CSPAN's Capitol Hill News is reporting that the House has authorized subpoenas for the RNC and for Secretary Rice.
Alrighty... it's coming in baby:
In rapid succession, congressional committees Wednesday ramped up their investigations of the Bush administration by approving a subpoena for Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and granting immunity to a former key aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration's claim, now discredited, that
Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.
Regarding the RNC subpoenas:
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also issued a subpoena to
Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan to answer questions about whether White House aides improperly used Republican Party e-mail for government business.
The subpoenas were part of a series of actions today by Democratic-controlled committees to compel testimony on Bush administration activities. House and Senate panels also issued subpoenas to administration officials for testimony on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
Updates and from the thread:
Also, as MarketTrustee points out in the thread, the Senate has authorized, but yet to issue, a subpoena for Sara Taylor, who resigned three and half weeks ago from her position as White House political adivsor, a position she held under Karl Rove:
Simultaneously across Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved — but did not issue — a subpoena on the prosecutors' matter to Sara Taylor, deputy to presidential adviser Karl Rove.
There will obviously be a lot of whining. One thing we know about the Republicans is they whine better than anyone in politcs. In fact, Tom Davis immediately said of the subpoenas are: "ill-advised, unnecessary or premature.'' I guess he's not sure, but that shouldn't stop anyone from reminding him, as sailmaker has reminded us, that during the nineties and the Republican held House, subpoenas were mighty abundant:
Back in the mid-1990s, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, aggressively delving into alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration, logged 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether former president Bill Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to identify potential Democratic donors.
In the past two years, a House committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
That's right. Twelve hours on Abu Ghraib - 140 hours on whether Clinton had... had what? Used a Christmas list to identify donors? But this, these subpoenas - this line of questing is ill-advised or premature? Tom Davis is a pest, and like all pests, they are parasites and parasites do not like having their host terra challenged.
I hope when the nausea of the talk shows cover these developments, they will have the integrity to bring up the level of subpoenas issued last decade:
... the agenda was different during the Clinton administration. The government reform panel alone, for example, issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.
The panel received more than 2 million pages of documents and heard from 44 Clinton administration officials, including two White House chiefs of staff, according to statistics culled by Democratic staff on the Government Reform Committee