Redstate

Campaign Promises Sure Get Dispensed With Fast, Don't They?

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | National Security — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

And contrary to what they have said in the past, they don't care much for implementing all of the 9/11 Commission recommendations (read on):

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. Instead, Democratic leaders may create a panel to look at the issue and produce recommendations, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

Because plans for implementing the commission's recommendations are still fluid, Democratic officials would not speak for the record. But aides on the House and Senate appropriations, armed services and intelligence committees confirmed this week that a reorganization of Congress would not be part of the package of homeland-security changes up for passage in the "first 100 hours" of the Democratic Congress.

"I don't think that suggestion is going anywhere," said Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee and a close ally of the incoming subcommittee chairman, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.). "That is not going to be their party position."

It may seem like a minor matter, but members of the commission say Congress's failure to change itself is anything but inconsequential. In 2004, the commission urged Congress to grant the House and Senate intelligence committees the power not only to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies but also to fund them and shape intelligence policy. The intelligence committees' gains would come at the expense of the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Powerful lawmakers on those panels would have to give up prized legislative turf.

But the commission was unequivocal about the need.

"Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult and important," the panel wrote. "So long as oversight is governed by current congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the security they want and need."

Now Democrats are balking, just as Republicans did before them.

The decision will almost certainly anger commission members, as well as families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, many of whom have pressed hard for implementation of the recommendations.

"The Democrats pledged to implement all the remaining 9/11 reforms, not some of them," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), who served on the commission.

Carie Lemack, whose mother was in one of the jets that hit the World Trade Center, echoed that sentiment: "It wasn't a Chinese takeout menu, the 41 recommendations. You have to do all of them."

Now, to be perfectly fair about things, there may very well be various Commission recommendations that I, upon close inspection, wouldn't favor. But this refusal--after swearing up and down that all of the Commissions recommendations would be implemented--is bizarre to contemplate . . . until we notice that the recommendation involves Congressional reorganization, which will result in the loss of a certain amount of power and influence for the incoming Democratic majority, as the excerpt above shows.

All of this--along with the drawn-out soap opera over who would be the House Intelligence Committee Chairman and the decision by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remove current ranking Democrat Jane Harman from the running because Harman committed the grave sin of cooperating in the past with the Bush Administration--seems to indicate that the incoming Democratic majority is bound and determined to make intelligence policy a purely political tool to be wielded in a partisan manner. When the Bush Administration was accused of having done that, it was deemed a scandal in the public eye. We shall see what the commentariat have to say now when the sins the Administration has been accused of committing are now being performed on the other side of the partisan divide.