Why Bush, GOP can block all inquiries...(aka, why we are screwed)

[SoCalDem]

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/morefrom/story/headlines/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/usatoday/20030813/pl_usatoday/11578880&e=4


Why Bush, GOP can block all inquiries
Wed Aug 13, 6:21 AM ET

By Susan Page, USA TODAY

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 (news - web sites)'s fellow Republicans control both houses of Congress. The General Accounting Office (news - web sites), 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 (news - web sites) to set up a parallel press operation for investigative inquiries and made Clinton's White House seem at times like an embattled enclave.


...snip.....

"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.

...snip.....

"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 (news - web sites). "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 (news - web sites), for example.
...snip.....

It's still possible to request a special counsel to investigate accusations that raise potential conflicts of interest for the Justice Department (news - web sites). But the question is now left to Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites)'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 (news - web sites) 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.


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YOU MUST READ THE REST OF THIS...

[liberalhistorian]

1. Frightening, isn't it? What's really scary, though, is that

a lot of people don't seem to realize this, or even care, and by the time they do it may be too late. I think Shrub is even worse and more dangerous than Nixon. I just wish we had a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein who would come forward and show it and get people to really pay attention.

[TacticalPeek]

2. All it takes

to change the usurpers' torture from drip, drip, drip to Niagra is:

5 or 6 Representatives

2 or 3 Senators

1 Judge

Their dreams of glory shall turn to nightmares of ignominy.