The Second Best Use of a House Committee Gavel

Matt Margolis points out the latest Democrat temper tantrum, this time Friday afternoon when they attempted to hijack a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Brother Meringoff picks up the narrative:

Yesterday, the House Dems gave us a taste of the infantile leftism we've been missing lately. The House Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings on the Patriot Act, which is set to expire at the end of the year. The Democratic minority invoked a rarely used right and invited its own panel of witnesses to testify. That would have been fine if the intent had been to obtain testimony about the Patriot Act. But the Dems tried to use the panel to bash Administration anti-terrorism policy generally, and in particular to attack U.S. policy on detaining suspected terrorists outside the U.S., a subject that has nothing to do with the Patriot Act. That Act, controversial in its own right, does not deal with the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The Washington Times' account of the proceedings is here. And this is how the Washington Post covered the hearing.

One of the panel members was Amnesty International USA chairman Chip Pitts. He reiterated his organization's view that Guantanamo Bay is "the gulag of our time." This is an assertion so outrageous that many liberals have denounced it. And it's an assertion that AI's Bill Schulz proved incapable of defending when questioned by Chris Wallace, ultimately admitting that he knew little about what happens at Gitmo and that the AI statement was essentially a publicity stunt. But the House Democrats saw fit to bring Pitts in so he could repeat the slander in hearings on a subject unrelated to detention policy. Pitt fared no better than Schulz, defending his comparison to a system that left 20 million dead Soviet civilians by referring to one death under questionable circumstances at Gitmo.

At the end of the hearing, the Democrats tried to hold an impromptu press conference (in the Times' account) or to prolong the hearing (according to the Post). James Sensenbrenner cut off the committee microphones. This was unfortunate, since the Dems undoubtedly would have further revealed how their hatred of President Bush trumps any interest they might otherwise have had in combatting terrorism.

This disgusting display raises a number of questions, only some of them rhetorical. Such as what is this "rarely-used right" the Dems invoked, why did Chairman Sensenbrenner allow them to invoke it, and why did Republicans never invoke it when they were in the minority? And, as the follow-up, how long will it be before libs are howling that Sensennbrenner's is yet another example of majority Republicans "crushing their First Amendment rights" and attempting to "squash any and all dissent" to the GOP's "blatant power grabs"?

As to the "substance" of the demands of the Donks and their rafter of "witnesses," one is, I think, justified in asking whether this flagrant insistence on what amounts to unconditional surrender to the terrorists is a reflection of their hatred of the President or a candid disclosure of their true loyalties. If the former, then they are reveling in a minority status that they know is going to be indefinite, making the best of a bad situation by casting discomfiting restraint and basic decorum to the proverbial four winds, secure in the knowledge that none of their insane rantings will ever actually get within a Tiger Woods tee shot of serious consideration by those entrusted with governing responsibility. If the latter, on the other hand, then the country is in some seriously deep doo-doo when the cyclical pendulum of political fortune inevitably starts its swing back towards the left.

In the meantime, it is heartening to see a Republican committee chairman not put up with the minority's seditious idiocy for a change. Small wonder such refusal to suffer fools transpired on the House side, as opposed to the supine Senate.

Only thing that would have improved upon Sensenbrenner's summary adjournment would have been if he'd gone down the line of Democrat committee members and bonked each of them on the head with his gavel on the way out the door.