California Conservative

It takes alot to upset Pat Roberts. Yesterday’s stunt by Senate Democrats got him plenty upset.

Sen. Roberts got 15 minutes to speak after Senate Democrats shut down the Senate. Here’s the main points in that speech:

It seems to me it was rather convenient because it was just yesterday that our staff was working with the staff of the minority, indicating that not this week but next week we would spend as much time as possible, five or six days, to complete our work in regards to Phase Two. Isn’t like it has been delayed. as a matter of fact, it’s been ongoing. as a matter of fact, we have been doing our work on phase two. It is difficult, as I will indicate in just a minute while I will go through these provisions on what we agreed to do. So it seemed to be a little convenient for all of a sudden to go into a closed session of the senate and call for a full senate investigation of phase two when the committee is already doing its work. And I think that that basically is an unfortunate stunt.

I think I ought to say one other thing. there was a memo, it was highly publicized back about a year and a half ago and in that memo, which was not provided to republicans, obviously, it was a democrat memo, it says about paragraph four, and it caused a big fuss then and it caused us about a month to sort of walk gingerly around one another and smother each other with the milk of humankindness and say, well, let’s see if we can’t work things out. and we were able to do that. I credit a lot that have to Senator Rockefeller. He’s not a partisan man. But at any rate, here’s the paragraph. Over a year and a half ago. “Be prepared to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. we could pull the trigger.” Pull the trigger on the chairman. “”wuk pull the trigger on an independent investigation any time. We can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be next year.” Well, the trigger’s been pulled today with an executive session of the Senate that is not needed, not necessary, and in my personal opinion was a stunt. So I plead with my colleagues across the aisle and my colleagues, all Republicans on the committee, next week when we start this out on a Tuesday, we’ll go through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Sen. Roberts even wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that referenced this memo. Here’s the salient paragraph from the op-ed:

“While this sounds reasonable on the surface, it conceals a more nefarious intent. A memo written by the committee’s Democratic staff, revealed in the press last week, makes clear that the minority’s goal is to prejudge and use the committee’s review and what the memo describes as “vague notions regarding the use of intelligence” to “castigate” the Republican members of the committee and conduct a partisan attack on the president. I will not let that happen.”

Several other things that Sen. Roberts said were noteworthy, too. He mentioned that his staff and Sen. Rockefeller’s staff were ironing out the details of the next committee hearing and that the Committee’s Phase 2 report would’ve been worked on at that time. That makes today’s stunt all the more unnecessary.

It also shows the desparation that Democrats are feeling these days. They were practically hyperventillating at the thought that Karl Rove was about to be indicted. They were certain that their ‘Culture of Curruption’ campaign would return them to power. They could practically taste those committee chairmanships.

Notice that their hopes had nothing to do with an agenda of anything that the American people could get excited about. No new initiatives. They thought Patrick Fitzgerald would give them a ‘Fitzmas’ present.

They thought wrong.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 2:22 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, DNC, Washington, DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.