Since becoming the leading candidate for House speaker, majority leader Kevin McCarthy has been treated with suspicion by some conservative commentators. Sean Hannity is one of them, and in an appearance on Hannity’s Fox News program Tuesday, McCarty faced tough questions from the host about what the current Republican leadership has delivered for conservatives. In the process, the affable majority leader made an unforced error and handed Democrats a significant political cudgel.
After some back and forth about spending cuts and Obamacare, McCarthy brought up the House’s select committee on Benghazi and how it has affected Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable [sic]. But no one would have known any of that happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
Clinton’s campaign, which has been desperate to paint the Benghazi select committee as nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt by Republicans in Congress, jumped into action. Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon took to Twitter:
Speaker-in-waiting confesses what the true goal of taxpayer-funded Benghazi Commitee is. https://t.co/62NgqyGpBE
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) September 30, 2015
And the Clinton campaign was out with a video of McCarthy’s comments saying the Republican admitted the investigation is a “political charade.”
Democrats like Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking member on the Benghazi committee, were quick to blast the would-be speaker, and Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs committee, used the opportunity to call for shutting the select committee down. The ensuing media coverage has certified McCarthy’s comments as a full-fledged gaffe.
Republicans have been arguing since the committee was created in May 2014 that the purpose of the investigation was to find facts about what occurred on September 11, 2012, at the American consulate in Libya. The chairman, Trey Gowdy, has said on many occasions that the committee would “follow the facts wherever they go.” John Boehner, who has taken credit for driving the creation of the committee in the first place, and Gowdy have gone to great lengths to ensure participation in the investigation from reluctant Democrats.
On Tuesday, McCarthy was right to note that the findings of the House committee have been damaging to Clinton’s campaign. He never said the central purpose of the committee was to hurt Clinton’s candidacy, even though it’s a fact that without the committee’s investigation, we might have never found out that Clinton kept a private email server while serving as secretary of state. Democrats may have complained about a politicized investigation, yet the facts the investigation has unearthed have been undeniable, and undeniably bad, for Clinton.
But did McCarthy need to say it publicly? Anyone paying attention to the Democratic primary polls can see that the investigation’s findings have hurt her presidential campaign. McCarthy was clearly frustrated with Hannity’s argument that the current Republican Congress has not achieved much for conservatives, and perhaps it says something about that claim that the best answer he could come up with was the Benghazi committee’s incidental damage to Clinton’s image and electoral standing.
McCarthy is a savvy strategist and a popular figure within the Republican conference, and the comment about the Benghazi committee sounds like it could be a part of his pitch to his fellow House members. But McCarthy might be wise to stick to the other, more forward-looking part of his pitch: that under his speakership, the House would be bolder and more willing to pursue conservative policy solutions on national security, Obamacare, and social issues.
