Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek write that Senator Joe “Vichycrat” Lieberman has “quietly” decided to give President Bush a pass on Katrina.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.
Lieberman’s reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues.
Conventional wisdom says that Lieberman is so much in love with his self-image of the Good German Democrat that he’d send his mother to Iraq to make Bush happy. Of course, it’s always possible someone is paying him off.
On Wednesday night, Bush conspicuously cited Lieberman’s advice as being the inspiration for creating a new “bipartisan working group†on Capitol Hill that he said will “help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror.â€
Talk about someone backing the wrong horse.
Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.
Asserting that there were “too many important questions that cannot be answered,†Lieberman and other committee Democrats complained in a statement last year that the panel “did not receive information or documents showing what actually was going on in the White House.†…
…But now that he chairs the homeland panel—and is in a position to subpoena the records—Lieberman has decided not to pursue the material, according to Leslie Phillips, the senator’s chief committee spokeswoman. “The senator now intends to focus his attention on the future security of the American people and other matters and does not expect to revisit the White House’s role in Katrina,†she told NEWSWEEK.
Joe is finding other ways to sell us all out. From an editorial in today’s New York Times:
Making his umpteenth pitch to Congress to provide more security money for New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated the obvious when he said that money to defend against terrorism should be divvied up based on an assessment of risks, not “spread across the country like peanut butter.†After all, his testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee echoed one of the key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The mayor estimated that more than $3 billion had been distributed in this lunatic way to date.
Unfortunately, the committee’s incoming chairman, Senator Joseph Lieberman, is partial to peanut butter. Mr. Lieberman, who won re-election last November as an independent with help from Mr. Bloomberg, continues to believe that every state, regardless of the risks or threats it faces, should be getting antiterrorism money. In negotiations with the House, Mr. Lieberman is seeking a “compromise†formula that preserves guaranteed minimums for relatively low-risk places like his home state of Connecticut. The minimums he wants well exceed the financing favored by the House, and cannot be justified on the basis of national security.
If the Senator isn’t pocketing a generous amount of “thanks” from somebody besides his constituents ….
you know i voted for gore but i had to really overlook joejoe to do it. i thought the choice of joejoe was gore’s biggest mistake. joejoe’s ugly face, old man tone and whinniness just made me nauseated. he’s like that fellow employee who just fawns over the boss for his own benefit, who tattles about another employee. he’s like eddie haskel. joe likes getting screwed by bush just so joe can have recognition. he’s a traitor to us. i hope the voters next time do him justice. bush said joe’s reelection showed the nation that bush was right. i did not vote for lieby, i was not able to vote in conn as a arizona resident, only his small following in conn. did. i know he would have been beaten very, very badly if all of us could have voted for lieby.
Light up the switchboard in Senator Reid’s office: 202-224-3542. Press 1 to tell a live staffer, 2 to leave Senator Reid a voicemail. I registered my objection to Lieberman’s dereliction of duty and advocated some micromanagement of Lieberman’s duties AND preparation to flip some Republicans to replace gormless Joe when he joins his soulmates on the other side of the aisle, as I believe he will. How about Arlen Specter?
Joe is technically ‘Independent’, but he is caucusing with Dems. That gives Democrats a bare majority; his defection to ‘be’ a Republican in fact, would not make a tie. It would give Republicans a majority, because the VP casts a tiebreaking vote.
If – and I say if – Joe was to be so irritated by snubs and insults from Dems that he changed from Independent to Republican, I don’t know HOW that would affect the structure in the Senate.
Suppose that Joe’s defection would affect structure in the Senate..Being purely political here, I would be tempted to find a disgruntled Republican who might be talked into changing his party affiiliation affiliation. Otherwise, Joe has an obscene amout of power, and he might well wield that power.
Another point about a potential Lieberman switch to Republican: he would lose his seniority for committe assignments. When Frank Lautenberg was reelected again to the US Senate after a brief retirement, he lost his seniority for his previous years of service.