It may go nowhere, but the House Judiciary Committee has just voted 20-14 to recommend contempt charges against Karl Rove for his repeated refusals to appear before them. The committee, which wants to talk to Rove about … well, it’s now got to the point where they may as well just throw a dart at a board filled with all the questionable activities to have emanated from Turd Blossom.
Rove (possibly the only person to fail to get a degree from UT Austin but still get invited back to lecture at the LBJ school, and rumored to be hoping that they’ll just accept his autobiography as a PhD thesis) has tried to claim that, even if he couldn’t drape himself in a super-extended version of presidential immunity, he had no role in judicial selection. Yes! That was it! They were investigating untoward influence in the hiring of federal prosecutors and the politically-motived prosecution of former Governor of Alabama Don Siegelman.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas leapt to his defense, saying that the House should be fixing everything apart from Rove. To be fair, no one can claim Smith has any conflict of interest, because he’s pretty much the only Texas Republican in D.C. that didn’t have Rove as a campaign architect at some point in their career.
This article appears in July 25 • 2008.
