It’s always fun to watch Majority Leader Bill Frist who has a political pattern: on a controversial issue he’ll break with the White House but eventually discard his original position and quickly change it to the official line. It has happened again:
Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, on Sunday defended the raid by federal agents on a Democratic lawmaker’s Capitol Hill office, breaking with senior House Republicans who had said the search was unconstitutional.
Mr. Frist, Republican of Tennessee, said agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation had acted appropriately when they searched the office of the lawmaker, Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, as part of a bribery investigation.
The House speaker, Dennis J. Hastert, Republican of Illinois, criticized the raid last week and demanded that the F.B.I. immediately return the materials from Mr. Jefferson’s office. Mr. Hastert even issued a rare joint statement with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, saying that F.B.I. officials had not notified them before the raid and that the search violated the constitutional principle of the separation of powers.
Mr. Frist disagreed, shifting his position from last week when he had expressed concern about the search.
“No, I don’t think it abused separation of powers,” said Mr. Frist, who is considering a bid for the presidency in 2008, during a “Fox News Sunday” appearance. “I think there’s allegations of criminal activity, and the American people need to have the law enforced.”
In recent days, Frist has made it known that he intends to take up two vital issues greatly impacting the United States, issues about which the population is loudly clamoring for resolution — gay marriage and flag burning.
Frist is gearing up to run for President. But the FBI raid issue and others underscore (again) that the real issue is not limited to particular stances. It’s whether he has the backbone to take a difficult position that shows he is an independent thinker and stick with it — a position that isn’t pandering to the party’s base to get their support or adjusting a previous assertion to be in line with what the White House wants.
On this and other issues he shows the kind of backbone you find in this SEA-GOING INVERTEBRATE:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.