WASHINGTON -- Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) plans to offer an amendment on Tuesday to dismantle the House Select Committee on Benghazi, causing further headaches for Republicans after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) recent comment that the panel's purpose is actually to sink Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions.
Slaughter will offer her amendment at Tuesday night's Rules Committee meeting. She plans to strike language from a GOP bill to create a new select committee on Planned Parenthood and replace it with text abolishing the Benghazi panel, Slaughter spokesman James Owens said.
Slaughter is ranking member on the Rules Committee. Since Democrats do not have a majority in Congress, they are unlikely to prevail in this effort.
Last week, McCarthy, who will likely be the next speaker of the House, told Fox News that Clinton would have been "unbeatable" in the 2016 election had it not been for Republican efforts in the House to discredit her over the fatal 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, [and] what are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened," he said.
McCarthy's fellow Republicans -- who have long insisted that the taxpayer-funded committee is nonpartisan and focused solely on getting to the bottom of what happened in the attack -- quickly criticized his remarks.
But Democrats have already seized on the inadvertent admission to undermine the committee's work. Clinton, for example, has a new TV ad using McCarthy's words as evidence of the GOP campaign to take her out.
On Tuesday morning, McCarthy released a statement further trying to clean up the damage from his remarks.
"The integrity of Chairman Gowdy, the Committee and the work they've accomplished is beyond reproach," he said. "The serious questions Secretary Clinton faces are due entirely to her own decision to put classified information at risk and endanger our national security."
Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Oct. 22. In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Clinton declined to say that Congress should defund its work but nevertheless said it was "a political, partisan committee for the sole purpose of going after me."
In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last week, Senate Democratic leaders criticized the House GOP for spending more than $4.5 million of taxpayer money on the Benghazi committee.
UPDATE: Oct. 7 -- Slaughter's amendment was voted down in the committee meeting on a party line vote. She plans to instead introduce it as a privileged resolution on the floor Wednesday, meaning the full House will be forced to vote on whether to keep the Benghazi committee funded.