The Senate

Out Damned Spot

The Senate voted yesterday to officially demand that Bush not pardon Scooter Libby, whose sentence he previously commuted.   Republicans then demanded a vote to repudiate Bill Clinton's 140 acts of clemency, many of them after "donations" had been received during his last days in office.  Harry Reid quickly quelled the uprising by "erasing' from history any record of the Bush vote, which had failed anyway. “ Last night the U.S. Senate erased a page of history, literally. The body agreed to permanently remove from the constitutionally mandated Congressional Record a vote taken earlier in the evening on a measure that said the president should not pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. The Senate vote failed 47-49, but any reference to the vote itself was expunged as though it never happened. [story] ” So much for that, now it's part of internet lore.  After the Senate Ethics Committee Keating Five hearings, democrats demanded that records be sealed so members would not have their reputations sullied unfairly.  I'm not making that up.  Too bad, because those hearings were a treasure trove of "insider trading" secrets.  Especially interesting was  testimony from Sen. Alan Cranston's AA who matter-of-factly announced that she routinely changed the language of senate legislation - after it had been passed. If C-Span ever re-airs that series (C-Span currently does not acknowledge it ever happened), tape the whole thing;  it's a civics lesson in a box.