I suspect it must be difficult to be a Republican press flack right now, given the political environment and multiple political scandals in the air, but this spin was unintentionally hilarious.
The situation is surprisingly straightforward. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is likely to ask White House officials to testify about their actions involving the Plame scandal. The Bush gang is likely to resist. It could get ugly, but Waxman has precedent to fall back on.
If Waxman presses ahead with the White House, he could assert he was following precedents set by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who was the committee chairman when Bill Clinton was president.
“This White house has been successful in changing the goal posts so that it’s almost impossible to get information from them or get people to testify,” the Democratic official said. “What was common during the Clinton years has become nonexistent.”
In response, David Marin, the committee’s Republican staff director, said, “So basically Chairman Waxman is now mimicking the Burtonian strategies he once decried? I guess fairness depends on where you’re sitting. Did the Bush White House move the goal posts, or has Mr. Waxman?”
Now, I don’t know David Marin. Maybe he was kidding. Maybe the reporter caught him off-guard. Maybe he couldn’t think of anything coherent to say. Whatever the circumstances, to suggest that Waxman’s efforts here are in any way “Burtonian” is transparently silly.
Let’s take a moment to remember exactly what Burton was up to a decade ago.
Most memorable, however, was the famously unhinged chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Indiana Republican Dan Burton. During his tenure, Burton issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to 141 different Clintonites. His inquiries included ten days of hearings on whether the White House used its Christmas card list for political purposes. In one case, Burton’s investigators managed to subpoena the wrong man. His low point came in 1998, when Burton released misleadingly edited transcripts of secretly recorded phone conversations conducted in prison by former Clinton associate Webb Hubbell….
Burton wasn’t alone. In 1997, Republican Representative Gerald Solomon of New York notified the FBI that Democratic National Committee fund-raiser John Huang may have sold U.S. secrets to the Chinese, prompting an FBI investigation and wide press coverage. Two years later, FBI files released to Congress showed that Solomon’s charge had been based on a cocktail-party conversation with a Senate staffer who claimed to have heard the scoop from an unnamed employee of the Commerce Department, where Huang had worked. Solomon couldn’t remember his source’s name — only that he was “a male in his thirties or early forties, approximately five feet ten inches tall with brownish hair.” (That narrowed things down to roughly half the federal government’s employees.) As Henry Waxman, currently the ranking Democrat on the House Reform Committee, put it at an American University forum last month, “That’s the climate we were in then: Even cocktail-party gossip could launch major congressional and criminal investigations of the Democratic Clinton administration.”
The point of Waxman relying on Burton’s precedent is not to be equally reckless and irresponsible to his GOP predecessor. The Clinton White House cooperated with Burton’s inquiries, no matter how stupid they became. That’s what Waxman wants to follow. This is not “mimicking the Burtonian strategies he once decried”; this is using the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subpoena power to get information about a legitimate government controversy, and asking the White House to cooperate.
Indeed, this is the opposite of the “Burtonian strategies.” Burton held hearings about nonsense, manufacturing “scandals” out of thin air, launching investigations based on rumors circulated on Drudge’s homepage. Waxman, in contrast, wants to get to the bottom of an actual controversy in which an undercover CIA agent’s identity was exposed for political purposes, and the Vice President’s chief of staff has already been convicted of obstruction of justice.
If House Republicans can’t tell the difference, they’re either a) confused; b) not paying attention; or c) both.