It has been a no good, very bad week for the Obama administration, as Washington has been overtaken by scandals. On Wednesday President Obama announced that Steven Miller, the IRS acting chief, was asked to resign, effective next month. Miller will still testify Friday at the House Ways and Means Hearing. “I wouldn’t want to be Steven Miller,” Politico’s Manu Raju told the Cyclists on Thursday’s show. “Members of Congress look for a scapegoat to publicly beat up and I think you will see that.”
It will be interesting to see how Miller acts while testifying: he was a Bush appointee and just fired by the Obama administration. “Does he have much loyalty to the Obama administration? Will he actually throw people under the bus from the Obama administration? Or will he take the blame himself and say look, this is relegated to a very small section of people and sort of neuter the Republican attacks,” Raju said.
Miller’s resignation could be only the first. “A lot of the facts still have not come out, the investigations are still going to become ongoing and Republicans are never going to be satisfied no matter what the president says, so they are going to keep attacking,” Raju said.
For months, while the Obama administration has been on the offensive, Republicans have been on the defensive. Now they are “finally fueled: they have something to go on the offensive with,” Raju said. “This is the first time they feel they have something to really pound the administration on.”
Abby Borovitz