California's pitbull from the 30th District.

While most people will agree that the 109^th Congress was the most inept, useless group of elected officials to ever grace the halls of congress, there was one man who kept his nose to the grindstone and kept holding hearings and attacking the actions and misdeeds of our current administration.

That man is Henry Waxman.

He has consistently held the current administration accountable on many issues. He has held hearings as the ranking minority member of the Committee on Government Reform. Reid and Pelosi might be the Queen Bee's, but the worker bee has been Waxman. This report from Waxman’s committee identifies 15 key oversight issues involving President Bush and his Administration that the 108^th and 109^th Congress failed to investigate. They are:

• The role of the White House in manipulating intelligence about Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda;
• The responsibility of senior Administration officials for the abuse of
detainees;
• The role of White House officials in leaking the identity of a covert CIA
agent;
• The role of the Vice President’s office in the award of Halliburton
contracts;
• The responsibility of senior White House officials in the failed response to
Hurricane Katrina;
• The secret wiretapping of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency;

• The identity of the energy industry contributors who met with the Vice
President’s energy task force;
• The role of the White House in withholding key Medicare cost estimates
from Congress;
• Evidence of conflicts of interest at multiple federal agencies and the White
House;
• The increasing politicization of science-based federal agencies;

• The failure of the Department of Justice to enforce voting rights laws;

• Contract abuses at the Department of Homeland Security;

• The influence of industry lobbyists in writing EPA regulations;

• The influence of the tobacco industry lobbyists on U.S. tobacco policies;
and
• The role of former Attorney General John Ashcroft in illegal campaign
finance activities.

Now, that is one hell of a laundry list of fuck-ups by the Bush Administration. Most of them, if not all, are issues that have been raised in the media and by bloggers. Our current resident of the Oval Office has had the protection of a Republican-controlled Congress, which made it easy for him to ignore the questions raised in Mr. Waxman’s 22-page report.

He doesn’t have that luxury any longer. Ain’t that a bitch.

To read the rest of this, hit the TBR button

Tags: Politics, Bush,Henry Waxman