DEMS LET REPUBLICANS FIGHT OVER DETAINEES, FOCUS ON CRONYISM

ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports: While Republicans are doing some soul searching about the treatment and trial of suspected terrorists with their competing versions of detainee tribunal legislation, the Democrats are content to let the GOP Senators and White House argue among themselves.

Democrats, instead, are focusing on cronyism in Iraq and faulting Republicans in Congress for failing to adequately investigate the Bush administration.

Today they are going to glom onto Sunday’s Washington Post story about the GOP allegiance that was apparently a prerequisite for getting a job with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American government entity that headed the initial post-Saddam transition in Iraq. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that a 24 year-old recent college graduate was charged with reopening Baghdad’s stock exchange and the head of a Christian adoption agency in Michigan was tasked with re-envisioning Iraq’s public health system. More important than qualifications, rand the story, were Republican credentials. LINK

Durbin and Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY, are calling for a Congressional investigation into the hiring practices at the CPA.

"You would think that the feature in the Washington Post last Sunday would provoke some Republican Senator to join with us in a bipartisan way to investigate this," said Senator Dick Durbin, R-IL, on the Senate floor Tuesday morning. "This is worse than Brownie and FEMA in Katrina."

Democratic investigations are becoming a theme on Capitol Hill. On Monday, Democrats held an unofficial Democratic Policy Committee hearing on Capitol Hill with former Halliburton employees about the misallocation of funds by Halliburton and also the apparently inept treatment of civilian employees, placed as they were in a combat zone.

Republican Senator Judd Gregg responded to Durbin on the Senate floor on Tuesday, "It is disingenuous for the assistant majority leader to come to the floor and say we have done nothing when almost every major piece of legislation has been obstructed by the other side."

The Senate is expected to vote today on the Oman Free Trade Agreement, part of a Bush administration push to create a Middle East Free Trade Area. They will then spend the rest of the week considering a contentious bill, passed last week by the House of Representatives, to put 700 miles of fence across the border with Mexico.