Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>Posted 8/12/2003 7:25 PM Updated 8/12/2003 7:45 PM
>Why Bush, GOP can block all inquiries
>By Susan Page, USA TODAY
>
>
>
>WASHINGTON - The urge to investigate defined the capital during the
>Clinton years. But no more.
>For nearly a decade, special counsel inquiries and adversarial
>congressional hearings dominated the headlines, etched bitter partisan
>lines, led to the impeachment of a president and made the nation's
>political debates resemble hand-to-hand combat.
>
>Now, some things have changed. The law that provided for special counsels
>has expired. President Bush's fellow Republicans control both houses of
>Congress. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of
>Congress, has stepped back from challenging the White House after losing a
>court case that sought to open the records of Vice President Cheney's
>energy task force.
>
>The result: The White House is better able to control information and
>prevent a nagging controversy from becoming a full-blown crisis. It's
>harder for Democrats to demand answers and easier for administration
>officials to dismiss their charges as political posturing. And Bush faces
>less of the daily barrage that prompted President Clinton to set up a
>parallel press operation for investigative inquiries and made Clinton's
>White House seem at times like an embattled enclave.
>
>Not since the early years of Lyndon Johnson's tenure has a president had
>more breathing room.
>
>"It's made an enormous difference and it's helped Bush in governing," says
>Larry Sabato, a political scientist who studied the pursuit of Washington
>scandals during the Clinton years. "When a president is seen as besieged
>and entangled in controversy, he really can't get very much done. But when
>a president commands the central institutions of American politics and has
>few institutional checks, he can range more widely and hover above the
>fray."
>
>That doesn't mean partisanship has evaporated or even eased. The
>charge-and-countercharge on cable TV shows and interest-group ads
>continue, and Democrats' frustration with the White House is palpable. A
>sense among avid Democratic voters that party leaders haven't done enough
>to challenge Bush is boosting the presidential prospects of insurgent
>Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.
>
>But Bush's Democratic critics now face a much steeper challenge to force
>the administration's hand or drive the capital's agenda than Republicans
>had during the Clinton administration. As the minority party in Congress,
>the Democrats can't schedule a congressional hearing, issue a subpoena,
>demand a special counsel or rely on the GAO to get information that the
>White House doesn't want to give.
>
>Predictably, the parties disagree on whether this a good thing.
>
>"When the Republicans ran the Congress and Clinton was in the White House,
>there was no accusation too small for them to pursue," says California
>Rep. Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform
>Committee. "Now that President Bush is in power, there's no scandal so
>large that they have any interest in examining it."
>
>He says he'd like to have hearings on the no-bid contract awarded to
>Halliburton, Cheney's former company, to rebuild oilfields in Iraq, for
>example.
>
>But White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Bush has delivered on his
>campaign promise to "change the tone" in Washington.
>
>"The American people want us to be forward-looking and want us to work
>together to get things done, not to continue to settle political scores
>from the past or score political points," he says. "There is an ugly side
>of Washington's recent past, and Americans will not look kindly upon
>partisans or presidential candidates who seek to exploit unsubstantiated
>rumors or innuendo for political gain."
>
>It's still possible to request a special counsel to investigate
>accusations that raise potential conflicts of interest for the Justice
>Department. But the question is now left to Attorney General John
>Ashcroft's discretion.
>
>So far, Ashcroft hasn't appointed any. And, with a handful of exceptions,
>congressional Republicans have avoided holding hearings that might
>embarrass the president - on precisely who was responsible for including
>disputed intelligence claims in the State of the Union address in January,
>for instance.
>
>In contrast, by the end of Clinton's first term, Republicans on the
>Government Reform Committee had issued 40 subpoenas and held three
>hearings into the firing of workers at the White House travel office and
>four into the release of confidential FBI files on past officials to a
>junior White House aide. Five special counsels had been appointed by
>judicial panels to pursue allegations against Clinton and his Cabinet.
>
>One was named in 1995 to investigate whether Henry Cisneros, the secretary
>of Housing and Urban Development, lied to the FBI about the size of
>payments he had made to his mistress. Cisneros left the government in 1997
>and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the case in 1999.
>
>That inquiry, after pursuing related allegations, is only now closing
>down. The final report is expected to be submitted this fall. It is the
>last of the Clinton era to conclude its work.
>
>A blunt weapon
>
>There's little nostalgia for the special counsel law, enacted after the
>Watergate scandal and allowed to expire in 1999 without protest from
>either party. Critics say the law became a blunt weapon that propelled
>marginal accusations into lengthy investigations and maligned innocent
>people. The Clinton-era special counsels cost taxpayers nearly $133
>million.
>
>During the Bush administration, several special counsels have been
>requested: Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked for a special counsel to
>investigate campaign contributions to Republicans by Westar Energy, a
>Kansas utility seeking exemption from some regulations. Environmental
>groups wanted an inquiry into whether the No. 2 official at the Interior
>Department violated ethics laws to help his former lobbying firm. Sen.
>Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., requested one to pursue possible conflicts of
>interest in the administration's inquiry into Enron's collapse.
>
>Each time, the Justice Department declined. (Ashcroft recused himself from
>the Enron case because he had received Enron contributions as a Senate
>candidate.)
>
>Most Democrats are less concerned about the need for criminal
>investigations than they are about congressional review, though. Only the
>majority party can schedule hearings and require testimony. Most committee
>chairmen, Republican or Democratic, aren't inclined to use those tools to
>irritate the president when he is from their own party.
>
>So Democrats now express outrage and demand answers through press
>releases, op-ed articles and open letters, hoping for news coverage or a
>public groundswell. Lobbying by relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11
>terror attacks convinced congressional Republicans and the White House to
>agree to an independent commission that Democrats wanted, for instance.
>Persistent media coverage has driven disclosures about those controversial
>16 words in the State of the Union.
>
>Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a presidential hopeful and former chairman of the
>Senate Intelligence Committee, says he would love to convene hearings into
>the "misleading statements" by Bush and others about whether there was
>credible evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Niger that could
>be used in a nuclear weapon.
>
>"Were they the result of intelligence agency failures? Or were the
>agencies acting appropriately but the information they provided was
>manipulated?" he asks. "I would want to hold a hearing on that."
>
>Democrats also want to explore:
>
>. The administration's refusal to declassify a section of the
>congressional report on the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The 28 pages
>reportedly detail possible Saudi involvement.
>
>. The help that the Federal Aviation Administration gave in May to Texas
>Republicans who were trying to track down Democratic state legislators.
>The Democrats had flown to Oklahoma to avoid a special session on
>redistricting.
>
>. Allegations that the administration has distorted scientific findings to
>justify political decisions involving missile defense, environmental
>protection and other issues. Waxman last week issued a 40-page report on
>the subject. A White House spokesman dismissed it as partisan sniping.
>
>"We still have our voices and our ability to speak out when we see things
>we don't like," says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, another presidential
>contender and the senior Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs
>Committee.
>
>But he says "it would be a lot different" if Democrats could schedule
>hearings and call witnesses. "They'd be under a lot more pressure than
>they are today."
>
>Stuart Roy, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has
>no sympathy for the other side: "You have Democrats feeling irrelevant,
>and the only way they can make themselves feel more relevant is to engage
>in the politics of personal destruction."
>
>To some extent, partisans in both parties have switched sides. Democrats
>like Waxman who decried investigations of the Clinton administration now
>express frustration about lacking the tools to get answers from the Bush
>administration. Republicans like DeLay who defended the Clinton-era
>inquiries now dismiss proposed investigations as political grandstanding.
>
>An agency defanged
>
>When the General Accounting Office sought information about Cheney's
>energy task force, the White House refused. Administration officials said
>they were determined to rebuff what they saw as an incursion on the
>president's constitutional authority.
>
>The GAO then filed its first-ever lawsuit against the White House
>demanding the information. But in February, the agency announced it was
>dropping the case after losing a round in federal court, although the
>watchdog group Judicial Watch is continuing its lawsuit on the same issue.
>The head of the GAO, David Walker, said he wouldn't sue the administration
>again unless he had the approval of the House and Senate oversight
>committees - committees that control the agency's budget and are now ruled
>by Republicans.
>
>"Much of this is the result of unified government," with the White House
>and Congress under one party's control, says Stephen Hess of the Brookings
>Institution, who arrived in Washington as a speechwriter for President
>Eisenhower and has been studying capital affairs ever since. Bush's
>unchallenged position at the head of the GOP and the discipline imposed by
>Republican congressional leaders have magnified the advantages.
>
>Bush is in an even stronger position than the last two presidents who had
>unified governments. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during
>the first two years of Clinton's presidency, but Senate Armed Services
>Chairman Sam Nunn nonetheless held critical hearings on administration
>policy toward gays in the military. Democrats controlled Congress
>throughout President Carter's tenure, but his relations with Congress,
>even his fellow Democrats, were famously prickly.
>
>The first President Bush and President Reagan had to deal with opposition
>control of one or both houses of Congress throughout their terms. Both
>administrations faced several special counsel investigations.
>
>The current President Bush had a Democratic-controlled Senate for less
>than two years, after Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., left the GOP in May 2001
>and until Republicans regained control in the 2002 elections. If Bush wins
>a second term in 2004, many political analysts predict he'll be presiding
>over unified government again.
>
>Hess says that favorable landscape gives Bush an opening for the sort of
>fundamental policy changes made by such consequential presidents as LBJ
>and Franklin Roosevelt. Bush's grand ambitions include a new national
>security policy of pre-emption against foreign threats, the creation of
>individual investment accounts in Social Security and more tax cuts.
>
>Veterans of the Clinton administration are wistful when they consider the
>contrast.
>
>"There were countless investigations and we ended up consuming enormous
>resources that otherwise would have been spent on trying to move the
>president's agenda forward," says John Podesta, former White House chief
>of staff. The Bush team has a big advantage, he says: "I don't think the
>bloodhounds will be out."
>
>
>
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