First off, they’re not his committee chairs. Bush doesn’t appoint them, they don’t answer to him. They aren’t like parliamentary ministers.
Second, this is highly irregular and unwarranted. Yet legal.
Off topic, but we have the same situation here in Alaska with our (largely republican) legislators. If they don’t want information requests processed, they just sit on them. Anytime one of them wants to be excused to go to the bathroom, the whole fucking bunch of them goes into caucus so the public won’t know if it was a #1 or a #2. Fuckheads.
It’s not about the stupidity of the questions. As you could read in my previous post, I’m all for effectiveness, and I don’t think a lot of time should be spend on this particular example (the banner, and its funding). It’s pretty useless to spend an afternoon’s debate on that, all right.
The point is, that their effort to bring into place a solution looks highly suspect. Neurotik notes that GWB doesn’t appoint the committee chairmen. That may very well be, but the fact remains that they belong to a party, in this case the Republican party. So, you’re effectively giving one party the authority to dismiss tough questions by the other party.
That’s not fair at all. If you want to come up with a process that will reduce duplicate questions and such (as the spokesman claims), you’d do so by a procedure that doesn’t favour one party over the other right off the bat.
C’mon, SPOOFE, it’s all right to admit that an idea is fundamentally flawed, even if it originated from within your “own” party.
I think you’re missing the point. If the Democrats had simply asked stupid questions, the administration wouldn’t have bothered to implement this policy - why take that kind of political risk? I think it’s much more likely that some of the Democrats’ questions, on the other hand, have been very pointed, legitimate questions, ones that have the potential for causing the administration to admit some of the crap they’ve been pulling. That’s why the adminstration doesn’t want to take any more questions from them. They’re putting their fingers in their ears - “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”
Now, of course, to justify their actions, the White House will say that it’s because stupid questions have been taking up their valuable time, and will trot out a few examples, but they’re just lying about their motivations. The only plausible explanation for the administration taking this stance is that they don’t want to face embarrassing questions from the opposition.