More and more congressional Republicans may be slamming President Bush on Iraq, but the White House can count on the House Judiciary Committee when the chips are down.
One after another, House Republicans on Judiciary yesterday afternoon dismissed a Democratic hearing on Bush’s decision to commute the two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for former top White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby as a misguided, partisan oversight investigation.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) pointed to the dozens of pardons President Clinton issued on his last day in office, including for numerous criminals convicted of cocaine trafficking, such as his half-brother Roger Clinton and Carlos Vignali, who paid then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s brother $200,000 to represent him.
Republicans also cited Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, who fled to Switzerland after having been indicted for tax evasion and illegal oil deals made with Iran during the hostage crisis. The lawmakers resurrected the ghosts of Susan McDougal and Whitewater, the pardons for 16 “terrorist” members of the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group responsible for detonating 120 bombs in the U.S. and even, as Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) put it, their “dear former colleague,” ex-Rep.
Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime Democrat from Illinois who was snared by the House bank scandal in the mid-’90s.
“As troubling as these pardons are, they were within President Clinton’s authority to grant, and neither I, this committee, nor Congress can limit their power,” Smith said.
Smith advised his “Democratic friends” to try to avoid becoming the “party of howlers.”
“Forget the partisanship, the Bush-bashing and the negativism,” he suggested.
Republicans clearly were prepared for a public flogging of Bush for commuting Libby’s sentence. More than a dozen GOP members took turns defending Bush while far fewer Democratic House members showed up to assail the White House.
The Democrats who did so, however, did not mince their words.
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) said he was sponsoring a bill to censure Bush for the Libby clemency, which he called “an egregious abuse by the president” and a “politically motivated quid pro quo designed to halt the investigation” of which other White House officials were involved in the cover-up of Iraq’s lack of weapons of mass destruction.
Republicans were equally passionate, dueling with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose arguments impugning Bush administration claims that Iraqi officials sought uranium in Niger led administration officials to discuss and leak information to reporters that his wife, Valerie Wilson, was a covert CIA operative.
At one point, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) read aloud a Washington Post article, which, he said, called Wilson a “blowhard” and a “liar.”
Wilson was present to defend his wife and point out differences between Clinton’s pardons and Libby’s — namely, that Bush administration officials had violated national security by outing his wife’s identity and they did so for vicious political retaliation.
“Never in my 23 years as a member of the diplomatic service of the United States did I ever imagine a betrayal of our national security at the highest levels,” Wilson said.
Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) took the premise a step further, arguing, “We’re in a war today” because no one spoke up about inconsistencies in the president’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and contended political retaliation, or the threat of it, may have played a role in officials’ reluctance to question the administration’s claims.
“Somebody had to have problems with Secretary of State [Colin] Powell’s testimony before the U.N.,” he said. “We were told that the bombing would be over in six months and the whole war would be over in six months, that we didn’t even have to budget for it because it would be over so soon.”
Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), the committee’s ranking member, was unconvinced, echoing Smith’s earlier sentiment that the hearing was a waste of time and trying to pin the “do-nothing” label on Democrats.
“This is more braying at the moon by our colleagues on the other side,” he said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) quickly defended Democrats’ legislative record so far, pointing out that in the entire two-year 109th Congress, there were 37 bills passed, while so far in the first seven-plus months of the 110th, Democrats had passed 15 measures.
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