Fresh of the news that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is at or near the top of the list of candidate to replace Hillary Clinton at the State Department, two prominent Republican Senators are vowing to block her nomination if it’s put forward:
Senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday made crystal-clear their opposition to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as a nominee for secretary of State. Speaking at the Washington Ideas Forum, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., criticized Rice’s faulty explanation of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya.
McCain said point-blank that he would oppose the nomination of Rice to replace Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Asked if he would do anything to block her, including filibuster, he bluntly answered “yes.”
Graham added: “I don’t trust her.”
“I think she was a political choice, telling a political narrative, and either she didn’t know the truth about Benghazi—so she shouldn’t have been on T.V.—or she was spinning it,” Graham said. He said he wouldn’t “promote” anybody involved in the “Benghazi debacle.”
“I don’t think that’s a good resume to be secretary of State,” Graham said.
Graham also told the WIF panel presented by The Atlantic and The Aspen Institute that he thinks there might be at least one Democrat who’d vote against her, but dodged the question of whether the five necessary Republicans would defect to allow her confirmation.
Picking Rice would certainly be a controversial choice, not the least because of the role she played in the initial intervention in Libya and then two months ago in the Administration’s response to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Would the rest of the GOP caucus join McCain and Graham in blocking the nomination, though? Given the uproar over Benghazi and the fact that its now gotten tied into a sex scandal that brought down a CIA Director, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
