Republicans are reviving well-worn political scandals as they bid to seize control of Congress in mid-term elections while seeking to check former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s momentum towards a possible presidential bid in 2016.
Republican leaders and strategists have steadily rolled out the plan in recent weeks, including the House of Representatives voting to recommend the attorney general appoint a special counsel to probe IRS targeting of political groups.
However, Thursday marked a potential watershed, when the House, pushed by Speaker John Boehner, voted to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi.
The two scandals consumed Washington for months in 2012 and last year, and the Republican Party managed to put the administration, including Clinton, on the back foot.
The question is whether re-investigation of the scandals at a time lawmakers struggle to cooperate on jobs initiatives to improve a shaky US economy will rally voters to the GOP side, or prompt a backlash.
“This is a story that’s not going to go away,” Representative Joe Barton said of Benghazi.
No fewer than eight investigations have been conducted on the tragedy, in which four Americans were killed by extremists, including the US ambassador to Libya.
Republicans insist the White House interfered politically in the attack’s aftermath, and that White House “stonewalling” is only making it worse.
“This doesn’t need to be, shouldn’t be, and will not be a partisan process,” Boehner said as the House, on a party-line vote, approved the new Benghazi probe, whose chair will be two-term Representative Trey Gowdy, a Tea Party Republican.
“We will not take any shortcuts to the truth, accountability, or justice. And we will not allow any sideshows that distract us from those goals,” he said.
However, that is exactly how Representative Steve Israel, head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, sees it.
“These are political strategies Republicans have to excite their base in the mid-term election,” Israel said, adding that the broader electorate will not bite.
Voters “want us focused on the economy and not these distractions,” he said.
Another reason for the refocus could be the improving performance of US President Barack Obama’s controversial healthcare law, highlighted on Wednesday by testimony from insurers who said premiums were not soaring as Republicans predicted and that the vast majority of enrollees have paid their coverage.
Conservatives who relentlessly sought the law’s repeal and blasted its disastrous rollout last year were now “pivoting” away to past scandals, Israel said.
“When one issue fades, they’ve got to invent another one,” he said.
Republican National Committee press secretary Kirsten Kukowski said it was “ridiculous” to expect her party to abandon the Obamacare campaign theme.
“There are many issues that the American people are not happy with, whether it’s Obamacare, the economy or Benghazi,” she said.
Adding to Republican pressure, a House panel on Thursday voted to subpoena US Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki over accusations that a “waiting list” for sick veterans at an Arizona hospital contributed to deaths there.
The administration has found itself knee-deep in investigations, Kukowski stressed, because “from the very beginning the Democrats have been handling these issues in a non-transparent way.”
In private, however, Republican strategists admit the party has revived Benghazi because it serves as a political battering ram against Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential frontrunner in 2016.
Clinton, for her part, opposes a new probe, but complained that some Republicans “choose not to be satisfied.”
“That’s their choice, and I do not believe there is any reason for it to continue in this way, but they get to call the shots in the Congress,” she said on Wednesday at the Ford Foundation.
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