House Republicans defend Libby commutation

More and more congressional Republicans may be teeing up to slam President Bush on Iraq, but the White House can still count on the House Judiciary Committee when the chips are down.

One after the other, House Republicans on the Judiciary panel, some of the most conservative members in Congress, spent the afternoon dismissing a Democratic hearing on Bush’s decision to commute the two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for former top White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby as a waste of time and just another misguided oversight investigation conducted for partisan reasons alone.

{mosads}Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) pointed to the dozens of controversial pardons President Clinton issued on his last day in office, including those for numerous criminals convicted of cocaine trafficking, including his half-brother Roger and Carlos Vignali, who paid then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother $200,000 to represent him.

Republicans also cited Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice who had fled to Switzerland after being indicted for tax evasions and illegal oil deals made with Iran during the hostage crisis. They brought up the ghosts of Susan McDougal and Whitewater, the pardons for 16 “terrorist” members of the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group responsible for setting off 120 bombs in the U.S., and even their “dear former colleague,” as Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) put it, ex-Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime Democrat from Illinois who was snared by the House bank scandal in the mid-’90s.

“As troubling as these pardons are, they were within President Clinton’s authority to grant, and neither I, this committee, nor Congress can limit their power,” Smith said.

Smith also advised his “Democratic friends” to try to avoid becoming the “party of howlers.”
“Forget the partisanship, the Bush-bashing and the negativism,” he suggested.

Republicans were clearly prepared for an ugly public flogging of their president for commuting Libby’s sentence. More than a dozen GOP members took their turns defending Bush, while far fewer Democratic House members showed up to assail the White House.

Republicans also took turns dueling with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose arguments impugning Bush administration claims that Iraqi officials sought uranium in Niger led administration officials to discuss and leak information to reporters that his wife, Valerie Wilson, was a covert CIA operative. He was on hand to defend his wife and point out the difference he saw between Clinton’s pardons and Libby’s, namely, that Bush administration officials had violated national security by outing his wife’s identity — and that they did this all for vicious political retaliation.

“Never in my 23 years as a member of the diplomatic service of the United States did I ever imagine a betrayal of our national security at the highest levels,” Wilson said.

Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) took the premise one step further, arguing that “we’re in a war today” because no one was speaking up about some of the inconsistencies in the president’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that maybe this type of political retaliation, or the threat of it, played a role in officials’ reluctance to question the administration’s claims.

“Somebody had to have problems with Secretary of State [Colin] Powell’s testimony before the UN,” he said. “We were told that the bombing would be over in six month and the whole war would be over in six months, that we didn’t even have to budget for it because it would be over so soon.”

But Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), the irascible ranking member of the panel, was unconvinced, echoing Smith’s earlier arguments that the hearing was a waste of time and trying to pin the do-nothing label on Democrats, as they had done to previous Congresses when the GOP held the majority.

“This is more braying at the moon by our colleagues on the other side,” he said.