No, the scandal surrounding the White House’s Medicare scam hasn’t gone away. Congressional Republicans are intent on ignoring the administration’s criminal behavior and congressional Dems are focused on generating an investigation.
Democrats yesterday renewed their call for an investigation of whether the Bush administration misled Congress on its cost estimates of the Medicare legislation.
In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Democratic leaders asked that Congress demand that the White House turn over internal documents on the cost estimates.
In a separate letter to President Bush, the Democrats call on the president to provide answers regarding his role in the Medicare issue.
As the fine folks at the DCCC’s Stakeholder noted yesterday, the Dems’ letter noted an interesting contradiction.
“During the Clinton Administration, the actions of White House and other executive branch officials were repeatedly investigated by the Republican-controlled Congress. Committee chairmen issued over 1,000 subpoenas for documents related to Administration conduct, dozens of senior White House officials were called to testify or give depositions before committees, and no allegation seemed too small to pursue.
“During the Bush Administration, the Republican-controlled Congress has veered to the opposite extreme. Major allegations of misconduct, such as the outing of the identity of a covert CIA agent for political gain, have been ignored.
“This is fundamentally wrong. Our constitutional oversight responsibilities should not be driven by political expediency. Regardless of the party affiliation of the President, there are some matters that are too important to be ignored. The withholding of the Medicare cost estimates undermines the integrity of the legislative process. We will be derelict in our constitutional duties if we continue to overlook such a serious abuse.”
Granted, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) will host a hearing this week to look at “the process for preparing cost estimates on pending and proposed legislation.” That’s worth pursuing, but it’s intentionally overlooking the real scandal here.
We know, for example, that a legal analysis prepared by the Congressional Research Service concluded that Bush administration officials appear to have broken the law by threatening HHS officials into silence about the real costs of the Medicare plan. We also know that a GAO investigation detailed how the administration’s propagandistic “video news releases,” prepared for TV stations to look like objective news about Bush’s Medicare policy, were also illegal.
And yet, Dem requests for information have gone completely ignored by congressional Republicans, who don’t seem to mind being lied to by the White House.
Let’s not forget, on April 1, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) said he’d pursue this matter with hearings and subpoenas if it involved “a violation of law.” In fact, he assured his colleagues he would use “whatever tools are necessary to get to the bottom” of this.
That was 83 days ago. We’re still waiting and Thomas’ word continues to look increasingly meaningless.
And I should note that this isn’t a partisan controversy, or at a minimum, it doesn’t have to be. Consider, for example, that Deroy Murdock, a writer for the conservative National Review, described the administration’s behavior as “shifty and dishonest” that “also looks criminal.” Keep in mind, this is coming from a conservative.
Murdock also argued that Republicans and other conservatives should be “furious that federal bureaucrats in a GOP administration used coercion and lies to engineer a $534 billion expansion of the welfare state.” To his credit, Murdock also outlined a series of steps he believes should be taken. Among his recommendations:
* Tom Scully and Doug Badger should be subpoenaed to appear before the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. They should identify their supervisors — all the way up their respective chains of command — who knew about Foster’s estimates and the efforts to conceal them from the American people and their elected representatives.
* Scully and other witnesses should testify under oath. Medicare staffers Jeffrey Flick and Leslie Norwalk should be brought back to Ways and Means, this time to deliver sworn testimony.
* HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson also should be summoned to Capitol Hill to explain what he knew, when, and if he discussed any of this with President Bush.
* Rank-and-file GOP House and Senate members should caucus with their leaders to determine whether senior Republicans hoodwinked them into voting for the drug benefit on false pretenses. If members of the drug-benefit conference committee and/or Republican floor leaders received and failed to share the Administration’s higher estimates, party backbenchers should remove these untrustworthy colleagues and replace them with others who will not lie to them.
* The United States Department of Justice should conduct a criminal investigation to determine if members of the Bush administration violated any or all of the five federal laws cited above, or additional statutes. Anyone who fooled Congress into buying a brand-new, $534 billion entitlement by pretending it only had a $395-billion price tag should be prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced to a federal penitentiary for the maximum allowable term.
I knew if I read National Review long enough, I’d find something with which I could agree wholeheartedly.