Political Quotes

“I want to reiterate a couple of points, so there can be no misunderstanding. Congress does have an important oversight responsibility and is meeting that responsibility. There should be no implication, no misunderstanding about that. I have asked each committee to provide me with a list of oversight hearings held in the 14 months since President Clinton took office. I have only gotten a report from one committee, but they have conducted 20 hearings. I am going to place all of those into the Record so that we do not get what I believe to be a misleading comparison, which suggests that there have been no oversight hearings since President Clinton took office, and there were all these other oversight hearings during the years when Presidents Bush and Reagan were in office. That is the first point. The Congress is meeting its oversight responsibility. That is not the issue here. Second, I submit to my colleagues, that list is not relevant to this debate, because the question is not whether there should be hearings in connection with congressional oversight. The question is whether there should be hearings when a special counsel has been named, and when that counsel has explicitly asked that there not be hearings.”