Sunday Papers

DeLay: The Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith reports on what looks to be (if you can wade through all the dates and dollar amounts in there) another questionable if not outright unethical trip to the UK taken by the Majority Leader. The Post has apparently obtained a bunch of receipts from that 2000 excursion, and reports that those receipts indicate Mr. DeLay's airfare, food and other hotel expenses were charged to credit cards belonging to uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and another registered lobbyist. Ethics rules do not permit members of Congress to allow lobbyists to pay travel expenses, even if the lobbyist is later reimbursed.

DeLay's staff said the Majority Leader remains under the impression that the UK trip was funded by the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research, and that Abramoff was acting in his capacity as a member of the Center's board of directors. A DeLay spokesman said "to the extent that Mr. Abramoff put the charges on his personal credit card, Mr. DeLay has no knowledge of this. But that would be consistent with Mr. Abramoff obtaining full reimbursement from the National Center." Unfortunately, the Post story does not address this question, which leaves a pretty important gap in the report.

Gap or no, however, this type of thing should not be tolerated by rank and file Republicans. Whether this be corruption or just the appearance of corruption, it looks pretty sleazy. It is time for Tom DeLay to voluntarily step down from his position as Majority Leader, allow the Ethics Committee to function again under fair, bipartisan and transparent rules, and submit to a full review of his actions just as any other member of Congress should. If I were a Democrat, and there were concerns like this about Nancy Pelosi or Steny Hoyer, would I be saying the same exact things? You bet I would. There are too many people in this country so jaded that they think all our elected officials behave like this. Let's make sure we have a process that can root out those who do.

Bolton: Once again, the Bolton nomination gets lots of ink today. Douglas Jehl, newly assigned to the Bolton-beat at the New York Times, highlights some recently declassified emails between various players in the Bolton drama, including exchanges that reveal the impact Bolton's outbursts had on Christian Westermann, the analyst with whom Bolton got into a dust-up over language about a non-existent Cuban bioweapons program. As Jehl notes, some of the emails do offer some new insight into that debate: an email from Westermann to a Bolton assistant suggests that it was not only the State Department analysts, but also CIA, NSA and DIA people who disagreed with the language that Bolton wanted to use in his speech. A later email from another State Department official asks Bolton's assistant to give the intelligence community "the opportunity to review such documents once they have been prepared and circulated for clearance, particularly in cases where we've provided input for use in the draft."

In the Washington Post, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger offers the best op/ed I've seen yet in support of Bolton's nomination. I like this essay because it's not just the usual "Bush deserves his nominees" argument, and actually does discuss some of what I consider are Bolton's best moments (defeating the "Zionism is racism" resolution in the General Assembly, negotiating the Security Council actions prior to the Gulf War in 1990). Unfortunately, I think Bolton's actions since Eagleburger served with him [and in this I include the Westermann, Armstrong and Ryu incidents; the comments of Ambassadors Jack Pritchard and Tom Hubbard; words of caution from Colin Powell and his former chief of staff] are serious enough that I cannot agree with Eagleburger that he would today make a good UN ambassador.

In this week's issue, Newsweek will report that British diplomats found themselves so uncomfortable with Bolton's behavior during negotiations concerning Iran that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, personally intervened with Colin Powell in November 2003 and told him that Bolton was making it "impossible to reach allied agreement on Iran's nuclear program." Prior to that, the Michael Hersh piece reveals, the deal which resulted in Libya's abandonment of its WMD programs "succeeded only after British officials 'at the highest level' persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team" after he refused to drop a demand that not only would Libya renounce its nuclear program, but that Qaddafi would immediately resign. Sources told Hersh that the White House agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," saying that this is the only reason the Libya deal was reached. If true, this is an even more serious allegation than almost any of the rest of them, since it speaks directly to Bolton's ability to work with allies and also to his ability to follow the official policy of the Administration.

Filibusters: David Broder offers a compromise on the nuclear option in his column this morning, noting that "Only the senators themselves can defend their institution from the damage the 'nuclear option' would cause. They have the capacity - and the clear duty - to do it." As always, I would support a compromise that avoids nuclear warfare in the Senate, whether it be Broder's or one suggested by Joe Biden this morning on "This Week" in which Democrats would drop the filibuster against the majority of the disputed nominees in exchange for the withdrawal of the most extreme.

The LA Times reports on how the business community is completely freaked out about the nuclear option because of the possibility that their agenda could be sidelined by a slowdown in the Senate if Frist goes nuclear.

Miscellanies: Neil Lewis (an alumnus of the RINO's own alma mater) reports on the unresolved questions left over from the Moussaoui guilt plea this week on the capacity of our judicial system to handle trials of suspected terrorists. The Times editorial board gives a little credit to the "sensible Republicans" in Congress. The operative quote:

"The fast-emerging question for [Bush] and the other Republicans is, when they will realize that nothing in the American system provides for the party that wins an election to do whatever it wants, no matter what objections are raised by the minority party or even some of its own members? The point is not lost on American voters: primal party loyalty is no substitute for effective, democratic government."

The Washington Post editorial board discusses the unfortunate backpedaling that the Rice-Zoellick State Department has been doing on Darfur.