Wednesday - October 26, 2005

Warfare In The Senate

Things are getting a might nasty on the Senate floor as Democrats and Republicans duked it out uesterday over the Valerie Plame (did you know she was a CIA agent?) kerfuffle. Democrats put forth a bill to strip Karl Rove of his security clearance and Republicans responded by offering their own bill to strip Democratic Senators Harry Reid and Dick Durbin of their clearances. Both bills failed as cooler (?) heads prevailed. However, the war goes on, fueled by protestors outside the building and hate-mongering groups like MoveOn.org pushing for Rove’s resignation. Are we having fun yet ...?

Rove Fight Escalates
WASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The partisan fight over Karl Rove exploded onto the Senate floor yesterday, with Democrats trying to strip him of his security clearance and Republicans retaliating by trying to strip the chamber’s two top Democrats of theirs. The moves, which came as amendments to a spending bill, both failed, but not before each side blamed the other for “juvenile” behavior and for poisoning a well of good feelings they said had existed in the past few weeks.

Some senators said the entire exercise was wrong. “There might be a contest between which of these amendments is more poorly drafted,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, who voted against both amendments. “We should not be doing this. This is exactly why the American public holds Congress in such low esteem right now,” said Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, who also opposed both.

Meanwhile, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife, Valerie Plame, and her identity as a cover CIA employee is the central issue, came to the Capitol to call for President Bush to fire Mr. Rove. “I believe it is time for Karl Rove to go and time for this president to live up to his promises that anyone involved in this leak would be fired,” Mr. Wilson said during a press conference with Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, steps away from the Senate floor.

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an “undercover agent,” saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee. 

“She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat,” Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, called Democrats’ amendment “purely a political amendment” and then submitted his own. It would have stripped clearance from federal officeholders who make “reference to a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the floor of the United States Senate, or any federal officeholder that makes a statement based on a FBI agent’s comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations thereby putting our servicemen and women at risk.”

The former is a reference to Mr. Reid, who mentioned the FBI file of one of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees, and the latter is a reference to Mr. Durbin, whose comparison of U.S. interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay to Nazi and Soviet regimes was cited in Middle Eastern press, including Al Jazeera. Mr. Frist’s amendment failed 64-33, with 20 Republicans joining Democrats and one independent in voting against it, while Mr. Reid’s amendment failed on a party-line vote, 53-44.

- Go Read The Rest Of This Sorry Crap Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/26/2005 at 06:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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