Editorial: Stonewalling provokes drastic action

Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005 | 7:24 a.m.

On Tuesday Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, in a bold move, forced a rare closed-door session of the Senate. The Nevada Democrat's gambit was clear: to highlight Republican Senate leaders' failure to finish an Intelligence Committee probe of the president's use of faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

Republican Senate leaders were furious with Reid. They sputtered that this was just a stunt. But the fact is that it took an extreme step like this -- the political equivalent of getting hit in the head by a two-by-four -- to get the attention of the Republican leaders.

And after Reid's move, rather than continuing to bottle up the investigation as they had done, the Republicans agreed to conduct a quick, bipartisan review of the Intelligence Committee's investigation.

Reid and his fellow Democrats were forced by the stonewalling from Republican Senate leaders to take the extraordinary measure that they did on Tuesday. "They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why," Reid explained.

The bottom line is that Reid renewed attention to the faulty intelligence that the war in Iraq was predicated on, something that Republicans -- particularly those in the White House -- don't want brought up anymore. The president's standing with the public continues to deteriorate, and much of this is tied to how badly the war in Iraq is going.

Also making matters worse for the administration is that last week Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been investigating who leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent, whose spouse had revealed that faulty intelligence had been used to support the case for war against Iraq.

The Bush administration has mastered the art of trying to change the subject when things are going wrong -- nominating Judge Samuel Alito of the federal appeals court on Monday to the Supreme Court was part of the White House's effort to divert attention from the indictment and the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the high court. It was encouraging, then, to see that Reid and other Democrats aren't about to roll over and that they have no intention of letting President Bush try to change the subject this time.