Minority Leader Harry Reid today forced the Senate into a rare, secret closed door session, threatening to delay legislative action until the Intelligence Committee followed through on its planned investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence failures.
Transcript below: Read more
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), today on the Senate floor:
“Well, there’s been a lot of talk about Phase 2. What is Phase 2? Why has it been delayed, if in fact it has been delayed? … It isn’t like it’s been delayed. As a matter of fact, it’s been ongoing. As a matter of fact, we have been doing our work on Phase 2.”
Pat Roberts, 3/31/05:
“I don’t think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further.”
In a speech on the Senate floor, Democratic leader Harry Reid said the American people and U.S. troops deserved to know the details of how the United States became engaged in the war, particularly in light of the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
Statements from Reid demanded the Senate go into closed session. With a second by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the public was ordered out of the chamber, the lights were dimmed, senators filed to their seats on the floor and the doors were closed.
For more on closed sessions, check out this CRS report.
UPDATE: Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) says the closed Senate session is “some sort of stink about Scooter Libby and the CIA leak.”
UPDATE 2: Statement of Sen. Jay Rockefeller on the closed session.
UPDATE 3: Statement of Sen. Harry Reid on the closed session.
UPDATE 4: Majority Leader Frist reacts: “They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. But this is the ultimate. Since I’ve been majority leader…have ever I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution.”
UPDATE 5: From Hotline: “Sen. Reid and Sen. Jay Rockefeller decided on today’s tactic after reading Murray Waas’s account on NationalJournal.com of how senior members of Vice President Cheney’s staff, including Scooter Libby, may have intentionally withheld crucial documents from the Senate staff.”
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh didn’t care for a post we published yesterday, Samuel Alito’s America. From today’s Rush Limbaugh show:
Byron York sent me this note that the Center for American Progress has tried to rewrite Senator Kennedy’s famous Robert Bork’s America, and here’s basically what it says. “Samuel Alito would overturn Roe vs. Wade. Samuel Alito would allow race based discrimination. Sam Alito would allow disability based discrimination. Sam Alito would strike down the Family and Medical Leave Act. Sam Alito supports unauthorized strip searches. Sam Alito is hostile toward immigrants,” and they cite their cases to give evidence of this.
This is what we want. We want these people to come out and show just how far out of the mainstream they are. We want them to illustrate that it is they who are extreme on all of these things, folks.
This is a bit confusing. Limbaugh doesn’t question any of our claims, he just says we are “out of the mainstream.” It’s out of the mainstream to be against racial discrimination? It’s out of the mainstream to support the Family and Medical Leave Act? Apparently, you have to be a dittohead to understand the logic.
Special thanks to right-wing pundit Byron York for sending around our work. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much you care.
When President Bush nominated John Roberts, the White House repeatedly highlighted the level of Bush’s consultation with the Senate:
I think you heard from some long-time serving members of the Senate who said that this level of consultation was unprecedented.
The same occured during the lead up to the Miers pick:
We have consulted with over 70 United States senators. That matches the level of consultation that we held for the first vacancy. The level of consultation that we engaged in was unprecedented; we have now matched that.
With Alito’s nomination, however, the White House disregarded the process:
[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid’s tongue was firmly in cheek when describing consultation with the White House about the Alito nomination.
“I really am impressed with the consultation of this nomination. Let me tell you what it consisted of. I was at the Rosa Parks event last night, which was a solemn occasion and very nice. [White House Chief of Staff] Andy Card walked up to me and said I am going to call you at 6:30 in the morning. I said, ‘That is too bad,’ because I knew by then they had already picked someone…. He didn’t call me at 6:30 [but at] about quarter to 7. The conversation lasted maybe 10 seconds. He said, ‘You have already heard?’ I said, yup, and that was it. That is the consultation. With [Judge John] Roberts we had consultation, with [White House Counsel Harriet] Miers we had consultation, with Alito zero, nothing.”
It’s not that President Bush didn’t have the time — he spent last weekend “contact[ing] prominent conservatives to test the reaction to various candidates.”
Rush Limbaugh is euphoric over Bush’s choice of Sam Alito as the next Supreme Court nominee. On yesterday’s show, he was the happiest when he began talking about how “anathema” the pick is to liberals:
This is fabulous. We’ve got a male. We have a married male. He’s European. He is anathema to the libs on this, folks. He is anathema to them. The exact opposite of what they were hoping for, and this is fabulous.
But Rush has conveniently forgotten that Alito isn’t the kind of nominee conservatives said they wanted:
“I will pick a person who can do the job. But I am mindful that diversity is one of the strengths of the country.” [President Bush, 9/26/05]
“I think we should have a woman this time. Isn’t the [justice] retiring a woman?” [Traditional Values Coalition Chairman Louis P. Sheldon, 10/28/05]
“I would really like for him to name another woman.” [Laura Bush, 7/16/05]
“Some people have asked me, ‘Well, didn’t you want a woman?’ Well, yes, of course I did. Of course I think diversity is important on the Supreme Court. I would like to see another woman. I would like to see a Hispanic American on the Supreme Court.” [Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), 7/21/05]
Looks like Rush isn’t the only one with short-term memory problems.
From today’s Washington Post:
“We tend to learn our lessons,” said one senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be more candid.
The White House has certainly learned their lesson: it’s easy to spin reporters by speaking to them on background.
According to the Washington Post, this isn’t supposed to happen. From the Post’s policy on anonymous sources:
Sources often insist that we agree not to name them in the newspaper before they agree to talk with us. We must be reluctant to grant their wish. When we use an unnamed source, we are asking our readers to take an extra step to trust the credibility of the information we are providing. We must be certain in our own minds that the benefit to readers is worth the cost in credibility.
UPDATE: More valuable insight from the senior official in today’s Post:
“It was clear if the president was going to go for someone with judicial experience that Alito was his pick,” the senior official said.
“There was a lot of momentum behind Judge Alito,” the official said. “I don’t think there was a lot of gnashing of teeth.”
“Sam Alito is just what George Bush is looking for: a big government conservative who will almost always side with the government against the individual, and the federal government against the state” – Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano, 11/1/05 (via Hit and Run)
“Rove remains a focus of the CIA leak probe. He has told friends it is possible he still will be indicted for providing false statements to the grand jury. ‘Everyone thinks it is over for Karl and they are wrong,’ a source close to Rove said.” [Washington Post, 11/1/05]
The libertarians at Hit and Run have produced a point-by-point rebuttal to our earlier post, Samuel Alito’s America. Our original post runs through a number of Alito’s decisions with headlines that suggest Alito’s confirmation would have broad policy implications. (For example: “ALITO WOULD ALLOW RACE-BASED DISCRIMINATION.”)
Hit and Run responds to each of our points by noting that Alito didn’t make a broad policy pronouncement but decided how the law should be applied in a specific case. In Bray v. Marriott Hotels, for example, Hit and Run notes that Alito never says he would “allow race-based discrimination.” Rather, according to Hit and Run, Alito argues one “might think the hotel’s stated reasons for promoting someone else are weak, but that this isn’t enough to show they were pretextual.”
Hit and Run’s argument has some intuitive appeal but, in the end, misses the point. When a judge consistently applies to law to the facts in a certain way it has broad policy impacts. To pretend otherwise is foolish. For example, if Alito’s interpretation of the law in Bray v. Marriott was accepted it would “immunize an employer from the reach of Title VII [even] if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was the result of conscious racial bias.” In other words, racial discrimination would be allowed.
That’s not our opinion, that’s the opinion of the majority in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. And that’s Samuel Alito’s America.
UPDATE: Hit and Run responds to our response.
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