Posted by
Bert Chapman on Thursday, May 24, 2007 5:05:53 PM
I've enjoyed dissing various liberal Senators in recent postings and it's now time to diss liberal Representatives. Last November's elections returned the Democrats to power in the House and Senate. These election results enabled numerous old war horse liberals to assume committee chairs and other positions of power while allowing new liberal stalwarts to pursue their nefarious visions. One of the old war horses of the House of Representatives is California's Henry Waxman. Waxman represents his state's 30th district which includes a number of Los Angeles area locales including Hollywood. He came to Washington in the halcyon Democratic victory of 1974 in the midst of voter outrage over Watergate and has become an troublesome fixture in the House since then.
Waxman serves on two of the House's most powerful committees: Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform. Both of these committees conduct prodigious amounts of oversight of federal agency programs and produce tremendous amounts of documentation of their activities. As a Government Information Librarian, I assure you these committees crank out a lot of paper and occupy beaucoup byte space on the web documenting their activities. Some of these investigations are useful but some are dubious.
Waxman now chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This committee is concerned with evaluating the management performance of various government programs. Go to this committee's website
http://oversight.house.gov/ and you'll get an idea of its daunting agenda. Congressional committees have subpoena power which they can use to compel recalcitrant witnesses to testify. Sometimes that is necessary.
Under Henry Waxman's tenure, this subpoena authority will be used as part of his relentless desire to hound Bush Administration policymakers for real or imagined transgressions. Waxman is especially fixated over the ongoing conflict in Iraq. A bizarre obsession of his in this regard is his desire to compel Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about information she may or may not have received as National Security Advisor concerning potential knowledge about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Waxman has obviously not read the scores of documentation on the origins of 9/11 and its accompanying intelligence background to know that we're not likely to learn anything new about this tragedy. Instead, he wants to hound Rice, who has justifiably resisted his pursuits, in order to prove that he's an anal retentive liberal crusader more interested in scoring cheap political points, than actually learning information that would help the U.S. avoid future terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, as the chair of a powerful committee, Waxman will use his considerable powers to seek to ruin the lives and careers of any official or citizen who crosses his path or somehow incurs his self-righteous liberal indignation. Americans should take a close look at Waxman over the next two years and decide if they really want such a malevolent power hungry ogre to conduct oversight of federal agency program management. Waxman's preening arrogance should remind all Americans of the reasons why they took congressional control away from the Democrats in 1994. Hopefully, his over the top behavior will alienate enough Americans to return control of the House to the GOP in 2008 and, hopefully, by then, the Republicans will recover the fiscal conservatism, administrative probity, and ideological certitude prompting their congressional victory in 1994.