Old news, but worth repeating: Harry Reid delivered a speech last night attacking the president on a biblical scale, the sort of righteous broadside that most of us had assumed that part Dems were incapable of. Compared to this, Al Gore’s speech last week was a tap on the wrist:
“Republicans today control the House of Representatives, the Senate and theWhite House. They have absolute power, and it has corrupted their Party and led to the culture of corruption that we see now in Washington.
We have the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, admonished three times for ethics violations and under indictment now for money laundering.
We have the White House, where an employee has been indicted for the first time in 135 years.
There’s Karl Rove, who is under investigation… and David Safavian, the man appointed by President Bush to be charge in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts who was led away in handcuffs because of his dealings with Jack Abramoff and others.
And then, we have the Republican “K-Street Project, which has invited lobbyists inside our nation’s Capitol….as long as they are willing to pay the right price.
The Republican abuse of power comes at great cost to our country, and we can see it in the present state of our union. Special interests and the well-connected have grown stronger, while our national security… our economy… our health care… and our government have grown weaker.”
And that’s just the opening. It gets better. I regret that he didn’t connect any of his fear about Bush’s imperial presidency to the looming Alito hearings, but we can’t always get what we want, and it’s hard to complain. This is clearest and most coherent attempt a Democrat has made to lay blame for the Republicans’ sins at their own feet in a long time.
Speaking of Alito, the Judiciary commitee split 10-8 along party lines to recommend him to the Senate. Which is kind of heartening – at least the Democrats haven’t rolled over yet. There are apparently 41 likely “no” votes right now, which is enough to support a filibuster, but nobody is particularly anxious to attempt that. Fingers crossed that somebody changes their mind. Write your Senator.