140 hrs sworn testimony on Clinton's Xmas card list; 12 hrs on Abu Ghraib

This is a different tune that Davis sang last month in a devastating report by The Boston Globe’s Susan Milligan on the full extent to which Congress has fallen down on the job.


Representative Tom Davis, the current chairman of the Government Reform Committee, the chamber's chief watchdog for government waste and abuse, said his panel had not abdicated its oversight role, which many consider critical to the separation of powers in government.
''What aren't we doing? We aren't going after the mini scandal du jour, to try to embarrass the administration on a hearing that's going nowhere," said Davis, Republican of Virginia.


If you haven’t seen it, the Globe piece is a certifiable Must Read. It’s chock full of damning statistics and observations that put the lie to Davis’ November statement. To wit:
Back in the mid-1990s, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, aggressively delving into alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration, logged 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether former president Bill Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to identify potential Democratic donors.
In the past two years, a House committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-schlesinger/congress-falls-down-on-th_b_12496.html


SHAME!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's all call Tom Davis and remind him.

It just takes one house in Congress in 2006.

"But the agenda was different during the Clinton administration. The government reform panel alone, for example, issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.

The panel received more than 2 million pages of documents and heard from 44 Clinton administration officials, including two White House chiefs of staff, according to statistics culled by Democratic staff on the Government Reform Committee.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that from October 1996 to March 1998 -- well before the impeachment hearings -- the Clinton White House staff had spent more than 55,000 hours responding to more than 300 congressional requests, and had produced hundreds of video and audio tapes, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, to congressional investigators."

The outcome of all this investigation? zippo indictments

It really is outrageous and people need to see how corrupt and hypocritical this so-called "political" party is.

There's no sense in Congress wasting its time on the Bush administration, either. All that investigatin' they did of Clinton just shows what a squeaky clean operation the White House is, has been, and always will be. See?

See?