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“WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H226-H227 on Jan. 28, 2004.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in a mood to lament what is going on in this House. The American people, I think, sometimes do not understand what it means to have one-party government. The United States right now is in the hands of one party from the Presidency through the Senate, right on through the House of Representatives. One party makes all of the decisions. That has a very strong effect on what happens around here. Issues that might raise questions if they are in the hands of the majority party are clearly not raised. If they are an issue of the minority party, who cares because the majority is running the place and there is really very little that the majority cannot do, from the way it has handled the Committee on Rules to the way it handles bills all up and down the line.
If it was just the processes of the House that I was depressed or upset about, that would be one thing. But there are huge issues that I think affect the American body politic. When people think about the Congress, there is often a saying, that people like their Congressperson, but they do not like Congress in general because of the things that they see happen here.
The first issue that brought this to my mind was the issue of the outing of a CIA agent by someone in the White House. I am not someone who is enamored of the CIA, but still someone who knows the importance of the CIA; and I believe that the protection of CIA agents is absolutely paramount. We cannot have an intelligence agency that is being exposed on every hand by anybody for any political purpose. The issue comes up, there is no outrage in this body.
We will give them $40 billion more for the budget for that agency, but we will for political purposes out an agent anytime we feel it is politically, or some people will, anytime they think it is politically expedient. It obviously came from the White House, and we are several months down the road, and there is nothing happening. They have moved it now to a special prosecutor in Chicago. Why there, I do not know. Finally, the Attorney General felt he could not handle it; it was too hot to deal with in the Justice Department, so it is gone.
There are other things that happen here. We have intelligence leaks in the other body. There is no outrage anywhere. No one demands an inquiry because the man who did it apparently, we do not know, and it is not clear who did it, but it is clear there should be an investigation of an intelligence leak. It does not happen. Where is the outrage in this place? Is it only Democrats in the minority that feel outrage? Are there no Republicans who care about the intelligence agencies in this country that allow leaks, allow outing of agents?
The other thing that we do in this House is we deal with public policy, huge public policy, policy that affects 20, 30, 40, 50 million people at a swipe, not little issues. Sure, there is the museum that goes up in somebody's district, and people get all excited about the pork involved in that kind of thing. Those are not the issues people should be outraged about.
The outrage ought to be about issues like, take the pharmaceutical bill. It comes to the floor. Medicare affects 40 million people. The issue sits on this floor frozen in time for almost 2 hours while the leadership of the majority tries to get the votes. We are told that the voting closes down after 15 minutes, but that issue could go for 2 hours. Where is the outrage in this body?
Mr. Speaker, one Member even suggested he was given a little extra encouragement.
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