I’ve been thinking lately about a terrific column Jonathan Alter wrote a few months ago about Watergate — and what the scandal would have looked like if it had happened now. Alter’s conclusion, which is hard to argue with, is that Nixon would have survived. Why? In large part because of Congress.
[B]ecause both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP, there were no “Watergate” hearings to keep the probe going. John Dean and other disgruntled former aides had no place to go.
That’s undeniably true. Nixon’s White House wasn’t brought down because of a Justice Department investigation; it crumbled when lawmakers — including Republicans who cared about the rule of law — began asking questions about the controversy and putting White House staffers under oath until they got answers.
With regards to the Plame scandal, there are a lot of angles for Dems to pursue the controversy, but the demands for congressional hearings needs to be at the top.
When Clinton was president, congressional Republicans held thorough, high-profile hearings with remarkable consistency. As Henry Waxman explained, “There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.”
Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.
Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries.
If Drudge ran an item in the morning about something that might be controversial about the Clinton White House, Republicans had scheduled hearings by the afternoon.
In July, in reference to the Plame scandal, a Republican source told Tim Russert, “If this was a Democratic White House, we’d have congressional hearings in a second.” And that’s the problem.
Patrick Fitzgerald has conducted a thorough probe, but he has a narrow mandate. He won’t share acquired information that stands outside the “four corners” of his issued indictment. That leaves the nation with only a small part of a much larger story.
We know that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove leaked classified information to reporters, but to fully understand what happened, it’s up to Congress to subpoena documents and compel testimony in order to get to the truth. Republican lawmakers, however, don’t want to ask questions, and they sure as hell don’t want answers.
Oddly enough, way back in July 2003, when this story first broke, Newsday ran a story about reactions to the controversy. The article said “members of both parties indicated a congressional investigation is likely.”
Even at the time this was a no-brainer. It’s a White House scandal in which national security was compromised and laws may have been broken. Of course there’d be hearings. Lawmakers couldn’t completely blow off their oversight responsibilities; given the nature of the controversy, they’d be a laughingstock if they pretended not to care.
Except that’s exactly what happened. Republicans began to realize that this is a story that could literally put Bush’s presidency in jeopardy. GOP lawmakers could to their duty or they could look out for Bush’s political interests. They chose the latter.
In 2003, it was offensive. But in 2005, it’s ridiculous.
Two years ago, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Porter Goss said, “If somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I will have an investigation.” On its face, this was absurd. Goss, now the CIA director, was insisting that evidence was necessary before Congress would begin an investigation. Goss had everything backwards — evidence is supposed to be a product of an investigation, not a prerequisite.
But even if we accept Goss’ low standard, given what we now know, there’s ample evidence of actual wrongdoing, and in some cases, literal felonies. Hearings are not only justified, they should be mandatory.
What will it take for Congress to do its duty? What is the explanation from congressional Republicans for their negligence?