Investor's Business Daily, July 6th, 2007
Congress: Democrats continue to poke, prod and probe the Bush administration. Some of the investigations are a mere nuisance. Others, if not reined in, will compromise our national security.
We've editorialized recently about the many attack investigations on the White House, thinking Democrats had only launched a few dozen because no one had a real handle on how deep their maliciousness ran. Now we know.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said last week that the Democrats had "launched over 300 investigations, had over 350 requests for documents and interviews, and they have had over 600 oversight hearings in just about 100 days."
Democrats suggested that Stanzel was exaggerating. But they haven't come up with figures disputing his claim. And even if he has overstated the case by 100%, Democrats are still running enough investigations to nearly paralyze the White House.
But, of course, that's the idea. If they can't impeach President Bush, they'll bedevil him to the last minute of his presidency. But in carrying out their holy war, they will eventually make the U.S. more vulnerable to our terrorist enemies.
Forget the Democrats' threats to investigate Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence. (Even they know that the Constitution gives the president the "power to grant reprieves and pardons.") Such ankle-biting isn't likely to have much impact on our security.
Not so, however, the noisy and endless probes of White House policy allowing the National Security Agency to place warrantless wiretaps on overseas calls with suspected terrorists.
Due to security concerns, the administration can't say too much. But the White House implies that the much-maligned wiretap program, which was upheld by a federal court Friday, has been integral to the country's counterterrorism success. With no organized terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11, there's good reason to believe that the program has thwarted attempts.
The Democrats could sideline other important security measures by, for example, limiting the administration's efforts at gaining vital intelligence by digging deeper into the CIA's foreign prisons program, or ramping up excess scrutiny on the prison that holds enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.
In fact, with the 2008 elections a little more than a year off, the congressional majority has the time to severely weaken U.S. counterterrorism efforts by airing every security secret in the country and looking for misconduct in every program.
America is under siege. Consider that two of the doctors suspected in last week's terrorist attempts in Great Britain had looked into jobs in the U.S. Yet again recent news makes it clear that the government needs every tool it can handle to fight the war on terrorism.
But we're living in a moment when it seems that the Democrats are far more serious about scoring political points than they are about keeping the country secure. In the long term, their witch hunts will hurt them as much as they will ordinary Americans.
