majority, but he made clear during the floor debate that he is not interested in trading his vote for anything.
“I initially declined to sit on the committee, and I declined for one very important reason because there was fear in my constituents and myself that if I were to be put on that committee, my committee seat would be used as leverage — extortion if you will,” he said, getting an objection from another member for impugning the motives of other legislators, before continuing to say, “I didn’t say that had been done, I said I had that concern it would be done.”
Eastman’s seat on the House Judiciary Committee will be filled by fellow Wasilla Republican Rep. Jesse Sumner. Sumner, who is more of a mainstream Republican than Eastman, ran against Eastman in 2020 with the backing of several incumbent Republicans. Following the 2020 redistricting cycle, Sumner and Eastman no longer shared a district.
