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 emocratic
Rep. Henry Waxman is demanding the White House refer the matter
of Karl Rove's investments to the Justice Department to determine
whether the president's top political adviser violated conflict-of-interest
laws. Congress's investigative agency, the General Accounting Office,
is taking an unusually aggressive approach in its demand that vice
president Dick Cheney turn over the names of participants in his
energy task force. And there is a real possibility the GAO will
launch yet another investigation of the White House, this one a
probe of contacts between the president's staff and the Salvation
Army on the issue of whether organizations taking part in the faith-based
initiative would be subject to state and local laws banning discrimination
against gays and lesbians.
In each case,
it's hardly surprising that the Bush administration is facing loud
and sustained criticism from Waxman and other adversaries on Capitol
Hill. What is surprising is that the White House is not hearing
loud and sustained defenses from its allies in Congress.
It's a significant
turnabout from recent years. During the Clinton administration,
many Democrats — Waxman chief among them — virtually threw their
bodies in front of Republican investigators in an effort to defend
the White House, often against credible allegations of wrongdoing.
Now, with Waxman on the offense, accusing White House officials
of violating ethics laws, Republicans are mostly silent.
For example,
House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton, Waxman's
longtime foe, has not made any public statement in defense of Rove
or Cheney. (Burton's only substantive comments have been to defend
himself against Waxman's charge that Burton over-investigated the
Clinton administration while going easy on Bush.) Nor have Burton's
committee colleagues been quick to offer their support.
What's going
on? For the record, Republicans say the charges just don't deserve
a rebuttal. "A lot of these allegations are so ridiculous that
we just haven't responded because they're so ridiculous," says
John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert. "These
stories are all just nitpicking and don't really rise to the level
where they require answering."
But there's
something else at work, too. Privately, congressional sources say
the White House has shared little information about the Rove and
Cheney matters with Republicans responsible for oversight of the
executive branch. Even though GOP lawyers who have looked into the
matter believe neither man did anything wrong, Republican members
of Congress are hesitant to launch a public defense without a fuller
sense of the facts. "These guys don't stick their necks out
for anybody until they have heard the entire story," says one
senior aide.
And that is
perhaps the most extraordinary change from recent years, when Waxman
was willing to go to war on Bill Clinton's behalf without knowing
very much at all about, say, the campaign-finance scandal. "This
committee has been discredited by a series of mistakes, bad judgment,
partisan overreaching, and extremism," Waxman said of the Government
Reform Committee in 1998, as Burton was trying to uncover evidence
of illegal conduit contributions to the Democratic party and the
Clinton campaign. Waxman strongly denied allegations of a so-called
China Connection even after there was irrefutable proof that there
was indeed a China Connection. "They were quick to go into
defense mode before they had gotten any information,"
says a GOP staffer. "With Republicans, you don't get that lock-step
defense."
Which is the
root of Republicans' — and the White House's — woes in the Rove
and Cheney matters. So far in the Bush administration, Republicans
have simply not shown the discipline that was a Democratic trademark
during the Clinton years. "You don't have the sort of clarity
of purpose among Republicans that you do with Waxman or [John] Dingell,"
says the senior GOP aide. "If it's defense, [Democrats] play
defense. If it's offense, they play offense. And there's not a lot
of hand-wringing about it."
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