The Republicans are crying like babies:
WASHINGTON — Republicans are getting fed up with what they call “fishing expeditions” and hearings to nowhere conducted by majority Democrats thriving in their newfound oversight authority.
Annoyed by ongoing inquiries into everything from the firing of eight U.S. attorneys to the Bush administration’s 2003 charges that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger, Republicans inside and outside Congress say Democrats have gone overboard.
“We understand that the Congress has a role to play, which is oversight over the Executive Branch,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said during a recent press briefing. However, “I do think there is a difference between oversight and overreaching.”
What Dana Perino calls ‘overreach’, the Washington Post editorial page calls:
“…an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source…”
Of course, that’s a reference to former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s recent testimony. If you need a little reminder about that testimony, here you go:
After the hospital-room stand-off, Card summoned Comey. From the transcript:
“COMEY: Mr. Card was very upset and demanded that I come to the White House immediately. I responded that, after the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present.
“He replied, ‘What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.’
“And I said again, ‘After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness. And I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States.'”
That conversation eventually took place, but Comey said it resolved nothing.
“SCHUMER: OK. Can you tell us what happened the next day?
“COMEY: The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality. And I prepared a letter of resignation, intending to resign the next day, Friday, March the 12th. . . .
“I believed that I couldn’t — I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.”
Technically speaking, Comey explained, Bush signed the presidential order himself but the signature line for the attorney general to attest to its legality was apparently left blank.
Which leads the USA Today to conclude:
Perhaps most compelling is what Comey’s testimony says about the danger of White House arrogance. It’s easy for a president or his advisers to find the law inconvenient, to dismiss facts that get in their way and to stampede those who disagree.
When that happens, a Comey or an Ashcroft can turn a president away from running roughshod over citizens’ rights or rushing into an ill-conceived war.
If only this administration had learned that lesson sooner.
Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal disagrees:
What’s really going on here is a different form of political theater: Democrats are trying to whip up an aura of “illegality” to create the political leverage to strip a Republican President of his surveillance authority in wartime. They’ve tried to do this since the program was revealed, and back in 2006 Russ Feingold compared it to Watergate. But unfortunately for the Democrats, wiretapping aimed at America’s terrorist enemies is politically popular.
So, rather than arguing the legal merits, Democrats are spinning a yarn about shady deeds perpetrated in a hospital room at night. They are using half-truths to achieve a partisan goal that is dangerous policy, and they shouldn’t get away with it.
Right. The Democrats shouldn’t get away with it. The Republicans are so incredibly stupid for failing to understand the critical need to remove Bush and Cheney from power. They should take their own advice.
“We’re not hostile to the administration,” one prominent conservative House member who did not want his name used told me. “We just want it to be over.”
So does everyone. Get cracking.
That’s funny, “We just want it to be over.” Why, so they can do it all again? They held power in all three branches for six years. The current all-around disaster in foreign, domestic, and every other realm of policy and governance is a predictable result of their principles in action. 30 years of Reagan-Bushism have wreaked havoc on the US and the world.
Rats slinking off the proverbial sinking ship….
So how many impeachable crimes does Bush have on his record now? At least a dozen, I’d say, each of which makes Watergate look like a parking violation.
Will the Dems ever face the reality that Bush has left them with no option other than impeachment? Time to just do it.
this USAG probe will not disappear. Gonzales will quit says Specter
as the warrantless NSA program comes back to bite. Once again the lies are exposed without protection of rubber stamping GOP Congress..
More here from Laura Rozen
Matt Taibbi had an interesting column in march in RS: Tasting Their Own Medicine: Republicans complain about the congressional shaft:
The Republicans ran Congress like a basement cock-fighting ring for more than a decade, and two months or so after they’re out of power, they’re already transformed into a bunch of squawking dissidents more pretentious than Rage Against the Machine.
Rolling Stone
boo-fucking-hoo
lTMF’sA
was great d, well worth the time for the detour!
Well I have tennis neck on all the hearings the dems are doing…I am both for them and against them….against them only in the sense that although lots of thugish behavior of the repug adm is being exposed, time is a’ wasting and what have they actually produced that will change or outlaw these acts in the future?
So little time and so many criminals about sums up my position. None of their investigations get to the main tumor…which is …How was a small cabal of delusionals, people formerly under investigation years ago for espionage like Feith and Perle, criminals like the convicted Elliot Abrams, able to rise to power positions and so totally subvert a supposed democratic goverment and infiltrate the very agencies set up as safe guards for the protection of America, including congress itself and lie us into a war?
The biggest war crime in our history as a nation and the biggest criminals of our century are being given a free pass and I haven’t seen any signs the dems want to address this.
Why not?
My sense is they know some of their members don’t have completely clean hands on this either and are burying it for their own self preservation.
Part of it is self-protection, I think, and part of it is anticipatory immunization. There’s a much better than even chance that in a little less than two years from now the DLC will be in the same position the GOP is in… one party governance with huge amounts of corporate funding being showered on them if only they’ll do as they’re told… and they’ll be taking as much advantage of that as they think they can get away with.
And they do NOT want to wind up hoist on their own petard here, which they very well could do if they’re not very careful. Legal-enforceable accountability could well be a double-edged sword, which I think is a big part of the reason that it is almost never suggested and certainly is not actually implemented in any real fashion.
Good-government progressives may have a bit of the upper hand now in some small ways, because the bad-government conservatives have been so egregiously bad, but even within the Democratic party we’re very much a minority, and there’s no reason at all to believe that the D’s, once in power, will change their stripes or their spots from their normal corporate logo designs.
You are right of course.
I just wish the mud slide known as capitol hill would hit bottom sooner rather than later so we could get a head start on rebuldling this democracy and not have to leave the job to our children.