Freedom Line Blog

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey says appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal would be a bad idea because the investigator would still report to the President.

Better, Mukasey said, for congressional investigations to continue, with a potentially ironic assist from one of the most corrupt divisions in the Department of Justice.

“Ironically, if you decide to have a criminal investigation, I would think that perhaps the proper entity to investigate is the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which has been charged politicizing the way it enforces the law and would have an excellent opportunity to redeem itself and get out from under those charges if it were to conduct an impartial investigation,” Mukasey added.

Though I’m a big fan of Mukasey, particularly his tenure as AG, I just don’t see how the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division gets near this case. In order to prove Mukasey right, the Division would have to conclude in its investigation that major wrongdoing occurred, recommending resignations, fines or criminal charges. Anything less and the Division will be accused of rolling out a whitewash to cover for the Obama administration.

This doesn’t even mention the fact that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, as the Mukasey quote alludes to and our own Quin Hillyer has argued, is a breeding ground for corrupt applications of the law. How these legal weasels can be trusted with playing such a sensitive investigation straight is beyond me.

No, the closest we’ll get to an independent arbiter on any of the Obama scandals will be the federal judiciary, and even then there’s no guarantee. Best for the House to continue exercising its oversight responsibilities until they find some smoking guns.

H/T: The Daily Caller

A group of powerful Republicans in the House and Senate is demanding an investigation into potentially illegal fundraising calls by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to private health companies.

In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, three House committee chairmen and two Senate ranking members said, “The Secretary’s actions show an apparent disregard for constitutional principles and may violate the Antideficiency Act, the prohibition against augmenting congressional appropriations, and executive branch ethics laws,” according to reporting by Politico.

As I explain in my column this week, Sebelius has been caught quoting specific dollar amounts that private companies should donate to a pro-ObamaCare community organizing group getting ready to promote the law ahead of this year’s October enrollment.

Whatever GAO decides to do, it’s a near certainty that the relevant Republican-led House committees with jurisdiction over this scandal will soon launch investigations into Sebelius’s conduct.

Earlier this year Michael Barone catalogued a litany of abuses to the rule of law perpetuated under the Obama Administration. “Gangster Government” is the term Barone coined to describe the behavior.

As of Friday, Barone needs to update his list.

Sarah Kliff broke the news that Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been calling health care executives, “asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law…”

Imagine the conversation. A health care CEO gets a personal call from the chief regulator of his business suggesting that the company and the people it employs make financial donations to promote a law administered by the regulator.

Sounds like a suggestion that can’t be refused, right?

As Barone would say, this is Gangster Government.

Republicans in Congress need to push back hard on this abuse of power by Sebelius.

The people running businesses are there to make profits, not spend precious resources on ruinous fights with thugs spending taxpayer money.

If Sebelius can get away with coercing businesses to “donate” money to promote a law that increases her power over them, an awful precedent will be set. She – and any of her successors – will be able to tax, fine and now “fundraise” the very people they regulate.

Fail to pay enough, and say goodbye to your livelihood.

Congress needs to put a stop to Sebelius’ abuse of power. Now.

A new Gallup poll provides more proof that the liberal fixation on gun control and immigration reform isn’t even on the Top Ten list of the most important issues for Americans:

This suggests to me that one way to inject issues 1-10 into the deliberations about gun control and immigration is for Republicans in Congress to ask rhetorically, “Why are we discussing restricting guns and legalizing illegal immigrants when 1) 86 percent of Americans want us help create jobs and help the economy grow, 2) 81 percent want us to make the government work more efficiently and fix our schools, and 3) 77 percent want us to address the financial problems with Social Security and Medicare?”

Rather than letting Democrats pick the two issues that most divide Republicans, GOP members of Congress should be picking issues that divide the opposition. Any of Gallup’s Top Ten are natural strong points for Republicans, and especially conservatives. All they need to do is pick one and start reframing the debate.

Now.

Not only does a newly released version of the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill expand (from 844 to 867 pages) its previous draft, it also “contains 999 references to waivers, exemptions and political discretion,” according to an analysis by Neil Munro of the Daily Caller.

That means the Gang’s new bill has more exemptions per page than ObamaCare; 1.14 per page to 0.78 by the Daily Caller’s count.

As a reminder, there are now two secretly negotiated versions of comprehensive immigration reform circulating on Capitol Hill, and neither of them includes one word of input from the public, issue experts, or other Members of Congress.

If the U.S. Senate under Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) were following a transparent process it would be expected that the introduced version of the Gang’s immigration bill would change and perhaps get bigger after a few weeks kicking around in committee as Senators and their supporters read and tweaked it.

But the fact that there has been no opportunity for amendments to the Gang’s original bill and barely enough time for opponents to read and understand it – and consequently, find out what’s wrong with it – the arrival of this secretly amended version means that non-Gang members are back to square one trying to figure out what the bill actually says and what it actually does.

With 999 exemptions, waivers and grants of discretion to sort through, it would take the better part of a month to diagram how the law will work when implemented, and ferret out all its unintended consequences.

As it is, the full Senate is expected to start voting on the new version as early as next week when Congress returns from its current recess.

This is government by ambush, and conservatives need to kill both the bill and the perverted process that makes it possible.

The editors at National Review Online give some much-needed advice to the congressional GOP:

“The basic outline of a workable strategy is easy to draw up. First, Republicans should explain why Obamacare is unlikely to work. Second, they should finally unite behind an alternative that would let at least as many people get coverage as Obamacare but without the law’s side-effects. Third, they should say that they plan to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as they can do so — whether in one fell swoop, which could occur only under a new president in 2017, or one step at a time. Fourth, they should advance bills that both replace parts of Obamacare and highlight its flaws.”

The most perplexing thing about congressional Republicans is that no one has stepped forward to be the Paul Ryan of health care reform. Ryan spent years in the background learning the federal budget process to construct a clear, workable reform that slows down the growth of entitlement spending while making Medicare and Medicaid more market friendly.

With ObamaCare on the books since 2010, it’s a wonder that no Republican in the House or Senate has taken on the responsibility of putting together an alternative that the GOP can rally around. To my knowledge, no one – not the 16 Republican physicians in Congress or anyone on a relevant committee – is taking steps to make sure there’s a workable replacement in the event conservatives get their wish and repeal ObamaCare.

It’s not enough to be right that ObamaCare is wrong on the merits and impossible to implement. There’s also got to be a contrasting vision of health care reform that is better than ObamaCare.

As of now, we’re still waiting.

The Los Angeles Times has a good piece outlining how House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), a former immigration attorney whose committee has jurisdiction over immigration laws, is planning to contribute to the reform debate begun by the Senate’s Gang of Eight proposal.

In contrast to the Gang’s sprawling 844 pages, Goodlatte is opting for much smaller pieces of legislation that deal with specific issues, such as a guest worker program, border security, and expanding use of E-Verify among employers.

Goodlatte’s process also has another feature that commends it – education for deliberation.

“At the same time, however, the House bills could provide an important educational exercise for many newer GOP lawmakers as they learn the complexities of the immigration debate. Many Republicans represent congressional districts that have very small Latino or immigrant populations, leaving them unfamiliar with the issue. Republican leaders, however, believe that passing immigration reform legislation is vital to their future electoral strategy of attracting Latino voters.

“Goodlatte and others have been conducting study sessions attended by 100 Republican lawmakers to bring them up to speed on immigration issues.”

A big part of Paul Ryan’s popularity is derived from his emphasis on explaining how the current federal system works, where it needs to be fixed, and what solutions will fix the problems. Just like Ryan, Goodlatte seems to realize that Members of Congress, and the public too, will benefit from getting more time, more information, and more debate about how to fix our broken immigration system.

Besides, as ObamaCare has shown, there’s no virtue in “comprehensive” reform if its parts are unintelligible and unworkable. Better to get the policy right the first time.

And the hits just keep on coming.

After news broke that the leadership in both the House and Senate were conspiring to exempt themselves from ObamaCare’s costly insurance exchanges, we’re told that the problem isn’t Congress shirking responsibility for a law it passed.

It’s worse.

The real issue, according to reporting by health policy expert Ezra Klein, is that Congress is too stupid to write a law clear enough to know what it does.

Per Klein:

“Here’s how it happened: Back during the Affordable Care Act negotiations, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed an amendment forcing all members of Congress and all of their staffs to enter the exchanges. The purpose of the amendment was to embarrass the Democrats. But in a bit of jujitsu of which they were inordinately proud, Democrats instead embraced the amendment and added it to the law.
…
“So Grassley’s amendment means that the largest employer in the country is required to put some of its employees — the ones working for Congress — on the exchanges. But the exchanges don’t have any procedures for handling premium contributions for large employers.

“That’s where the problem comes in. This was an offhand amendment that was supposed to be rejected. It’s not clear that the federal government has the authority to pay for congressional staffers on the exchanges, the way it pays for them now in the federal benefits program. That could lead to a lot of staffers quitting Congress because they can’t afford to shoulder 100 percent of their premiums.”

Got that?

Rather than think through how an amendment would alter the structure of a law that, as one of its architects put it recently, “is probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress,” Democrats opted to play games. No wonder the lead author of the law sees “a huge train wreck coming down.”

Whether it’s a fine that’s really a tax, a “family glitch,” or now an ambiguous gap in coverage, ObamaCare’s so-called drafting errors are making it one of the worst written laws ever.

Robert Costa says that if the Senate passes the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, the House of Representatives stands ready to put the brakes on the latest piece of “must pass” legislation. Their mechanism: Regulator order.

“Regular order” allows House Republicans to dictate the pace of legislation and makes “grand bargains” of any sort harder to pass. Consider immigration. Several sources close to the leadership say that even if the Senate passes something on immigration, the bill will be immediately sent to the committees, and then either sent back to the Senate with changes, or rewritten in a bicameral conference committee. This means that the chance of the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill coming to the House floor, as is , is nearly non-existent. House Republicans would first have to mull it, schedule hearings, and then tinker with its legislative language .

That tweaking process could take months, which is just fine with many Republicans, who’d like the public to have as much time as possible to chew over the controversial elements of Obama’s prized bills. The caucus consensus is: The more time Congress takes to consider a bill, the more time the public has to sour on its components.

Unlike ObamaCare where Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic majority rubberstamped the Senate’s rewrite of the nation’s health insurance market, House Republicans want to make sure they know exactly what’s in the Gang’s immigration bill before voting on it.

If necessary, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is even floating the idea of breaking the Gang’s carefully balanced 1,500 page bill into separate pieces. That way, the most popular measures – such as enhanced border security measures – would likely become law, leaving less desirous elements out until supporters can figure out a way to sell them to the American people.

For a caucus that runs only one-half of one branch of government, regular order sounds like a good strategy to employ.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) did the Constitution and the nation it protects a service earlier this week by asking Dianne Feinstein, California’s senior liberal Democratic senator and gun control advocate, two simple questions:

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX) The question that I would pose to the senior Senator from California is would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment, namely, would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

Likewise, would she think that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures could properly apply only to the following specified individuals and not to the individuals that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

Feinstein’s responses were (1) “I’m not a sixth grader,” and (2) “You know, it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for your lecture.”

Note that Feinstein completely fails to articulate either a general principle of constitutional lawmaking, or a reason why regulations pertaining to the Second Amendment could be unique.

This, in a nutshell, is the core problem with modern liberalism. Although liberals pay lip service to the Constitution, they cannot defend their policy positions from the text, structure or purpose of the very document that gives them the power to govern.

A sixth grader knows that kind of logical breakdown creates a serious problem of credibility. A U.S. Senator serving for more than 20 years, not so much.

Click here for the video and transcript of the exchange.

H/T: RealClearPolitics

I don’t know of a major journalist other than Byron York continually highlighting the plight of the under- and unemployed in Barack Obama’s America.

Summarizing the findings of a new Rutgers study, York excerpted this cautionary stat:

The researchers asked people — unemployed and employed alike — about the “major causes” of joblessness. Seventy percent named “competition and cheap labor from other countries.” The next-highest number, 40 percent, blamed “illegal immigrants taking jobs from Americans.” That 40 percent is more than blame Wall Street bankers (35 percent), the policies of George W. Bush (23 percent) or the policies of Barack Obama (30 percent).

“These strong and enduring concerns about globalization and fears that illegal immigrants hurt job prospects for Americans citizens are likely to make it more difficult for policymakers in Washington, DC to negotiate free-trade agreements and reform immigration laws,” the report concludes, in what is probably a serious understatement.

Whether this perception is correct or not, Republicans in Congress need to take care how they handle immigration reform.  As I wrote last week, conservatives like Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies make a strong case that increasing the legal labor supply when jobs are scarce hurts native workers.  If Republicans are seen as complicit in increasing the Democrats voting base and hurting job prospects for working class citizens, the party will have no one to blame but its leadership for its dwindling popularity.

The Hill posted a jaw-dropping lead to describe just how broken is the federal budget process:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday said they will move a budget resolution through the Budget Committee and onto the Senate floor for the first time in four years.

Despite protests to the contrary, the move is in response to a House-approved measure to move the nation’s debt ceiling back from late February to early May.

It’s hard to applaud a group of adults for finally getting the regular budget process going in the Senate.  Still, it’s a sign of progress that a budget may actually be produced in accordance with federal law.

The Hill is reporting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is in the final stages of hammering out a filibuster reform package.  Here are the two biggest changes:

The agreement between Reid and McConnell is not expected to include the talking filibuster, which would require senators who want to block action on legislation to actually hold the floor and debate for hours on end.

In recent days, Reid has begun to focus on a proposal to tweak the filibuster rule by requiring the minority party to muster 41 votes to stall a bill or nominee. Under current rules, the responsibility is on the majority to round up 60 votes to end a filibuster.

I say half right because I favor a talking filibuster and making the minority party (in this case the Republicans) come up with the votes necessary to trigger a filibuster.  Putting people on the record isn’t comfortable, but it is required to make the distinctions between the parties – and their ideologies – more publicly apparent.

Moreover, citizens need to know the well-reasoned, well-researched arguments for and against a proposed policy.  Far from hurting the Republican minority, I think giving articulate conservatives like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rand Paul (R-KY) an opportunity to make their case will help educate the public about important issues.  This in turn will spur a dialogue on the Right that will allow the movement to better understand itself so that it can better persuade the electorate.

George Will has some excellent questions that should be put to Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel in the latter’s upcoming confirmation hearings.  Here are my three favorites:

●Do you agree with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s judgment that cuts under sequestration would “hollow out the force”? Can you give examples of procurements or deployments that justify your description of the Defense Department as “bloated”?

…

●Congress’s power to declare war has atrophied since it was last exercised (against Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary on June 5, 1942). Should Congress authorize America’s wars?

…

●Speaking of the imperial presidency, do you believe that the use of drones to target specific individuals means presidents have an unreviewable power to kill whomever they define as enemies? Do you favor “signature strikes,” wherein drones attack not identifiable individuals but groups of young males whose characteristics match the “signature” of terrorists?

Read the whole list here.

The Hill provides the text of a letter sent by the White House Office of Management and Budget to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

In it, the OMB’s Deputy Director for Management blames the late resolution of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations for causing the White House to violate the law by missing the February 4 deadline for submitting a budget to Congress.

But as The Hill notes, that excuse is nonsense when considered in light of the Obama Administration’s record on budgets:

Under the law, President Obama must submit a budget by the first Monday in February, but he has met the deadline only once. The annual budget submission is supposed to start a congressional budgeting process, but that has also broken down. The Senate last passed a budget resolution in 2009.

Left out of that tidy little summation is the fact that the House Republicans have never failed to pass a budget resolution during the entire time Obama has been president.

The failure of Washington to “work” in the Obama Era is not a failure of substance; both parties are relatively clear about their policy visions.  What’s grinding the system to a halt is the liberal disregard of legal procedures like statutorily defined deadlines.  Throw out the rules, and suddenly no one knows how to play the game.  As I said last week, unless the budget process is amended to enact meaningful punishment on parties who violate it, nothing else is likely to change.

Here at CFIF we’ve promoted the idea of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would require Congress to pass balanced budgets every year with certain 60 percent supermajority thresholds for raising taxes or the debt ceiling.

The idea comes with a stellar pedigree since conservative icons like Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and the Contract with America all supported various Balanced Budget Amendments.

Alas, the BBA has yet to become law, and with the current lineup of liberals running the U.S. Senate and White House, it will be awhile before such an idea can be seriously discussed in Washington.

That said, Byron York says that Republicans might have an opening in the coming fight over raising the debt ceiling to get closer to a balanced budget; albeit by amending a statute, not the Constitution.

On its face, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 sets out a clear deadline for passing a budget by April 15 every year.  The problem, however, is that there is no enforcement mechanism to punish Congress if it fails to do so.  With Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Democrats failing to pass a budget for the last 1,351 days as of today, the budget law’s impotency is on full display.

York reports:

“The law doesn’t have teeth,” says a Senate aide involved in the fight.  “Sen. Sessions and others have proposed process reforms to give the budget law teeth (one reform would make it harder to pass spending bills without a budget), but the debt ceiling is the strongest leverage we have on this. This is the opportunity.”

In other words, it is precisely because the budget law has no enforcement provision that Republicans believe they need some other form of leverage, in this case the debt ceiling deadline, to force Reid and his fellow Democrats to move.  In addition, whatever happens in the debt ceiling standoff, it seems clear that the original budget law should be amended to include some sort of enforcement method.

This strategy strikes me as a great way to get real value in return for raising the nation’s debt ceiling.  Imagine how much different Obama’s first term would have been if instead of ignoring the House Republicans’ Paul Ryan-inspired budgets, the President and Senate Democrats had to negotiate its terms up against a hard deadline.  Liberals would have been forced to debate conservatives on specifics instead of substituting scare tactics for policy.

So far, Republicans have said they want entitlement reform in exchange for upping the ceiling, and for good reason since spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone account for about 44 percent of the federal budget (other entitlements push the total to 62 percent).  Moreover, since entitlement spending is not discretionary, meaning it isn’t determined in the normal appropriations process but by eligibility formulas, reining in federal spending will require statutory changes that can only be gotten when the stakes are very high.

But if York is right, then Republican strategists would be wise to include changes to the Congressional Budget Act along with spending reforms to entitlements.  Winning both would improve the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook by helping conservatives change the way Washington does business.

Want to avoid future “fiscal cliffs”?  Eric Singer, portfolio manager of the Congressional Effect Fund, argues for three reforms.  First, adopt Economist Thomas Sowell’s idea to pay Members of Congress at least $1 million a year, but make the pay subject to all the rules and tax rates experienced by every other taxpayer.  Second, pass Warren Buffett’s proposed constitutional amendment to ban from reelection any current member who presides over a budget deficit.  Third, require members to forfeit any pay increases when there is a budget deficit.  According to Singer, the result would be timely, serious budgets.

Why this approach?

Michael Barone thinks illegal Mexican immigration into the United States might be a thing of the past for three reasons.  First, birthrates among Mexican-born, America-residing women are down 24 percent.  Second, up to one-third of the housing foreclosures in California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida since 2007 are estimated to belong to low-income Latino households.  Since there is always a time-lag in getting these kinds of data points, they go a long way to explaining reason number three: Mexican migration north was reported to be zero earlier this year for the first since the boom began in 1982.

All of this adds up:

Beneath the cold statistics on foreclosures and births is a human story, a story of people whose personal lives have been deeply affected by economic developments over which they had no control and of which they had no warning.

Those events have prompted many to resort to, in Mitt Romney’s chilly words, “self-deportation.” And their experiences are likely to have reverberations for many others who have learned of their plight.

Still, I’m hesitant to adopt Barone’s conclusion of a complete end to illegal Mexican immigration.

If it’s true that the bursting of the housing bubble and the concurrent recession are causing illegal Mexican immigrants to voluntarily repatriate themselves, then it’s a mixed bag for conservative immigration reformers.  While it’s good that the number of illegal immigrants is dropping, it’s not because of any fealty to enforcement policy by government officials.  Instead, it’s because of terrible economic stewardship by President Barack Obama and his tax-and-spend allies in Congress.

In short, if the economy rebounds, so will illegal immigration.

But don’t think that liberal amnesty seekers won’t use Barone’s data points to deny that cause-and-effect relationship.

Moreover, if the rumors are true that comprehensive immigration reform is the next bipartisan agenda item after the fiscal cliff showdown, then conservative reformers shouldn’t give an inch on the need to secure the border.  Furthermore, in order to blunt calls for amnesty because the illegal immigration problem allegedly is under control, conservatives need a Paul Ryan-esque big think on how federal immigration serves the national interest.

Personally, I’m open to a lot of different conclusions.  However, I deplore the incoherence of the current federal regime of passing laws politicians don’t intend to fund, and political appointees don’t intend to enforce.  Like every big issue, the American people deserve a clear, coherent vision on immigration policy and how it serves the national interest.

Forget the fiscal cliff negotiations.  If you’re a high-earning worker wondering if your taxes will go up in January, Reuters spotlights two new taxes coming your way courtesy of Obamacare:

The 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, meant to help pay for healthcare, goes into effect in 2013. It is the first surtax to be applied to capital gains and dividend income.

The tax affects only individuals with more than $200,000 in modified adjusted gross income (MAGI), and married couples filing jointly with more than $250,000 of MAGI.

The tax applies to a broad range of investment securities ranging from stocks and bonds to commodity securities and specialized derivatives.

The 159 pages of rules spell out when the tax applies to trusts and annuities, as well as to individual securities traders.

Released late on Friday, the new regulations include a 0.9 percent healthcare tax on wages for high-income individuals.

…

Together, the two taxes are estimated to raise $317.7 billion over 10 years, according to a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis released in June.

These two new taxes take effect January 1, regardless of whether President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans agree to raise other taxes on high-earning Americans.

As the saying goes, if you want less of something, tax it.  You’d think liberals could see that taxing high-earners into extinction very quickly guts the very social programs Big Government types love.

Another day of congressional testimony for Susan Rice comes with more indications the Ambassador to the United Nations will not become the next Secretary of State.

But do pity Ms. Rice, at least a smidge.  With the finger-pointing circus around the Benghazi, Libya fiasco, it’s hard to keep the story straight on what exactly happened and who was responsible for hiding that information from the American people.

To clarify things, The Blaze website (quoting Buzzfeed) lists at least five official versions of the truth from the Obama Administration:

1. References were removed to not tip off al-Qaeda and were substituted with “extremists,” according to David Petraeus.
2. The links to al-Qaeda were too “tenuous” to make public by the Directorate of National Intelligence because the source wasn’t trusted.
3. “The talking points were debated and edited by a collective of experts from around the intelligence community,” not just DNI, according to a DNI spokesman.
4. The CIA told Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte the FBI removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”
5. The CIA later called Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte back, saying they had misspoken to them and that they – not the FBI – had edited the talking points.

On the bright side for Ambassador Rice, so far none of the misrepresentations have implicated her or her office as the source of the misinformation.  At most (so far), we’ve got diplomatic (Rice and Hillary Clinton) personnel parroting information from the intelligence community whose job it is to resource diplomats.

As I understand it, it’s the DNI, CIA, etc.’s job to gather, interpret, and communicate information so that the diplomatic arm of the federal government can use it.  Sure, more and better questions seemingly should have been asked by Clinton and Rice, but ultimate responsibility for knowing and articulating what happened in Benghazi rests somewhere in the alphabet soup of the intelligence community.  Those lines of responsibility won’t change if Rice replaces Clinton at State.

Cold comfort, though, since it looks like scuttling Rice’s nomination will be the only chance the Administration’s critics get to actualize their displeasure.  Welcome to Washington.