Sen. Christopher Dodd chose the Iraq war as the topic of his first presidential campaign advertisement, condemning the “half-measures” proposed by his Democratic rivals to stop the war.
“I approved this message because we can’t simply wait for a new president,” Dodd, D-Conn., said in a 30-second commercial that said he is the only Democrat running for president with a plan to deny the “blank check” that President Bush is demanding for U.S. troops in Iraq. “We should have the conviction to stand up to this one.”
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace caused an uproar this week when he defended the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military and called homosexuality immoral.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and 2008 presidential candidate, criticized Pace and called for “a complete and total repeal” of the policy. He encouraged the other Democratic candidates to do the same.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., was among those who did just that. Although “don’t ask, don’t tell” was enacted during the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton, Sen. Clinton said she has been against it for many years. “It does a grave injustice to patriotic Americans who want to serve their country,” she said.
Clinton also clarified her thinking on homosexuality more broadly in response to Pace’s statement of personal belief that homosexuality is immoral. “I do not think homosexuality is immoral,” she said.”
Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is running for president, decried the increasing prevalence of “predatory” lending practices in the mortgage industry and said Congress should do something to keep more people from seeing their American dreams of home ownership turn into nightmares.
“There’s a distinction between a good, solid, sub-prime lender and a predatory lender, and we ought to put a stop to the latter without hurting the former,” Dodd said in a speech to the National Credit Union Association.
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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