Time For A Change 3

Just in case you were wondering whether two more years with a Republican led Congress wouldn’t be so bad, more evidence surfaces that makes a change in Washington a national necessity. The Republican Congress has consistently rubber stamped the President’s programs and abrogated its oversight responsibility. But apparently there have been a few exceptions to this approach. As James Glanz of the Washington Post reported on November 3, 2006 a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq, has sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

That apparently has been too much to bear for the Republican leadership and so they terminated the agency effective October 2007 by inserting obscure language into a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago to the surprise of many members.

John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen was “making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq.” He says he is going to try to extend the organization’s life.

Sen. Warner better watch out. First he returned from a visit to Iraq grimly stating that the country is in chaos. Now he wants to continue investigating US big business’s gold mine in Iraq. This will hardly endear him to the President or Congressional leadership. It would be more merciful for him to lose his chairmanship position because the Republicans lose the Senate than to have his own party decide to remove him if they manage to survive the election.