WASHINGTON — House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi expressed strong opposition Thursday to the 2016 defense authorization bill and heavily criticized the special committee looking into the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Calling it one of “the longest congressional investigations in history,” Pelosi said that the $4.5 million dollars being spent on the House’s probe of the 2012 incident in Benghazi should not fall to American taxpayers.
The investigation concerns then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of the emergency in which four Americans were killed in an attack on the compound.
In an interview with Fox News, Kevin McCarthy, who is running for Speaker of the House, acknowledged that the committee was created by the Republican majority, at least in part, to harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.
“It’s just an astounding admission of the Republican leader that the Benghazi committee was created with a political purpose in mind,” Pelosi said at a morning briefing. “It makes the whole operation unethical.”
Later Thursday, Pelosi, D-Calif., and many other Democrats voted against the $612 billion defense bill, which passed the House 270-156.
Pelosi is against the bill because it will authorize spending $90 billion to be spent as special war funds. Even though the bill was easily approved by the House Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell R-Ky., is worried about next week’s Senate vote on the legislation, which Obama has threatened to veto.
“The Democratic minority is preventing the Senate from providing the vitally needed funding for our troops and for our veterans,” McConnell said, apparently referring to the Democrats ability to stall the measure with a filibuster.
But Molly Reynolds, a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution,believes that the parties will come to an agreement on an overall 2016 spending plan by the Dec. 11 deadline when a stop gap plan expires.
“Given that Mitch McConnell needs at least some Democratic votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, and that President Obama must sign any deal, we may well see some sort of compromise between Democrats and Republicans,” Reynolds said.
Pelosi too remains hopeful.
“We can’t go down this path without being optimistic that we can find common ground for the good of the American people,” she said. “It can be a productive several weeks, or a calendar of chaos. Lets hope that it’s not the latter.”