Last month, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House committee on oversight, revisited another issue -- how the administration dealt with prewar claims, later discredited, that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. The committee voted along party lines to subpoena Rice. Republicans called it a fishing expedition; Democrats said Rice, as national security adviser at the time, had "primary responsibility to get the intelligence ... right."Indeed - and don't let anyone forget it.
Rice said she would respond by letter: "This is an issue that has been answered and answered and answered." But Waxman last week postponed the hearing to June "to accommodate Secretary Rice's travel schedule," and said he was confident she would show up.
Republicans have accused Waxman of partisan pettiness, to which he responded that during the Clinton administration Republicans issued more than 1,000 subpoenas. "They were the ones who politicized oversight," he said in an interview. "When Clinton was president, there wasn't an accusation too small for them to rush out and hold hearings. When Bush became president, there wasn't a scandal too large for them to ignore."
I really wish that people like Waxman would have set the bar for what this party should be, I must admit I'm extremely disappointed that the Dems haven't been the rabid pit bulls I wanted them to be after November.
