Defenseless
The silence of the Republicans.

July 20, 2001 12:15 p.m.

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."