Kerry Challenges Bush, Republican Allies to Stop Obstructionism

The big news from the Senate today was the subpoena for Karl Rove issued by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The Hill reports, "Leahy issued the subpoenas, one to Rove and one to White House aide Scott Jennings, after consulting with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the committee’s ranking member."

“The Bush-Cheney White House continues to place great strains on our constitutional system of checks and balances,” Leahy added. “Not since the darkest days of the Nixon administration have we seen efforts to corrupt federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to avoid accountability.”

John Kerry spoke on the Senate floor today on the subject of the obstructionism from the Bush Administration and the Republican party, highlighting the accomplishments of the new Democratic Majority in the 110th Congress.

Below are Kerry’s remarks as prepared for delivery:

Mr. President, last November, was one of those rarest moments in the short history of our country and our democracy. Any political science student taking a freshman lecture course will hear how hard it is to remove entrenched congressional majorities. They know the statistics about how hard it is to defeat incumbents around here. It doesn’t happen often.

But sometimes it does happen. Just six times in our 230-year history has one party lost both houses of Congress. 2006 was the first time the Republican Party failed to win a single House, Senate, or Gubernatorial office previously held by a Democrat.

We Democrats have been there. In 1994, Democrats woke up to a landslide defeat some people thought would never come. It wasn’t always easy, it wasn’t always collegial, but we listened, and we learned – and together we reached across the aisle to balance the budget and reform welfare. We wrestled with why we’d lost and we wrestled with what we had to do to come together not just as a Party but as a country.

Evidently, some people still haven’t wrestled with what happened last November 7th.

Last November Americans were angry. They saw our young men and women in uniform paying the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq for a failed policy stuck on auto-pilot. They saw the number of Americans without health insurance skyrocket to 45 million—with more hardworking Americans joining them every day. They saw record-high oil prices and global climate change a reality denied and deferred, and no serious national effort to address them. They saw staggering corruption and no accountability for the way the peoples’ house had been turned into a refuge for the special interests.

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