In case you haven’t heard (and I’m pretty sure you haven’t)
Tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on Feingold’s censure resolution.
According to The Nation, Feingold’s witnesses will be John Dean, who served for Nixon and revealed the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Watergate scandal, and Bruce Fein, who served in Reagan's Dept. of Justice as Deputy Attorney General. Both have been loud critics of Bush’s surveillance activities and both have argued that Bush’s actions are worthy of impeachment. Interestingly, both are republican.
It’s scheduled for 9:30, Friday, March 30, 2006 and I think it’ll be on C-SPAN 2.
Will CNN, MSNBC, and the evening news programs pick this up? Will they give more than 2 minutes of airtime to this story or will they continue their obsessive rants on immigration? (By the way, is anyone else curious why Bush is embracing this immigration debate? What a nice diversion from Feingold and
Can these men testifying tomorrow spark a real debate in the Senate? I don’t think so. After the subsequent vote, it won’t be talked about again and Bush will have officially had his way with the law and the Constitution. And I will be vowing to abstain from voting for any democratic presidential candidate who voted ‘no’ for censure.
Nevertheless, I’ll be reporting on the hearings here.
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posted by The Decider @ 11:01 AM
6 Comments:
Reagan did the same thing, which pretty much secured the election for Bush in 88: that time it was a whole amnesty. It was particularly generous: any illegal alien that was in the US since 82 was granted amnesty. In the meantime I was doing things by the book, and they had zero help for people like us, ALSO arrived in 82, which were doing things the right way. For that reason alone, I vowed to never vote republican, ever, no matter what. They need the votes this time more than ever, so this will be hot for a bit longer.
I'm going to be optimistic and say that this will get coverage. What I'm surprised people aren't being louder about is the leaked memo about invading Iraq.
Actually, I'm not surprised.
I won't be surprised if this gets no coverage. I wasn't surprised about the leaked memo on the Iraq invasion. I wasn't surprised that people only shrugged their shoulders when no WMD were found. I wasn't surprised when no one seemed to care about the domestic spying.
What causes my neurons to detonate is that people don't care about the sum of the Bush administration's complete disregard for responsibility and good governance.
I feel your pain. The sum of errors is the most shocking outcome of this administration. It’s extraordinary. It’s equally amazing how powerful fear seems to be as the republicans’ political antidote to the problem. Just amazing.
Dad, did you catch Gibson's interview with McCain on the amnesty issue? Stewart revealed what I thought was a telling exchange where Gibson tried to get McCain to admit that his position is actually the same thing as amnesty.
Okay, I'm not sure what to say about the lack of response to the memo. Jon Stewart did a great job showing that Bush was claiming to take diplomatic steps right after already deciding to invade, as the memo reveals. I think people know. This reinforces the Downing Street Memo, which Bush supporters before were slow to accept. I think many people would say it's just politics: they didn't expect honesty before in regards to National Defense, and they don't now.
What I thought was shocking was that Bush considered flying a plane in UN colors in hopes of having it shot down.
The hearings and coverage were equally disappointing. The shining star of the hearings was Bruce Fein (Reagan’s Deputy Attorney General). He was articulate, smooth, and effective. He took the majority of questions from democrats Feingold and Leahy. Unfortunately, Dean’s presence wasn’t so effective. Republicans Spector, Hatch, and Graham attacked his credibility as a former Nixon evil-doer. Graham spent as much time on his credibility than on the actual debate. Dean’s effect on coverage was both helpful and hurtful: the high profile name helped receive coverage—no doubt the reason why Feingold called on him to testify—but it also allowed coverage to discuss the republican claim that this is NOT like Watergate (which it isn’t), taking vital focus away from the real issue. Though Dean tried building a parallelism to Nixon by arguing that congressional intervention would have stopped Nixon from going too far, as intervention today would stop Bush from going to far, it was largely lost in the discussion.
Articles in the New York Times and on CNN.com covered the hearings, both focusing on Dean. CSPAN showed the hearings and replayed them last night. CNN’s Headline News made it a back story, only covering meaningless sound bites, and the other political shows barely touched on it, covering Bush’s trip, Rice’s trip, and the immigration debate instead. I didn’t see anything in the Post, but maybe I missed it.
I thought Feingold defended his position with clarity and daring spunk: "If we in the Congress don't stand up for ourselves and for the American people, we become complicit in the lawbreaking” (Take that, you pussy Democrats). Indeed, Cornyn (R-Tx) used the missing democrat support against Feingold, claiming that the meritless motion of censure is indicated by the fact that only two of Feingold’s colleagues have cosponsored the measure (democrats Boxer and Harkin) and that nobody has suggested that this program be stopped. Thank you, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Hilary Clinton.
Lindsey Graham and others played the wartime card by reminding us that censure tears us apart in a time when we need to bring ourselves together. Hatch said that wartime is not a time to take steps that weaken a president.
But Bruce Fein’s response to the issue of wartime powers, as it applies to the war on terror, was priceless. He warned us that if wartime were defined as Bush would like it defined, then we would have no temporal benchmarks and that authorizing “special powers” really means making permanent changes to the role of the executive (in effect making Congress powerless). Fein also added that the purpose of informing isn’t just to have it for its own sake, but to reinforce a system of checks and balances, and that informing the “Gang of Eight” isn’t sufficient because it appears that the president has not yet revealed how many Americans have been targeted or given sufficient evidence that abuse is not taking place.
Sessions (R-AL) tried addressing this issue by claiming that 13 of the 15 leaders in Congress were informed and not one of them objected. Informed? Objected? Both are notions that were not available to the “Gang of Eight”: they were told that the program was classified, so no action could be taken to either receive additional information or object in an actionable context.
Great post this morning on DailyKos about this subject:
http://www.dailykos.com/
- Nan
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