Someone explain this Closed Door thing to meFollow

From last night with the Senate. If you don't know the details, go find a new source and look it up.

What exactly is the big deal here? Near as I can tell, Reid used some rule to boot the folks out who didn't need to be there and have a Senate heart-to-heart in private. And? Isn't talking about this sort of thing what we're paying these guys for? Why the hand waving and shouting from the Right as if Reid just ate their children and burned their homes down? Ok, so the public wasn't let in but, if the public largely cared for up to the minute reports on Congress, they'd be showing C-Span on network television. We'll find out the end results on the evening news like we do every other day.

From what I can tell, it's not as if they were all locked into the Dome like the guys selecting the Pope. Hash it out, go home and eat dinner an hour late. Big deal. What am I missing that required all the spazzing out?

They keep mentioning "senate rule 21" which according to the .gov site says

Precedence of Motions

Rule 21. When a motion has been made and stated by the chair the following motions are in order, in the rank named:

PRIVILEGED MOTIONS

Adjourn, recess, or go at ease
Reconsider
Demand for call of the senate
Demand for roll call
Demand for division
Question of privilege
Orders of the day

INCIDENTAL MOTIONS

Points of order and appeal
Method of consideration
Suspend the rules
Reading papers
Withdraw a motion
Division of a question

SUBSIDIARY MOTIONS

1st Rank: To lay on the table
2nd Rank: For the previous question
3rd Rank: To postpone to a day certain
To commit or recommit
To postpone indefinitely
4th Rank: To amend

No motion to postpone to a day certain, to commit, or to postpone indefinitely, being decided, shall again be allowed on the same day and at the same stage of the proceedings, and when a question has been postponed indefinitely it shall not again be introduced during the session.

A motion to lay an amendment on the table shall not carry the main question with it unless so specified in the motion to table.

At no time shall the senate entertain a Question of Consideration.


Which means absolutely nothing to me , the general jist of what I got from it though is taht the dems used this as a procedural move in order to obtain " the Senate reopened about two hours later after members agreed to appoint a bipartisan group of senators to assess the progress of the intelligence committee's investigation"

The dems feel the investigations on whether the Bush administration manipulated the facts in order to press for a war in Iraq. They hoped the second phase of the investigation would have been done in 2004 and now its Nov 2005 and its just starting to move into it.

From what I can tell the GOP and Frist got their panties in a wad because the Dems didn't consult them first before invoking the call for the closed door session. The big deal was that the GOP was not consulted/warned before hand and closed sessions are not done very often. It was a congressional ***** slap that was needed to get the investigation moving and the GOP was just whining to the press for being ***** slapped.

Edited, Wed Nov 2 13:43:45 2005 by Kiggulak

Apparently there was a phase 2 which was supposed to take place but never did. Now this new committee is to perform phase 2 and get back to congress by mid November.

They called a closed session for a matter that did not require any measure of secrecy. As part of the process for holding a closed session, all staffers without security clearances and `need to know` are ejected from the Senate chambers. The media is removed. Senators are divested of their electronic doodads (cellphones, PDAs, pagers, PSPs).

Once the necessary security measures are taken, they can begin to actually discuss the matter that the Senate itself was closed for. In this case, the matter at hand was the formation of the bipartisan investigation committee. This issue is important. The question is, is it important enough to derail all other business of the Senate until it is resolved?

There are a great many other issues on the table at present, not the least of which being the Supreme Court nomination currently under consideration. Other business cannot advance during a closed session. Were one to substantially abuse the closed session rules, one could effectively dictate to the entire Senate what the business of the day would be - and could do so out of the eye of public scrutiny. For all we know they went into closed session, took a two-hour nap, then announced this bipartisan committee just to save face. :)


The irritating bit was Reid threatening to use this same move every damn day until he gets whatever it is he wants. It's a power play using the rules of order to muck with the day to day operation of one of our legislative bodies. All it's really doing is pissing off other Senators and giving us another circus to watch in the nation's capital. It's delaying business, and those bastards don't work enough as it is.

If Reid irritates the majority too much, the Republicans can turn around and utilize the `nuclear option` to force a rules change and take the ball away. Instead of resolving the matters placed before our legislatures, these swine are busy with the procedural equivalent of a di[b][/b]ck-size competition.

The commitee that was appointed to look into the investigations is made up of 3 GOP and 3 Liberals. I couldn't tell you which Senators, because it wasn't said in the article.

I guess there's not much to be shocked about concerning the Closed-door thing, except that, as Kiggulak said, it's not a very common practice. Most likely, the Repuclicans thought it was inappropriate to call for closed-doors. It's even more odd since the media would eat up something like this, although that might be why the Dems didn't want them in there.

Best I could find with a quick search.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/09/senate.intelligence/index.html

Found it. 10:8 in makeup which means the Republicans do control the rate of the investigation. I'm not saying they've intentionally slowed it since I'm in no position to say but they do have the ability to do so.

Presumably because, in committee, the Pubbies can say "that's nice" and still not do anything. The Democrats could investigate all they want on their lonesome but their findings wouldn't be included in the committee report without the consent of the GOP'ers. Getting a 3:3 group (which requires Senate approval) to look at it assures neither side can hold up production without it being public knowledge.

Edited, Wed Nov 2 14:31:34 2005 by Jophiel

The other significance of closed door sessions in the Senate: anyone can call for the session, and as long as someone seconds the motion there can be no debate about it. The session will remain in session until a majority votes to end it.

Generally it's used for things like impeachment votes, national security matters, and the like. So I think the Republicans were saying that there was no call for such an extreme measure, and the Demos were saying that it was the only way to force the issue of the implications of the recent indictments.

Also, of course, it made for good press coverage at a time when the White House had just tried to change the subject and move off of topics embarrassing to the Administration.

So basically, they realized that they weren't getting the traction they wanted from the investigation into that angle, so they're seeing if another investigation might better persuade the public that their version of things is correct.

Point being that (as mentioned earlier) we don't pay Congress to single out one administration and spend attempt after attempt to discredit them out of proportion to actual actions.

If you want to investigate whether faulty intelligence might have led to war, then start with the reasons Congress voted for that war (seems a logical starting point since this is Congress investigating, right?). Look at only those things considered and voted on in that resolution and work from there.

What they're doing is finding *any* intelligence that can be shown to be false, whether it was used as part of Congress' decision to go to war or not. More specifically, they already have a "list" of known false intelligence. Oddly enough, to my knowledge none of them were included in the Congressional decision to vote to authorize war. So the purpose of the investigation is not to see if we went to war based on false intelligence, but merely to flout the fact that there was false intelligence and hope that the media picks up on it and the public makes the assumption that it resulted in the war. And given past assumptions made in the public eye on this issue, that's not a bad bet.

It's purely about generating rhetoric to use against the Bush administration. That's why it's not a good use of their time, and doubly why using shenanegans to force it is a misuse of proceedure. Instead of making them look like they're getting things done, it makes them look desperate.



Funny take on it actually. Given that Wilson's op-ed, while openly calling Bush a liar, did not actually refute Bush's statement. I've said this before. I'll say it again. Bush said that Iraq "sought" uranium from Africa (Niger in this case). Wilson refuted it by arguing (correctly) that Niger didn't sell Iraq any uranium so Bush is lying. Interestingly enough, if you read his entire op-ed piece, you'll read a part where he talks about meeting with a minister in Niger who told him that he was approached by Iraqi governnment agents who wanted to open up "commercial arrangements", and that minister broke of dealings with them because selling uranium to Iraq would have violated UN resolutions.

So basically, Wilson's own article calling Bush a liar confirms exactly what Bush said. Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Niger. The issue is muddled further because there were forged documents found in Italy (I think!) that claimed a sale of uranium had been made. However, the Bush administration never claimed that sale actually occured, and we most definately did not go to war based on the assumption that that document was factual. So why investigate a forged document when the false information in that document wasn't used? It's pure smoke and mirrors designed to confuse the public on the issue.



Yes. It would be. The problem is that the "false intelligence" that the Dems want to investigate is mostly stuff that was discovered to be false before we went to war, and was not involved in the decision to go to war at all. What they really are doing is hoping that no one will notice that fact (and they're unfortunately probably right), and if they can get an investigation to file a report that lists the false intelligence, they know that that's all that'll be reported in the news.

The problem is that any report from such an investigation will provide a warped view to the public. The context of the intelligence leading up to the war will be lost since the report will undoubtably only mention those things found to be false. The public will only hear about the false intelligence, and assume that's all there was, and therefore conclude that we must have gone to war as a result of that. It's an investigation that leads the facts. It's not about determining if the war was based on faulty intelligence, but purely about making sure to provide the public (though the media) as big a list of bad intelligence as possible. That's not good politics. It's not even mediocre politics. That's why such an investigation has been blocked in the past. Investigating only one aspect of the intelligence will only provide a warped view of the issue. Looking into only the false things, or those suspected of being false, will exagerate those things importance in the decision to go to war. The first phase of the investigation did exactly what they *should* have done. It looked at the justifications listed by Congress for war. It analyzed each one for veracity. It found that the reasons used and voted on were all valid. The so called "phase two" is just a rhetoric building device for the Liberals.

I negate ye with the application of my tax dollars.

Where do we sign up to dictate how our money is spent? :)

At least the whitewater investigations started out based on something that was valid. You've got to admit there were some amazingly shady deals going on there.

I didn't even have a problem with the investigation into the Plame leak. Problem was that while it took starr about 3 years to veer off track from his investigation, it only took Fitzgerald about 3 weeks in his...

This one the Dems are pushing is a total farce though. There isn't even a vaguely valid justification for it. Remember. They've already looked at the reasons they voted for war, and the intelligence directly behind those reasons and found it all valid (phase one, right?). As a result, they determined that there was no need to look into non-direct intelligence that may or may not have been false because there was no national interest in doing so. The Dems decided to misuse Senate proceedures to force an investigation knowing full well that its only purpose is to try to spew as much FUD into the public's mind as possible. Given the result of the first investigation there is *no* possiblity that this investigation can ever result in any changes or actions. It's only there so that they'll at some point publish a book with findings, that the press can pour over to list out the false intelligence contained within (along with inuendo that we actually acted on that false intelligence).


This is really an all time low for the Dems...