America is commemorating the birthday of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. today. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., marked the occasion last week with a speech on the House floor.
“Dr. King turned a mirror on America, and the reflection was not good. It was ugly,” Cohen said. “America was not the land of the free, but it was a land built by the enslaved.”
Two Democrats in the California Assembly also commemorated King last week with floor speeches:
The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote this week on the nomination of Michael Mukasey to be the next attorney general, and President Bush made the case for Mukasey’s confirmation in his weekly radio address.
Democrats initially voiced little opposition to Mukasey’s nomination, but his refusal to take a hard line against an interrogation technique known as “waterboarding,” which some critics consider torture, has made the push to confirm Mukasey more challenging. Bush reiterated Mukasey’s qualifications for the job, including his tenure as a federal judge, and chastised some Democratic senators for delaying action on the nomination.
“Congressional leaders should not make Judge Mukasey’s confirmation dependent on his willingness to make a public judgment about a classified program he has not been briefed on,” Bush said. “If the Senate Judiciary Committee were to block Judge Mukasey on these grounds, it would set a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general.”
The Democratic address, given by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, focused on veterans’ affairs. Murray responded to a pointed speech Bush had given at the conservative Heritage Foundation by chastising the president for ignoring and underfunding the VA system even as he continues to spend tens of billions of dollars on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Under President Bush, the number of uninsured veterans has skyrocketed,” she said. “The personal data of millions of vets was lost. And yet, the president let three months go by before even nominating a new secretary of veterans’ affairs.
“The crisis at Walter Reed Medical Center was just one visible product of this categorical neglect for our veterans. In spite of all these failures, the president continues to offer little more than speeches and scare tactics.”
Equal pay to women for work equal to that done by men is at risk because of a Supreme Court ruling May 29, according to witnesses at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing this week. Here are video excerpts from the hearing, as posted online by the panel’s Democratic majority:
Six years into his presidency, George W. Bush is channeling the veto spirit of his father, former President George H.W. Bush.
Until this week, President Bush had vetoed only one bill. He vetoed his second on Tuesday, rejecting a measure that would have set a timetable for removing U.S. troops from Iraq. And then today, Bush issued a veto threat against a “hate crimes” bill just hours before the Democratic-led House passed it on a 237-180 vote. The legislation would expand the categories of violent acts punishable as hate crimes to those based on the victims’ sexual orientation, gender or disability.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
All of the veto news this week is reminiscent of the presidency of Bush’s father from 1989 to 1993. The elder Bush clashed constantly with the Democrats who had controlled both chambers of Congress for the better part of four decades. He vetoed 44 bills in four years — all but one of which were upheld.
If this week is any indication of what the current President Bush can expect for the remainder of his second term, it could be a long two years.
A new law aimed at authorizing military commissions to prosecute terrorists has been on the books less than two months, and Sen. Christopher Dodd already is working to counteract it.
With just days left in the 109th Congress, the Connecticut Democrat introduced a bill that would take several steps aimed at protecting the civil rights of alleged terrorists in U.S. custody. Dodd said that among other things, the measure would restore habeus corpus for those individuals, narrow the definition of “enemy combatants” and prevent the use of evidence gained through torture in an effort to stem that practice.
Both the new law and Dodd’s response to it are the result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. That 5-3 decision in June found that military commissions then in use violated military code and the Geneva Convention.
Dodd said the court made the right decision and criticized Congress for moving to undermine it. He called it “a dark day … for our country” and “a major step back, to walk away from habeus corpus, to walk away from the Geneva Conventions, to allow for torture to be used again.”
Dodd vowed to resurrect the bill in the 110th Congress, which Democrats will control. “We shouldn’t let that law passed in October to stand on the books,” he said. “I think it was passed primarily as a political action — to try to embarrass people in the 2006 elections about who’s for battling terrorism and who isn’t.”
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