Word: lieberman
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Last Wednesday at around noon, Senator Joe Lieberman was pulled out of a meeting with majority leader Tom Daschle; Homeland Security adviser Tom Ridge needed Lieberman on the phone. For months the Bush Administration had been quashing the Connecticut Senator's proposal for a Cabinet agency to deal with homeland security--just as it had when the idea was proposed before Sept. 11 by a commission led by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. Ridge had refused to testify before Lieberman's Governmental Affairs Committee, and the White House had pressed Republicans to fight the plan when it emerged...
During the conversation, Ridge gave no hint of the surprise that greeted Lieberman the next morning as he headed for a vote on the Senate floor. Reporters told Lieberman that President Bush would deliver a televised address that night to call for a new Cabinet-level agency even more sprawling and powerful than the one the Senator had proposed. Suddenly, the stampede was on for what the White House touts as the biggest reorganization of government in more than a half-century. The swiftness of the about-face was best summed up by Fred Thompson, the ranking Republican on Lieberman...
...Bush plan, insists his decision to include her district's Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab in the new department is a mistake and that the lab is better off as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration. (All the nuclear labs just underwent a major reorganization.) While Lieberman and Thompson contend that Senate rules give their committee the job of drafting the legislation that will create the new department, Republican Orrin Hatch says it should fall under the Judiciary Committee on which he sits. Hastert, meanwhile, is thinking about creating a new committee to do the job in the House...
...against a Backstreet Boy. Irritated by the flood of celebrities testifying in Congress (Julia Roberts and Christie Brinkley in the past few months), Voinovich boycotted testimony by KEVIN RICHARDSON before the Environment and Public Works Committee. Kentucky native Richardson, who founded an environmental group, was asked by Democrat Joe Lieberman to speak on the dangers of mountaintop mining. Lieberman claimed that Richardson was "knowledgeable" because of flights he has taken over coalfields, but Voinovich called the appearance a "joke." Fortunately for him, the legal voting age is 18--otherwise he would surely be struggling for preteen support in his state...
...Lieberman's committee also called the Administration on its political ace card--its handling of terrorism--by passing legislation that would put the Office of Homeland Security under congressional oversight. And Lieberman's long-ignored proposal for a commission to investigate Sept. 11 became a rallying point for Democrats in the flood of revelations that the FBI had missed clues on terrorism. Within the party, all this seems to be playing well. In Arizona, an early 2004 primary state, Democratic spokeswoman Dianna Jennings says, "There's a sense among party activists that what he's doing on the 9/11 stuff...