Or just being asshats?
Apparently this is the first time in 25 years a party (let alone a minority party) has unilaterly invoked Senate Rule 21 to hold closed-door sessions.
With both parties gearing up for the Alito nomination, the Democrats’ typical deferential accomodating wine-and-cheese attitude won’t serve them very well.
Does this signal a new fighting posture for the Demacratic Party?
Too early to tell, but the more I see of Harry Reid, the more I like. Misjudged the man, thought him bland and colorless, turns out he’s cream cheese and gunpowder on a Ritz.
Give 'em hell, Harry!
If they are growing balls, they picked a good time to do so.
And, I should add, it’s about f—ing time. It is time to go on the offensive to gear up for 2006.
I don’t know anything about the closed-door force and I don’t know whether it’s out of line, but I certainly think that in itself, the demand for the report on Administration use of Iraq intel is reasonable.
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee produced the first part of this report, the one slamming the CIA intelligence, back in July 2004. In April 2005 they said they were going to finish the second part, which investigates whether the administration cherry-picked or misrepresented the intelligence data in their arguments for war.
But they refused to set a timeline, and as far as I know, there is still no official due date for that report. If they’re supposedly conducting an investigation into the actions of the executive branch, it seems reasonable to demand that at some point they produce the results, or at least set a deadline for producing them.
The perception has been that the Republicans on the committee simply want to stall this potentially embarrassing report indefinitely. If that’s true, what would be a legitimate way for the minority party to force them to do their job?
In any case, Congressional Republicans will have a hard time complaining about Democratic “bullying” without looking like hypocrites. They’ve been no strangers to the use of aggressive tactics themselves:
I hope so, though it’s too early to tell.
Bill Frist whining about underhanded behavior doesn’t get any sympathy from me, though.
Has that ever stopped them before?
Timing, timing, it’s all a matter of timing.
And the time is right!
What shocked me was they said (I think they said…) that the committe was, in fact an ongoing, happening thing. I thought that they tabled the whole thing after hanging the CIA out to twist slowly. Now there was an investigation proceeding the entire time and I heard not one word about it!
That said, one is required to “tut, tut” at the parliamentary tactics of the timing, the realpolitik judo. Not the very best sportsmanship, don’t you know.
But to paraphrase Mr DeLay (R-Undead), as quoted above: “By any means necessary.”
Roberts said he had intended all along to work on the second phase beginning next week.
Excellent! Then he will, no doubt, have paper to prove it! Notes, memos, e-mails to principles, all refering to a specific date next week! Why, this will be no trouble to prove at all!
Unless, of course, the decision to proceed was internal, and he hadn’t got around to advising anybody else yet!
Then I guess we just have to take his word for it, don’t we?
Ooh, I use that one myself sometimes. “Glad you asked about that article, Jim—it’s in my schedule to get it to you by Friday! Didn’t I send you an email about that?” 
Still and all, irrespective of whether the Senate Intelligence Committee is really dragging its feet on this report and needs a boot up the butt to get them moving, this debate is supposed to be about whether Senate Dems actually had the right to boot them in this way. Does anybody know what this “closed-doors” maneuver is about and what it’s supposed to be used for?
Hooray for Harry Reid. If this “shutdown” is within the rules (and it is), then yes the Dems had the right to do this. I was never satisfied with the “official explanations” that were given out; they kept changing. I was never satisfied with what I considered to be a careless and cavalier approach, and the ever shifting rationale for war, in the face of evidence to the contrary of those rationales. Regardless of what the administration claimed, in trying to hang the CIA and Wilson in particular, the fact remained that the DECISIONS were made by the administration. They are accountable for those decisions. They can not blame anyone else. After reading over the years, many reports, editorials and screeds by various people who were very unhappy with the way information was (supposedly) mishandled, ignored, or “massaged”, and seeing how so many “absolute truths” were later shown to be untrue, I think it’s about time the Dems “went nuclear” in just this way.
Blix, Kwiatkowski, CIA, Powell, Wilson, Downing Street memo, and now Rice with her almost admission of “other motives”, etc. They all contradicted the claims of the administration either right then or later on. I had to wonder, why so many people would contradict the White House. What would they have to gain by lying. Someone should be held to account.
Harry Reid rocks! When I worked for the state, I had the pleasure of working with his office on some environmental issues in Northern Nevada. He’s always provided as much support as he could for both state and grass-roots projects that I’ve worked on.
He looks like a quiet bookish guy, but he was a boxer and a cop before (and while) he went to law school.
Harry Reid has been showing that he’s got mad skillz for a while now - but this move was brilliant. It forces the issue, commanding discussion of the Bush administration lies about the war and the stonewalling of the entire Republican party on the matter. It shows balls, which is what the Democrats have been lacking, and why fewer people have wanted to support them. And it had Bill Frist whining like a little simpering ninny. So much for the bravado of the nuclear-option-threatening Republicans.
A simply awesome deft political stroke that is procedurally fair, morally correct, exceptionally strong, and changed the landscape in one stroke. I give it two thumbs up - way up!
I think the Democrats are the least of the GOP’s worries. Check out the quotes from Amercian Conservative Magazine
This thing is getting better than fiction. The walls are starting to crumble.
Ah yes. The Office for Special Plans. That was (I believe) the Neocon bunch that muscled their way into the Pentagon and threw their weight around. Retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski had plenty to say about them in particular.
According to this account, data was being altered or invented, in order to support a decision that had already been made at the very highest levels. Coupled with the Downing Street memo, and all the rest, there really needs to be a reckoning.
Strikes me that it’s also a not-too-subtle signal to any Republicans still seriously considering the nuclear option w/regards to Supreme Court nominee Alito that Democrats can play hardball too.
Just a willingness to nonchalantly do something the majority party doesn’t want done says “We don’t have to play nice, ya know”
My prediction: nothing will come of this. Give it five or ten years and the general population might realize what was really going on. In the meantime…
Freedom is on the march!
I doubt will see anyone frogmarched out of the White House because of this. But it does keep the Plamegate/Iraq War stuff in the headlines for a while longer, is hard for the Repubs to respond to, and as others have mentioned, makes the Dems look a little less like the doormatts they’ve been preceived as for the last couple years. So it was a pretty deft political move.
Also I’ll add to the props given to Harry Reid. He keeps showing that he knows how to play a weak hand well.
I doubt this is the first time Frist has had his face slapped. Or the last.
And he’s acting like such a whiny little titty baby about it. Makes me feel warm all over.