Republicans go all-in on U.S. campus protests as potential election winner

It doesn't take a college degree to figure out Republicans see the protests sweeping U.S. college campuses as a winning election-year issue for them.

There's proof enough in their plans for a half-dozen congressional hearings, new campaign ads and choreographed confrontations with student protesters.

Republican lawmakers are posting videos of themselves being heckled, creating ads tailored to swing-state voters and scheduling events aimed at ensuring the issue remains top of mind for months.

As he announced a succession of hearings, House Speaker Mike Johnson described his cause as countering the scourge of campus antisemitism.

"We have to act," he said. When a journalist questioned why this stated commitment to fighting antisemitism seemed to exclude hearings into far-right groups like the Nazis holding public marches, he replied: "This is not partisan at all."

The hearings start next week.

Republicans have convened the mayor and police chief of Washington, D.C., for a grilling into their reported refusal to clear out an encampment that began in a square at George Washington University and has grown to clog the adjacent street several blocks from the White House.

The following week, college administrators from California and Michigan are being summoned to a hearing into their handling of these events.

There will be more hearings — into whether colleges have violated civil rights law, whether that makes them ineligible for federal funding and whether foreign students arrested at these protests will be deported.

A group of Republicans used George Washington University as an eardrum-rattling backdrop to discuss this. As they held a press conference on a tent-filled H Street, those lawmakers were greeted with noisy chants of "Hands off D.C." and "Trump lost."

A crowd of students gathered around the lawmakers. That included one far-right lawmaker, Rep. Lauren Boebert, who cursed as she tried pulling a Palestinian flag down from a statue of George Washington, now covered in a keffiyeh and spray-painted with graffiti.

"Kiss your federal funding goodbye," she said, warning the college administration to clear out the dozens of tents.

A professor at George Washington University who supports the protesters expressed doubt that those lawmakers were motivated by sincere concerns about student welfare.

"I'm cynical," said Ivy Ken, who teaches sociology. "So I think they were just using it as a stage, and I think the only photo ops they got were a lot of peaceful students singing and, you know, being clear about their demands."