Word: bush
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...When one party is in control of both the White House and one or both chambers of Congress, the Hill often overlooks oversight of the executive branch. For example, says American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein, during the period of GOP dominance under George W. Bush, homeland-security oversight failed. "The failure to do any oversight of the Homeland Security Department helped lead to the failure of Katrina," Ornstein says...
...Divided government often doesn't fare much better. Ornstein points out that Republicans during the Clinton presidency held "hundreds of hours of hearings about how the White House abused the Christmas-card list for fundraising," while under Bush they spent eight hours investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he says...
...Partisanship can stall investigations as easily as it can generate them. After the Bush Administration incorrectly declared that Saddam Hussein had dangerous weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, Congress launched a three-phase investigation into the intelligence screwup. But Republicans accused Democrats of going on a politically motivated witch hunt, and Democrats said Republicans were complicit in a cover-up of Administration mishandling of intelligence. It took years to get through the first two phases of the investigation. By the time the third got under way, few were paying attention anymore...
...recent Gallup survey of Global Perceptions of U.S. Leadership shows that the median approval of American leadership in the world jumped from 34 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2009—a change that is attributable to the change from the Bush to Obama administration. This buttresses the common perception that President Obama is at least as popular with international audiences as with American ones...
...votes. (Vice President Joe Biden could, in this case, cast a tie-breaking vote.) The White House has been very careful not to explicitly say it intends to pursue a reconciliation strategy, which Republicans insist is a radical, undemocratic move - this, even though the GOP used it during the Bush presidency to pass two rounds of tax cuts. But during a briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said of the approach, "The avenue exists if one wants to pursue it." On an earlier call with reporters, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer declared, "We have made...