The Senate can do that?
Last night the U.S. Senate erased a page of history, literally.
The body agreed to permanently remove from the constitutionally mandated Congressional Record a vote taken earlier in the evening on a measure that said the president should not pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The Senate vote failed 47-49, but any reference to the vote itself was expunged as though it never happened.
After apparently getting annoyed, Democrats countered with the Libby amendment. “If you are going to shoot this way, we have to shoot that way,” said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., on the floor.
Republicans were beside themselves. “Until this last amendment, I haven’t seen politically inspired amendments before this body,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said in opposition. There was so much audible grumbling from senators in reaction — and disbelief — that Kyl had to pause for it to subside.
After the Libby vote failed, Republicans struck back hard, offering an amendment condemning about a dozen previous pardons by former President Bill Clinton. As one GOP aide put it, “We brought our gun to the knife fight.”
Clinton was criticized after issuing more than 140 acts of executive clemency in his last few days in office.
But cooler heads prevailed when both party leaders decided not to have the Clinton vote, and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada simply asked that the Libby vote “be vitiated and stricken from the record.”
And with those words, it never happened — except on C-SPAN tapes.
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This is one of those things that doesn’t really make any sense to me. A couple years back, some words by a Congress-critter of heated rhetoric saying that everyone in her southern Florida believes that Bush came in through a coup was angrily strickened from the Record, Tom DeLay wanting such blasphemy to not be reported for the historical record. I scratched my head then as I do so now. They can do that? Why? In terms of historical political theater, it doesn’t measure up to physical fights that have occured on the Floor over statements about Slavery. But something about decorum demands that these things, if they happen, can be erased — like so many Chinese historical records of 1989 — the newest generation of Chinese youth have never heard of anything happening in Tiananmen Square because it does not exist in Chinese documents — or like so many Russian images of non-persons erased from photographs.
It is the sense of the Senate that Libby ought not be pardoned. I think if the Senate is going to expunge that vote from the record, they may as well expunge more worthy items from the record. The Bankruptcy Reform Bill. The Iraq War Resolution. The vote to confirm the last two Supreme Court justices. The vote to authorize Bush’s electors. They never happened. Did they?