I think the general rule when you do something for purely political reasons is that you don't want anyone to discuss what you did as a purely political stunt. And in that context, Reid's trick yesterday to demand that the Senate go into secret session was not a success. Sure, he got a day's headline, but once the report is made announcing what they went into session about, the next statements were why they did this and blindsided Frist by not discussing it ahead of time. For example, here is John Dickerson at Slate,
Reid was trying to thwart White House efforts to move past the Scooter Libby indictment. Yesterday, Bush had everyone talking about Alito. Today he unveiled a big program to prepare for a possible outbreak of avian flu. Reid wants to change the subject back.
And here is more evidence that this was cooked up to try to change the storyline in the press after the failure to indict Rove and the Alito nomination.
A Senate Minority Leadership staffer says this plan to shut down the Senate was hatched last night, as staff and Democratic Senators looked over the wreckage of what they believed was going to be their finest few days in a long time: an indictment of a White House official, a struggling President, a conservative judicial nominee, a splintering conservative base.
"Alito's nomination and the press that followed just devastated them," says the leadership source. "They couldn't get their message out. They felt that things had pivoted on them, and that with the President presenting his plan for avian flu, with the Alito nomination going apparently well, with the tax panel recommendations, they were going to get ploughed under. This was a stunt. But it worked."
He needs to change the subject. Exactly. He can't stop Alito and all the press has been generally favorable about Alito. And the Libby story was off the front pages, so this was his way to jerk it back into the front pages for one more day.
This stunt finally taught Bill Frist a valuable lesson.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said Democrats "hijacked" the Senate and showed great discourtesy. "It means from now on, for the next year and a half, I can't trust Senator Reid, and that's hard," he said.
The Senate exists based on its rules and the courtesy that each side accords the other. All Reid needed to do was to inform Frist ahead of time that he was going to make this demand instead of standing up and interrupting Senate debate about cutting the budget to demand the secret session. Now that Reid has shown that he was willing to manipulate Senate rules and tick off the whole GOP side, including moderates, for a partisan attempt to get a headline, he's just made it easier for Frist and the GOP to support the idea of changing those same rules on filibusters of judicial nominations. You and I might not give a flip about the senatorial rules, but they take them very seriously.
And, it seems that their demands for this Phase II of the intelligence review was all a ploy since they've been meeting already on this.
Republican staffers were ready to go with their presentation of public statements made by administration officials in May, but Democrats on the committee objected to Roberts' decision not to attach officials' names to their comments and let the process be anonymous. That backed up the discussion, the committee's GOP staff director said.
Roberts said he wanted to present a truly impartial look at statements that were made and what intelligence was available to those officials at the time they made their assessments. The chairman said from what they know now, there is no "there there."
The analysts who were interviewed were specifically asked if they felt any political manipulation or pressure in making their pre-war assessments. According to bipartisan committee staff, all said "no." Roberts said he thinks that's good enough, but Democrats have said they want to know if administration officials then took those assessments and used them for political advantage and manipulated them to go to war.
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., a member of the Intelligence Committee, and other Republicans said if Democrats had wanted to take issue with Roberts about any delays in the probe, they could have just asked him.
If you read more closely, you'll see that the real hangup has been over criminalizing part of the investigation.
The Defense Department's Office of Special Plans stopped cooperating with the Senate panel in July of this year. Roberts said key officials hired lawyers and stopped talking when Rockefeller suggested laws may have been broken. But Democrats dismissed that as an excuse.
If you read Reid's quotes, it's clear that he doesn't need an investigation because he's already reached his conclusion.
Democrats were dismayed that President Bush made no apologies after the indictment and that his naming of a new Supreme Court nominee Monday knocked the Libby story off many front pages. As he stood on the Senate floor to demand the closed session -- a motion not subject to a vote under the rule -- Reid said Libby's grand jury indictment "asserts this administration engaged in actions that both harmed our national security and are morally repugnant."
Actually, that is not what Fitzgerald said in his press conference, but they'll just ignore that and go on with the storyline that they already had. As Byron York pointed out, Fitzgerald totally blew the Democratic storyline out of the water in his press conference.
Perhaps the best explanation for the Democrats' decision to virtually shut down the Senate today can be found in one passage from CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's news conference last Friday:
This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel....The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction. And I think anyone who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
Fitzgerald's statement, and his decision to confine the indictment of Lewis Libby to charges of lying and obstruction, threatened to dash the Democrats' hope of using the CIA leak case as an opportunity to re-debate the reasons for going to war in Iraq. So the party, or at least its leaders in the Senate, has decided to use another route, the shutdown of the Senate, as a way to achieve that goal.
Don't be dismayed about what the Democrats did yesterday. It is actually a sign of the weak hand that they're playing. They lost the hope of a Rove indictment or of Libby's indictment being tied to the intelligence leading to the war. All the criticism of Bush's actions about Katrina have been diluted by information of how local and state officials were themselves at fault in so many ways. The nomination of Alito had shifted the conversation and stemmed some of the President's drop in the polls as conservatives return to the fold. The story was shifting to the actions that Bush was announcing yesterday about combatting avian flu. So, all they can do is pull a PR stunt to try to drag the storyline back to their turf. It might have worked for one day, but the Democrats need something positive for their agenda and they haven't been able to come up with a positive agenda for five years. posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:22 AM
