Remember those "lost" White House emails that were sent through Republican National Committee servers, even though they dealt with official business?
And remember how in all last year, Waxman held hearings and made demands that the RNC turn over those emails?
I'll give you one guess what -- almost a year later -- the RNC now says about that?
Oh, wait. I gave it away in the title.
But here, read it for yourself:
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.
Oh, OK. It no longer plans to.
Oversight! Yee-ha!
Those emails contain White House records that, by law, must be preserved. Of course, only the George W. Bush "administration" has the gall to ask, "By law, or else what?"
And the answer from Congress? "Or else we'll write Sternly Worded LettersTM, that's what!"
Not only must those records be preserved, but those records are believed to contain the "paper" trails of the US Attorneys purge, the illegal GSA political briefings, and just possibly, the Don Siegelman vendetta.
Time is ticking away on the 110th Congress -- the one elected to once and for all provide oversight of this rogue "administration" -- to get anything done. We can all appreciate the work that's been done in exposing the wrongdoing. Still, at bottom, the question is whether or not you feel well-served by the oversight and the "subpoena power" that you were promised was the single most important thing that would come from a Democratic takeover of Congress.
So, do you?
Or do you think there's work yet to be done?
The House just recently decided -- after eight long months, by the way -- that it'd had enough of the White House simply declining to comply with the law and with their subpoenas, and voted to hold Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in contempt. (More on that later.) The Senate, though, has not yet joined in pulling its weight in this fight, which after all is between the entire Congress and the executive branch. Not just the ones who are willing to stand up. The Senate's prerogatives (and therefore the power of both Democrats and Republicans) are just as much in question as are the House's. And yet, although the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to approve contempt citations -- including one for Karl Rove, who now sits squarely at the center of the Don Siegelman fiasco -- even as the House has acted, the Senate has not.
If we're ever going to get the oversight we were promised, and make the fight we know needs to be made about the power of the presidency before the next election deciding who will occupy it, the time to do it is now. The Senate's path has been paved by their colleagues in the House, and it's to their great shame that they delay in joining them.
The House, too, has been the one to show fortitude in making a fight on the FISA front. And for all the trepidation over the White House's anticipated fearmongering attacks, it took just hours (Really! Hours!) for them to have to backtrack and admit that the intelligence collection continues unabated (and also, I remind you, unchecked).
The door is open for a multi-faceted fight on the balance of federal powers that has been at the heart of every single one of the Bush-Cheney "administration's" power grabs, both large and small. Senators owe it to themselves (if they can't be brought to admit they owe it to their constituents and the Republic) to take this opportunity to push their way through. As I wrote leading up to the House's contempt vote:
[I]t might be time to borrow a page from the White House playbook, and pursue a "flood the zone" strategy. When the White House has multiple outrages to perpetrate (as is so often the case), it does so in overwhelming waves, with no mind paid to pacing or any insistence on decent intervals in between. Indeed, the strategy seems to be to flood the public, the media, and the Democratic opposition with everything it can throw at them, all at once. And each time they've done it, the national media have been for the most part unable (or uninterested) in keeping up. Light five fires at once, and four go relatively unnoticed.
So perhaps it's time to bring out all the grievances against the executive now roiling beneath the surface inside the Congress. Why not deal with contempt at the same time as we (hopefully) fight on FISA? And why not encourage the Senate to add its pending contempt votes to the pile as well? And why not get down to issuing subpoenas aimed at the "administration's" stonewalling on questions surrounding the missing e-mails? The destruction of the torture tapes? The withholding of key documents and testimony by the Department of Education? By NASA? In fact, by virtually every department of the executive branch that's been asked to comply with Congressional oversight over the past several years?
If George W. Bush's judiciary is ready to validate all of this, perhaps that's something the public would like to know, heading into the next election. Let's get at least some of this -- the most egregious parts, anyway -- out on the table.
Let's face it, something's got to be on that table.
This Senate needs to join the fight. Pat Leahy needs to join the fight. Henry Waxman needs to join the fight.
To the extent that they do and the sky does not fall, then perhaps Leahy, Conyers and Silvestre Reyes can find more success in convincing Jay Rockefeller in the FISA bill conference that he won't be all alone if he, too, opts to stand up, push back, and fight it out.
Then we can help prove to them that it's worth doing.
