You Can Count On Joe

Joe Lieberman, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is continuing in the stonewalling tradition of the 109th Congress where his Republican allies were in the majority.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

Lieberman’s reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues. On Wednesday night, Bush conspicuously cited Lieberman’s advice as being the inspiration for creating a new “bipartisan working group” on Capitol Hill that he said will “help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror.”

But the decision by Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to back away from the committee's Katrina probe is already dismaying public-interest groups and others who hoped the Democratic victory in November would lead to more aggressive investigations of one of the White House’s most spectacular foul-ups.

Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.

And now he doesn't care, because the President mentioned him in his super-duper escalation speech and his heart went all a-flutter.

This is the second major campaign promise that Lieberman has reneged on and it's only January. He ran on finding an end to the Iraq war and then supported additional troops. He ran on getting to the bottom of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and then dropped any semblance of oversight. He lied consistently in order to retain the Senate seat he considers his birthright. He's about as scummy a politician as exists in this country.

Henry Waxman, when he gets around to it, will probably subpoena these documents for investigations of his own. But this was the one thing Lieberman got right over the past year. It's clear that the devil's bargain here was support from conservative Republicans in exchange for rolling over like a puppy in the chairmanship of the key Senate oversight committee. Democrats need to work as hard as possible to make the fragile majority in the Senate in 2008, so we can give Lieberman a smile and a "Fuck You" and kick him off these committees. In fact, I almost wouldn't mind if they did it right now.