The Democrats’ startling move to put the Senate into a rare closed session yesterday provided great drama and partisan scuffling — and reporters eagerly jumped for the bait.
In his Washington Post column today, Dana Milbank writes, “It was a cheap trick — and it worked brilliantly. Reporters dropped their stories about Alito and covered the melee in the Senate. CNN titled the episode ‘Congress in Crisis.’ MSNBC displayed a live shot of a mostly empty hallway outside the Senate chamber and a clock showing elapsed time since the Senate went into closed session.”
Milbank’s column focuses almost entirely on the sputtering anger of various Republican and Democratic senators, including Bill Frist’s “screaming temper tantrum.” “Republicans are outraged,” one senator says. “I just ate lunch, and it’s upset my stomach.”
It’s marvelous stuff, but Milbank barely discusses why Democrats pulled their audacious maneuver yesterday: to get some answers about a long-delayed Senate intelligence committee inquiry into how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons. And Milbank’s colleagues, also seduced by the eruption of metaphorical face-slapping on Capitol Hill yesterday, did only marginally better.
The New York Times‘ article focuses on the “partisan quarrel” that barred the Senate’s doors and the ensuing “sharp public confrontation between the two parties as the Republicans lost control of the chamber for two hours and were left to complain bitterly about what they called an unnecessary ‘stunt.'” Quotes up top are devoted to one angry Mr. Frist, declaring that he, the Republican leadership and the country as a whole had been affronted by the maneuver. Later, the Times tells us that “Mr. Frist and other leading Republicans said they were particularly angry that Mr. Reid had provided them no warning of his intention, which they considered a breach of Senate etiquette,” followed by a windy, flabbergasted quote from Trent Lott.
Neither Frist nor Lott, however, appears to have been asked to comment on the underlying issue of prewar intelligence or to address the substance of the Democrats’ complaint — that the intelligence inquiry’s phase two report has been unnecessarily delayed. That is left to committee chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, who the Times reports “denied having done anything to slow the inquiry,” and is quoted from the Senate floor saying phase two would be “complete[d] as best we can.”
The Chicago Tribune uses more over-the-top prose in its story, writing “The tactic caught Republicans completely unawares, goading them into a fury” and that “Republicans angrily denounced the dramatic move as nothing more than a political circus act by a minority party desperate for attention.” Here again we get the anger of Frist — “If they want to get in the gutter, that’s — that’s I guess what they want to do” — but nothing deeper. The other Republican quoted is Roberts, who here “blamed Democrats for many of the delays” and “angrily responded that his staff had been hard at work on the second phase of the investigation and had hoped to conclude that work next week — which he said Democrats knew.”
The Post‘s front-page story, “GOP Angered by Closed Senate Session,” is also high on theatrics and “political pyrotechnics,” with Frist, “[t]he usually unflappable majority leader,” described as “searching for words to express his outrage to reporters.” The story added, however, that Frist appeared much calmer after the closed session ended and that “He agreed to a six-senator bipartisan task force that will report by Nov. 14” on the progress of phase two.
In the background it gives us about the committee’s work, however, the Post provides much greater insight. The paper prints an extensive timeline of the inquiry, noting how “Roberts resisted a full investigation for three months” back in 2003, and explaining through sources how “there has been little examination” by the committee to date of the central topics of phase two. And here Roberts gives a specific reason for the delay, saying key officials from a DOD office “hired lawyers and stopped talking” after Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller “suggested laws may have been broken.”
When politicians are blowing a gasket, that’s certainly an important part of the story. But so is going beyond the anger and blame-gaming to get at the underlying issues — or to explain how the Senate’s closed-session debate led to the task force compromise that was hammered out. In this case, the press ran with the quote candy, leaving the news behind.
–Edward B. Colby
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.