Ten Things Speaker Pelosi Must Do

To insure the credibility of the new Congress -- and to show that it has some teeth -- new speaker Nancy Pelosi should take these ten key steps.

| Tue Jan. 9, 2007 3:00 AM EST

It's too soon to tell just how far the Democrats are willing to go with their reforms. If they want to be taken seriously, however, they will need to take the following 10 steps.

1) Put Vice President Cheney under oath and get his secret energy meeting documents. They may show how the oil companies colluded in the war and what Bush got from them.

2) Find out who initiated the torturing of prisoners in the Iraq and Afghan wars and see to it that they are prosecuted and put in jail. That includes officials — civilian and military — in the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon, and on the battlefields.

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3) Fire the military commanders and civilian officials who turned Saddam over to a death squad for execution.

4) Put Al Gore in charge of a new Congressional office to implement measures to reduce global warming.

5) Place former FBI chief Louis Freeh and current FBI head Robert Mueller under oath and order them to explain why they obstructed Congress in refusing to turn over to former Senator Bob Graham's intelligence investigation their key San Diego informant who was renting rooms to 9/11 hijackers.

6) Summon the outgoing Saudi ambassador, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, and get the straight scoop on the Saudi spy network in the U.S. and its ties with Al Qaeda.

7) Subpoena former FAA chief Jane Garvey and order her to explain how come her agency got numerous warnings about an impending attack on 9/11 and did nothing about it.

8) Investigate and move to indict top FDA officials who approve drugs for one use and then go to work and allow Big Pharma to sell them untested for other uses.

9) Place a moratorium on all oil and gas leases on the public domain until an impartial investigation revises the crooked Interior Department leasing program and recovers the billions owed by the oil industry to the government.

10) Deny federal funds to any state or locality engaged in “privatizing,” i.e selling off this country's public highway system.

And, finally, stop fooling around: Instead of "reforming" the earmark system, end it.