Frist threatens to re-structure the Intelligence Committee in order to block NSA hearings

Glenn Greenwald points out the lengths to which the Republicans will go to prevent the Senate Intelligence Committee from doing its job of oversight. In an article today, Glenn tells us that...

The Senate Intelligence Committee was created in 1976 and, from the beginning, it has been unique in its structure and operation. Due to the urgency of ensuring that our country has nonpartisan and non-politicized oversight over the Government’s intelligence activities, the Intelligence Committee is structured so that -- unlike every other Senate Committee -- the majority is unable to dominate the Committee’s operation and agenda, and the minority has much greater powers than it does on any other Senate Committee.

With the March 7 vote looming on Sen. Rockefeller’s motion for the Committee to finally hold hearings to investigate the scope and nature of the Administration’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens -- and with several Committee Republicans indicating their intent to vote for hearings -- Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened the Committee yesterday and warned it not to hold any hearings.

Frist specifically threatened that if the Committee holds NSA hearings, he will fundamentally change the 30-year-old structure and operation of the Senate Intelligence Committee so as to make it like every other Committee, i.e., controlled and dominated by Republicans to advance and rubber-stamp the White House’s agenda rather than exercise meaningful and nonpartisan oversight.

Yet again, Republicans are threatening to radically change long-standing rules for how our government operates all because they cannot manipulate the result they want. From redistricting games to changing the filibuster rules, when Republicans are incapable (even with their majorities) of manipulating the political result they want, they use their majority status to change how our government works in order to ensure the desired political outcome.

[...]

UPDATE: The ineptitude, sloth and confusion of our national journalists is sometimes so extreme that it's actually hard to believe. Here is an AP article, published by CBS News (h/t David Shaughnessy), which reports on the exchange of letters between Reid and Frist but never even mentions, let alone highlights, the only newsworthy aspect of the exchange -- that Frist threatened to re-structure the Intelligence Committee to block the NSA hearings.

Instead, the AP and CBS simply copy the claim in Frist's letter, base the headline on it, and then blindly recite it as the lede. Thus, the headline of the article is "GOP: Politics Blocking Survey of Spy Units." And the first paragraph of the article simply copies Frist's point and "reports" as follows: "Stifling partisanship is preventing the Senate Intelligence Committee from overseeing the nation's spy agencies, the Senate's Republican leadership says."

Frist's purported concern over the way in which "politics" is preventing the Committee from engaging in meaningful oversight is nothing short of hilarious. There is no oversight from the Intelligence Committee because Pat Roberts uses it to rubber-stamp everything the Administration does. And Frist is trying to block meaningful oversight by preventing NSA hearings designed to investigate the eavesdropping program -- hearings that have bipartisan support on the Committee. That's just obvious (but not mentioned in the article).

Frist's claim that he wants to block the NSA hearings in order to ensure that the Committee can engage in meaningful oversight is as Orwellian an example of up-is-downism as you will find. But you certainly wouldn't know that from the AP article or from CBS News, which "neutrally" mold the article's headline and first paragraph to fit Frist's facially deceitful claim, and then worse, never even mention the only newsworthy part of the whole episode.