As Hillary Clinton made a powerful case for herself, Elijah Cummings made an equally powerful case against the committee's hyper-partisanship.

The US Congress has a number of disappointing members who grab the spotlight so frequently that it is easy to imagine that they define the institution.

That is because the House also has a few exceptional members who step into the spotlight only when it is necessary -- and who, when they take that step, bring a measure of honor to otherwise desultory affairs.

That is what Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings did Thursday, when he condemned the abuses of the Republican majority on the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Hour after hour, at each and every necessary point, Cummings intervened -- with appropriate and righteous indignation -- to challenge the excesses of his conservative colleagues.

The Republicans kept him busy.

No one doubted that a session focusing on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton would see the most disappointing members of the committee embarrass themselves and the Congress.

And so they did.

The questions from committee chairman Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, and his minions were for the most part repeats of discredited campaign claims. Never mind that the basic premises advanced by the Republicans Thursday were rejected by the American people in 2012. After hearing a steady stream of Republican criticism of the administration's response to the tragic events that led to the death of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, voters reelected President Obama and Vice President Biden with a 5 million popular vote margin and a 332-206 Electoral College landslide.

Obama and Biden are not running in 2016. But Clinton is.

Gowdy's hearing developed such a sharp partisan edge that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein compared the "reckless" and "abusive" questioning with the approach seen during the "red-scare" circuses organized by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

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Authors Bio:

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.


Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.


Nichols is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. He was featured in Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," and in the documentaries Joan Sekler's "Unprecedented," Matt Kohn's "Call It Democracy" and Robert Pappas' "Orwell Rolls in his Grave." The keynote speaker at the 2004 Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in Athens, Nichols has been a featured presenter at conventions, conferences and public forums on media issues sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Consumers International, the Future of Music Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Newspaper Guild [CWA] and dozens of other organizations.


Nichols is the author of the upcoming book The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), as well as a critically-acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press) and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press), which has recently been published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), of which historian Howard Zinn said: "At exactly the time when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems, and songs from throughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country."


With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books, It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories) and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.


Of Nichols, author Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest."