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Center Ring at the Republican Circus
by The Editorial
Board
May 8, 2014
The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for
a seat on the Benghazi
kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy
Into a Scandal. Half
the House has asked to “serve” on the committee, which is
understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while
waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand.
They won’t pass a serious
jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House
Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing
nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration. On Thursday,
they voted to create a committee to spend
“such sums as may be necessary” to conduct an investigation of the
2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi,
Libya. The day
before, they
voted to hold in contempt Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service
official whom they would love to blame for the administration’s crackdown on
conservative groups, if only they could prove there was a crackdown, which they
can’t, because there wasn’t.
Both actions stem from the
same impulse: a need to rouse the most fervent anti-Obama wing of the party and
keep it angry enough to deliver its donations and votes to Republicans in the
November elections. For a while it seemed as if the Affordable Care Act would
perform that role, but Republicans ran into a problem when the country began to
realize that it was not destroying American civilization but in fact helping
millions of people.
Party leaders needed something
more reliable, so they went back and revived two dormant scandals from last
year, the embers of which were faithfully tended by Republican adjuncts on Fox
News and talk radio. Their hope is to show that the administration is corrupt
and untrustworthy, and if Hillary Rodham Clinton also gets roughed up in the
process, so much the better.
Four Americans, including the
United States ambassador,
died in Benghazi,
and their deaths have been crassly used by Republicans as a political cudgel,
wildly swung in the dark. They have failed to provide proof for any number of
conspiracy theories about the administration’s failures, including the
particularly ludicrous charge from Representative Darrell Issa that Mrs.
Clinton, then the secretary of state, told the Pentagon to “stand down” and not
help defend the American compound.
In fact, investigations
by two congressional committees(including one run by Republicans) found
that there was never any kind of “stand-down order” or request. But Mr. Issa
and others keep repeating it because, for their purposes, the facts don’t
matter.
Now Republicans are frothing
about a
newly released email message showing that the White House wanted Susan
Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations at the time, to go on
television in 2012 and make the case that the attack was not a failure of
administration policy. The message should have been turned over earlier because
all it shows is a routine attempt to spin the news in the most favorable way to
the White House. Though it is not the slightest evidence of a cover-up, it has
become the foundation for the committee’s existence. Demonstrating the panel’s
true purpose, Republican political operatives are already
raising money by stoking donor anger on Benghazi.
Democrats who are now
debating whether to participate in the committee shouldn’t hesitate to skip it.
Their presence would only lend legitimacy to a farce.
Similarly, the Justice
Department should not press Ms. Lerner’s contempt citation before a grand jury.
She invoked her Fifth Amendment rights at a hearing last year and refused to
testify, but Republicans claim, without foundation, that she waived those
rights by first proclaiming her innocence. Her refusal, they said, was
contemptuous of Congress. Little nuisances like constitutional rights or basic
facts can’t be allowed to stand in the way when House Republicans need to whip
up their party’s fury.
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