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

CelticProgressive Enters the Terrible Twos

Today marks the second anniversary of this blog. A lot has happened in those two years.

New Orleans was hit by a hurricane that left it underwater and showed to the world how pitifully inadequate the Bush adminsitration was. Iraq descended even further into chaos.

But on the bright side, Scooter Libby has been convicted, Donald Rumsfeld has resigned, Tom DeLay has left the House in disgrace, and the Democrats took control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years.

There has been good news. But there's a lot more to do.

We need to elect a Democrat to the White House in 2008. We need to get this country out of the morass it currently occupies in Iraq and begin repairing the damage that's been done to our life and our liberties since this criminal administration took over in 2001.

While the economy looks very shaky to me, I think that we can begin to feel a little optimistic. Bush is a lame duck, and it's obvious to everyone that his adminstration has been a pathetic failure. From their delusions of grandeur, when they thought they could remake the Middle East, they now realize that the best they can do by way of a strategy for the war is to try not to lose until after Hillary gets inaugurated -- then blame the mess on her.

But the end of the Bush years is in sight. And they can't end soon enough for me.

Tom Moran