No Open-and-Shut Case

By Lois Romano
Thursday, May 24, 2007

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) may be the new kid on the block, but she's having no trouble making her views known to the old bulls on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The freshman has already tired of debating defense appropriations issues in secret, and has this week been forcing senators on her subcommittees and on the full committee to vote to make the hearings public, as she did yesterday, when the committee was considering the funding for the Defense Department.

Not that she has had any success. Most of her colleagues clearly like things the way they are, because none of the sessions has been opened to the public. Of course, just who voted how cannot be known, because the vote to open a hearing comes behind closed doors.

Most congressional committees "mark up" -- the process of considering, discussing and debating -- legislation and funding bills in an open session before sending them to the full Senate.

Historically, the Armed Services Committee and the intelligence committee have done their business in secret, because they deal with classified information.

McCaskill said in an interview yesterday that when she was Missouri state auditor, before being elected to the Senate, she was responsible for enforcing open-records laws. Since her campaign, she has called for transparency when members earmark money for special projects, so the public can see where taxpayer money is being spent.

"I think we have an obligation to work in front of the public," she said, not disputing that classified information needs to stay classified.

"This is [hundreds of millions] of dollars we are dealing with, and the vast majority of the work we are doing is not classified."

Others disagree. A spokesman for Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that the committee does a fair amount of classified work, which is why markups are closed.

McCaskill said her colleagues have also argued that by keeping the process closed, they are protected from "lobbyists hovering around like vultures."

But she isn't buying it. "If that's the goal, we haven't been very successful. The vultures have been at work."

Speaking From Experience

For some Hill lawmakers, reasons for supporting or opposing any war can be quite personal -- and often hark back to their experiences.

Rep. Mike McNulty (N.Y.), a nine-term Democrat, never served in the military, but his reasons for opposing President Bush's strategy in Iraq and his planned vote today against the latest version of the bill to fund the conflict are no less poignant.

In 1970, McNulty lost an older brother, William, to the Vietnam War. William, who was a twin and was drafted as a Navy medic, stepped on a land mine in Quang Nam province and died while "patching up his buddies, which was his daily responsibility," the congressman says.

McNulty himself received a medical exemption for Vietnam because he had contracted polio as a young child. He says losing his brother was particularly difficult for him because "I was very much anti the Vietnam War."

While his brother was deployed to active duty, McNulty found an opportunity to testify on the war at a field hearing in his district in the spring of 1970. "What I related to some of my colleagues lobbying for my vote is that when I think back on the memory of testifying, I think if President Nixon listened to people like me back in 1970, my brother might never have died," he says.

"Fast-forward to today and I think this war will go down as one of the biggest blunders in the history of warfare, and I am not going to give the president a blank check to enable him to keep the war going through the end of this administration."

McNulty did vote to authorize the Iraq war, because, he says, he was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the Iraq Study Group report "debunked all of the reasons for getting into the war in the beginning," he says, he stopped voting for funding.

"What really bothered me was the persistent story by the administration that Iraq was within 12 months of nuclear capability," he says. Saddam Hussein "wasn't anywhere near the serious start of nuclear capability. . . . The administration made a mistake by giving us information that wasn't true, and I made a mistake by believing them."

McNulty says he admires House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for trying to put together a coalition to push for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. But all of her proposals included money to fund the war at least through September, and he wants it stopped now. He said that when the speaker first called him to solicit his vote, he told her about his brother.

" 'I'm deeply sorry for your loss and I accept your position,' " McNulty says Pelosi told him. "She never called me again or had anyone else call me. They just accepted my personal feelings and respected it."

Talk About Reinventing Yourself

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) fessed up during her commencement address at Eastern Connecticut State on Sunday that she wasn't born a serious legislator.

"I once worked as a go-go dancer," she told the students, although her mother had hoped she would become a doctor or lawyer.

"Thank you for this honorary doctor of law," she added in remarks reported by the Examiner. "Now I can tell her I am both."

Her office understandably didn't seem too eager to make her available for an interview to further discuss the dancing gig.

E-mail tips for this column to hill_loop@washpost.com.