GOP Lawmaker Outraged Hearing Held on Party Crashers Before Fort Hood Shooting

A senior House Republican questioned Thursday how House Democrats can hold hearings on the security breach at a White House state dinner last week before holding hearings on the Fort Hood shooting spree last month.

"How can it be that the House Committee on Homeland Security has launched an investigation and called hearings within a week to look into the couple who crashed a recent White House state dinner, yet a month after Fort Hood there has yet to be a single congressional hearing into the Fort Hood attack," Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said in a written statement.

"I fear that our nation is returning to the naive security outlook of Sept. 10, 2001, when radical Islamic terrorist attacks were considered a law enforcement and criminal problems and not threats to our national security," he said.

The Homeland Security Committee began its hearing Thursday into how Tareq and Michaele Salahi got into the White House state dinner last week without invitations -- an incident that has captured national attention.

But lawmakers have delayed a congressional investigation into the shooting rampage that killed 13 and wounded 29 at Fort Hood last month. The Senate Armed Services Committee postponed its briefing last month at the behest of the White House despite calls from some lawmakers to press forward with a probe.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee kicked off the first probe into the shooting late last month.