DEMS/GOP/POLITICS: “When Richard J. Durbin joined the Senate in 1997, his junior status relegated him to an unenviable task: serving in the minority on the Governmental Affairs Committee as the Republican-led panel exhaustively examined claims of an insidious Chinese plot to help President Bill Clinton in the 1996 elections.
‘We went on for months in public hearing,’ said Mr. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who does not remember the highly partisan sessions very fondly. ‘Months and months.’
Republicans abruptly abandoned the inquiry when polls suggested the public was turning against it, and the investigation was generally regarded as a bust.
But the ability of Republicans to convene a summerlong media spectacle unfavorable to the White House underscores a fundamental truth as relevant today as it was then: Being in the majority matters, both in starting an investigation and, sometimes as important, in stopping one.”
– Carl Hulse, “Majority Rule Means the Power to Stop, Not Just Start, an Investigation,” The New York Times online, March 3, 2017