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.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
RSS