Bring It On!

It looks like the Senate of the United States is going to force a showdown with the White House over the current scandal involving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

According to the New York Times, the Judiciary Committee has authorized the issuing of subpoenas to various white House officials, including Karl Rove, so that they will have to testify about why eight U.S. Attorneys were summarily fired using the flimsiest of excuses.

The White House has made a counteroffer, in which the officials would come up to the Hill and talk with the committee but in private, not under oath, and without any record of the discussion being kept.

Hmmmmmm... now why do you think that is?

Could it be that if they don't testify under oath they won't be subject ot perjury charges and prison time if they lie? “Well,” Rep. John Conyers said according to the Times piece, “we could meet at the local pub to have that kind of gathering.”

This reminds me of what the current chairwoman of the Senate Environmental Committee, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), told Republican Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) when he tried to cut off and restrict Al Gore's testimony in front of the committe by, in effect, acting as if he was still the chair of the committee:

“No, that isn’t the rule. You’re not making the rules. You used to when you did this. Elections have consequences. So I make the rules.”

The audience in the room burst into applause -- as well they should have. And it made a larger point besides just putting one pompous blowhard of a right-winger in his place. The fact is that there has been a major sea change in Washington, and some people on the right are a little slow to acknowledge it. The White House is still acting as if they can bully Congress into accepting any crumbs of cooperation they care to dish out. And that's not the case anymore.

The fact is that the Democrats in Congress are exercising their oversight prerogatives in order to find out why eight U.S. Attorneys were dismissed for what certainly seems to be partisan political reasons. The White House can bitch and moan about "show trials" all it wants, but no one with half a brain is accepting their subtle-as-a-rubber-crutch analogy between Congress and the Stalinist Soviet Union of the 1930s. After all, it's the Bush White House that's acting as if they're living in a totalitarian state with the executive as all-powerful and the legislative branch being nothing more than a Politburo-style rubber stamp for the executive.

That may have been true before January, when Bush had a Republican Congress that let him do whatever he wanted, but what's going on right now is exactly the kind of checks and balances laid out in the Constitution. It's democracy in action. And it's about time.

Tom Moran