Pelosi Supported the 9/11 Commission Findings Before Taking Action Against Them

Granny Goodness strikes again:

Speaker Pelosi, it goes without saying, has already abandoned the promise of “open, full and fair debate” — campaign posturing that indicted the very brass-knuckles legislating the ongoing blitz exemplifies. Generally speaking, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed last week, it is true that little is served by Republican grousing over machine-politics-as-usual. Such practices, though, are worth pausing over here. For in unilaterally ramming through this particular bill, liberal Democrats illustrate how hollow their encomiums to the 9/11 Commission have been. The Commission, for them, has been a crop for whipping the Bush administration, not a font of security wisdom.

After all, the ballyhooed panel’s watchword was “bipartisanship.” Not only did the Commission regard unanimity among its Republican and Democrat members as its signal achievement; it further insisted that its own recommendations, like national security itself, were oh-so-above anything as crass as partisanship.

The Commission maintained, for example, that the staff of new committees dedicated to public safety must be “nonpartisan” (Final Report 421). It decreed that, no matter how one-sided the majorities in any session of Congress might be, “the majority party’s representation on [an intelligence] committee must never exceed the minority’s representation by more than one.” (Id.) The message was crystal clear: The life-and-death decisions of these bodies were far too significant to be determined without equal input from both sides, much less to be rigged.

So now, in her first official national-security act, the new Speaker will honor the Commission by making a mockery of this central tenet. Determined to fulfill — or, rather, appear to fulfill — an ill-considered pledge to pass the Commission’s heretofore un-enacted prescriptions, Pelosi and company will pound home legislation with absolutely zero consideration by the committees on homeland security (for whose creation the Commission agitated) and intelligence — committees over which the Commission obsessed precisely because few members of Congress have expertise in the relevant areas.

(Of course, one member who does have such expertise is Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), who was ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in pre-Pelosi days, but who has been denied the committee chair in the new majority because Pelosi deemed her insufficiently partisan. Instead, the new Speaker chose to install Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D., Tex.), who promptly embarrassed the caucus with his alarming ignorance about the divide in the Muslim world between Sunnis and Shiites.)