“Is there any aspect of President Bush’s miserable record on intelligence that Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not willing to excuse and help to cover up?” a New York Times editorial today asks. The Times is mad about how slow our Kansas senator has been in completing an investigation into the use of prewar intelligence on Iraq by the White House. But it is furious about Roberts’ decision Thursday not hold a vote on whether to have an inquiry into the administration’s secret wiretapping program. Instead, Roberts said he is working with the White House to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to permit warrantless spying. “Stifling his own committee without even bothering to get the facts is outrageous,” the Times wrote.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has twice vetoed bills that would single out abortion clinics for special regulations, sending a message last year that she’d sign one that applied to all the state’s surgical centers. But House lawmakers gutted such a bill this week and turned it into the same old anti-abortion bill, as if forcing Sebelius into another veto mattered more than actually trying to make abortion clinics safer. As our editorial notes on today’s opinion pages, “they also ignored an excellent point that Rep. Nancy Kirk, D-Topeka, was trying to make with her broader bill — that as the nature of health care continues to change, the Legislature needs to ensure that there is sufficient oversight of the multiplying number of clinics that do office-based surgeries.” As it is, some lawmakers seem more interested in abortion politics as usual.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It’s difficult to know whether the United Nations’ scathing new report on the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba is accurate, or whether, as the White House claims, it is based on disinformation deliberately spread by terror groups. But this confusion is part of the problem.
Who really knows what is happening there? The U.N. investigation team wanted to go to Gitmo, but the United States refused to let it interview the prisoners — then criticized the investigators for writing a report based on secondhand information. Are the prisoners there really dangerous terrorists and important informants, or are they mostly foot soldiers who don’t pose a serious threat? How long will we hold them? Until the war on terror is over? Will it ever be over?
Unfortunately, the U.N. report, which calls on the United States to close the camp “without further delay,” hurts our nation’s standing as a human-rights champion. That, in and of itself, should cause the Bush administration to rethink whether the detention camp is doing our country more harm than good.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., criticizes fellow Democrats in this commentary for backing down on the USA Patriot Act. Feingold writes: “Some Democrats may be breathing sighs of relief that the president can’t use this issue to paint them as ‘soft’ on terrorism. But we’re not doing the party or the country any favors by refusing to challenge an administration that views our freedoms as collateral damage in the war on terrorism. If Democrats aren’t going to stand up to an executive who disdains the other branches of government and doesn’t worry about trampling on the rights of innocent Americans, what do we stand for?”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Washington Post conservative columnist George Will expands on a concern noted here earlier, about what he sees as the Bush administration’s “monarchical” view of executive powers: “It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be.”
In the end, Will advises Congress to give Bush authority to do what he’s already doing — “with suitable supervision.” Those are three key words — or should be, for all Americans. Our system of checks and balances shouldn’t just apply when it suits the president.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The loudest gun-rights advocate in the Legislature, Sen. Phil Journey, R-Haysville, also is leading the way on a smart gun-control bill that cleared the Senate this week on a 39-0 vote. It would align Kansas law with federal law in barring anyone who has been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital from possessing a firearm after release and, most important, requiring that the names of those committed to mental hospitals after July 1998 be entered into state and federal law enforcement databases. “No matter where they go in the country, they can’t buy a gun from a dealer,” Journey said. That only makes sense. Also key: A court could restore the person’s right to own a gun if he no longer poses a risk to himself or others.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
