Legalizing Lawbreaking
by digby
Oh for crying out loud:
:Roll Call
Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened to hold up any and all legislation in the Senate until Congress passes its legislation to prohibit the release of photos showing detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re not going to do any more business in the Senate,” Graham said. “Nothing’s going forward until we get this right.” Both Senators said they were alarmed that a House-Senate conference committee on the supplemental war spending bill appears poised to eliminate language — inserted by the two Senators — that would block public disclosure of detainee abuse photos. The $90-billion-plus bill has been held up, in part, because House Democratic leaders have said they do not have the votes to pass it with the detainee photo provision included, because many liberal lawmakers have balked at the language.
Regardless of how you feel about the release of the pictures, this legalizing of a cover up is just nonsense. The law is what it is and they should just abide by it. What this says is that Bush’s only error all those years was in not asking Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to cover his ass for war crimes and relying on his own authority. Obama will not make that mistake, obviously.
And, even more depressing is the fact that they are using this tactic when the Democrats have a large majority in the Senate. As Jane Hamsher says:
Joe Lieberman will add this to every bill to go out of the Senate and Harry Reid will help him, because he doesn’t want Lieberman to force a big showdown where all the Democrats in the Senate are forced to oppose the President in order to oppose the bill. This is the kind of thing you do to embarrass the opposition party, by the way.
sigh…
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