The White House is paying lip service to the intelligence reform legislation crafted by the 9/11 Commission, but if Bush and his gang really want to pass the bill, there’s an option they haven’t considered yet.
President Bush, facing pressure to do more to enact a stalled bill that would restructure the nation’s intelligence community, said yesterday he will ask Congress’s top two leaders to help pass the measure by next week.
Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney, meeting with leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, underscored the administration’s support for the bill, according to commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton.
Bush’s and Cheney’s comments come as several lawmakers, commission members, terrorism victims’ families and others say the White House must put more force behind its stated support of the bill, which stalled 10 days ago in the House.
The problem, of course, is that Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (Calif.) and Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (Wis.) blocked passage of the legislation, refusing to let the bill designed to overhaul the nation’s intelligence system come to a vote. (House Speaker Dennis Hastert could have gone around them, but he refused to work with House Dems to pass the bill.)
There’s been plenty of reasons to believe that Bush, who opposed the existence of the 9/11 Commission and repeatedly stalled on cooperating with the panel, was secretly pleased to see the legislation get blocked. The White House denies this, of course, and insists the president will continue to try and push Congress to pass the bill before the session ends.
If Bush really wants the legislation to succeed, he should already know exactly what to do — go after Hunter and Sensenbrenner the way he went after Max Cleland.
Two years ago, around the same time Bush opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Cleland was co-sponsoring the Homeland Security Act that would have created the agency. After Bush flip-flopped on the issue, Cleland raised concerns about GOP attempts to deprive future Homeland Security employees of traditional civil service protections.
Bush’s attack machine pounced and smeared a war hero, who left three limbs in Vietnam, as “soft on terrorism.” Republicans ran TV ads featuring pictures of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Max Cleland, equating the three as equally dangerous to American security.
In Bush’s worldview, this made complete sense. It’s not enough to support national security; everyone who doesn’t back Bush’s version of how to deal with security is wrong, unpatriotic, and an enemy to be crushed, even if you’re a triple-amputee.
Which leads us back to Hunter and Sensenbrenner. Their claim is not unlike Cleland’s in 2002 — they support intelligence reform legislation, but strongly disagree with the approach endorsed by the White House. Will Bush sign off on smearing these two GOP lawmakers as enemies of the state?
Better yet, will Republicans mind if Dems start running ads in Hunter’s and Sensenbrenner’s districts arguing that their anti-American position empowers terrorists, jeopardizes the safety of the United States, and makes them as dangerous as Osama bin Laden?
Turnabout is fair play, right?