Monica Goodling Testimony, The Morning After

Apologies for my lateness. I fully intended to post on this yesterday, but my computer--through which I had been streaming CSPAN-3--decided to commit suicide halfway through her testimony, and I spent the afternoon dealing with that. (In the new and allegedly cost-effective order of things around here, the High Sheriffs have to send someone from New York to fix it.)

The papers today suggest that Goodling opened some new areas of inquiry, most interestingly on the question of whether Gonzales was doing something that looked suspiciously like witness-tampering. The Washington Post put the right lead on its story. But I was mostly struck by how terribly the House Judiciary Committee performed. There were so many questions they didn't ask--most importantly, what criteria were used to pick the U.S. Attorneys who would be fired, and who, precisely, did the picking? I found myself wishing that they could go over to the Senate Judiciary Committee and ask to borrow Sheldon Whitehouse for the afternoon. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has a great assessment of the committee and its missed opportunity.

UPDATE: Computer EMS has now arrived from NYC, and is saying scary things about the chances of retrieving anything from my ruined hard drive, so I am migrant blogging from unused machines around the office. For those commenters who were wondering, word on the Senate side is that the Judiciary Committee over there has "no immediate plans" to call Goodling as a witness. Meanwhile, House Judiciary has yet to see those unredacted documents that Goodling took from the Justice Department--improperly, the Department says. "It's complicated," says one House committee aide. "We're still going back and forth with her and she's still going back and forth with Justice," which also wants them.