Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Justice For The Bush Administration And The Economy

Budget, Intelligence and Judiciary -- that's where most of the committee action is these days. And Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sits on all three. I spoke with him on Friday about the stimulus package and about his call for a look back at the Bush Administration's intelligence and judicial policies even as the country and President Obama look forward.

 

Republicans are beginning to get very antsy about the stimulus package. What can be done to bring more Republicans on board?

 

It's hard to know. The House [Republicans] obviously set a very bad example by voting in lockstep as a party against it, notwithstanding the President's, I thought, pleadingly courteous effort to talk to them, show them deference and include them in the process. Notwithstanding the essentially unanimous verdict of all responsible economists that this is a really vital thing for us to get done. So That kind of cast a bad political pall on all of this, and that may have influenced some of our Republican Senate colleagues to be more partisan and less practical.

So it's hardened the lines a little bit?

Yeah, I think that's true.

 

You've been a proponent of health care modernization for a long-time. There's a lot of money for that in the stimulus package. Is it stimulative? Do Republicans have a point when they say that there are many aspects of the bill that are laudable but not stimulative?

I think they're probably talking about their own tax cut provisions that anything else, but never mind that. ... I think that if you're going to spend billions of dollars on building out a health information infrastructure which is an industry really heavily dominated by American companies, hard to imagine how anybody could responsibly say that that doesn't have a stimulative effect. It's not the same, we tend to think of infrastructure as stuff that the Romans could have built.

Aqueducts.

 

Aqueducts, highways, bridges. And people are going to understand, right away, oh year, that puts people to work backing up stones to build the architecture - this health information infrastructure is nonetheless infrastructure for it being modern and I don't think that the tech companies that get these contracts and put people to work on this is creating less jobs than a construction company that gets highway funds and puts people to work, so I really don't buy that argument. I think that it is an added benefit that down the road, once the information infrastructure is in place, one can expect substantial improvements and substantial savings in heath care. Since I believe we're looking at a fairly prolonged recession; no economists who has spoken to us in the budget committee or in the caucus or of the articles I've read have suggested that is going to be anything other than a long recession. One of the reasons the economy is in trouble is because the health care system has an enormous weight on it, we've gotten use the weight because it's come upon us gradually. But it's a two trillion dollar-plus system headed to be a 4 trillion system,. Ford has to compete with Volvo; Ford has to put all the health care costs in the car; Volvo has a national health care system.... I think it's more of a twofer you get out of the health care fund... you get an immediate stimulus in the tech sector of the economy and you get the long term benefit of beginning the process of getting our way out of from the most dire  economic program we have, which is the unsustainable growth of heath care costs in America.

 

Last week, you said that in order for the country to move forward in terms of the policies of the Bush administration, it would also have to look back; there would have to be a reckoning.  Can you fill that in a little bit? What did you mean precisely? You're in the intelligence committee, you're on the judiciary committee, and you'll have some way on the degree to which a spotlight is shined on those policies?

My view is that as they outright admitted, the Bush administration sought to create a permanent, governing Republican majority and in order to do so, they were willing to do considerable damage to the infrastructure of the American system of government as we know it today. They had to do a lot of that secretly because if they'd done it right out in the public eye, there would have been outrage, or they had to do it at the sort of fine tuning administrative level below the customary level of scrutiny that the press and the public attend to. But the fact that it was done either secretly or deep in the administrative procedures that people don't ordinarily get very excited about looking at made it nonetheless an assault on our basic American system of government, the tripartite, federalist rule of law, mode that the founding father set up. And because it was so sophisticated and because a lot of it was under the radar, it's all the more important an object lesson for voters for citizens for other countries that it be a publicly aired what was done, why it was done, what it means for democracy. I think there's a very important discussion to be had out of this. ... Demcoracy isn't just a static thing. It's an ongoing thing. It has to move forward through time, and it has to educated the people who are served by it. This is a very important part of the education of the American people in the freedom of American democracy?

Where would this take place? Congressional hearings? Some sort of a commission? A truth commission?

I think it should be spread out across a lot of areas. It wasn't the intention of my speech to define where it could or should take place. It could take place by executie review by the new inspectors general and cabinet dire when they come in. It could take place through the White House....it could take place through Department of Justice investigations; it could take place through committee hearings; it could take place through an  independent commission. I think to a certain extent the measure of it is going on already. OPR [The DoJ's Office of Professional Review] is looking into what on earth became of the Department of Legal Counsel [OPL] there. There are inspector general investigations going on. I think it's less important for my purposes in the speech to define exactly what the mechanism should be for providing that accountability, for providing that clarity, for providing that education, than it is that the public understand that it is something that we will do and should do and that it need not interfere with the forward looking work that the Obama administration in has to do to recover our economy, reform on our health care system and improve our standing in the world.