A Politician’s Nature

For Democrats, "FOIA is as sacred as Social Security and Medicare." If Democratic members of Congress aren't willing to defend the decades-old transparency law which they long championed -- all because a Democratic President now wants the power to override it and two neoconservative Senators are spewing the rankest fear-mongering in order to compel its abandonment -- then what will they defend? Wasn't one of the main criticisms of the GOP Congress that they abdicated their duties to impose checks on the GOP President and instead capitulated to all of his demands, all because they were members of the same party? Why would the Democratic Congress want to replicate that behavior and allow a Democratic President to constrict their own long-standing transparency law?

  Glenn Greenwald

Uh…because they’re Congress?

For years under Bush, most Democrats in Congress were petrified about voting against war funding bills -- even when they contained unrelated amendments they found offensive -- because they were so scared that they would be accused of "failing to support the troops." Yet Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham are perfectly willing to threaten to vote against the current war spending bill and hold up the whole Senate -- and the entire GOP House leadership (the same people who long equated opposition to war spending bills with a "failure to support the troops") also said they would vote against it due to their opposition to the IMF funding it contains.

Yep. That sounds about right. We surely are not expecting Congressmen to have any principles, are we? Yes, I know, there are a handful of exceptions. Barney Frank and Russ Feingold come to mind. But, they are rare.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. --Mark Twain