Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says Arlen Specter's switch is exciting for America because theoretically now Democrats will now be able to ram things through the Senate without having to explain to America exactly what they're doing. Here she is with CNN's Candy Crowley:

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Arlen Specter has announced that he is moving to the Democratic Party. Your reaction?

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER: Very exciting, very exciting for the American people, because now we can get things done without explaining process.

And there's also this rambling, semi-coherent response to Crowley's question about Porter Goss's allegation that Pelosi lied when she said she hadn't been briefed on the types of enhanced interrogation techniques put into effect by the CIA after September 11:

PELOSI: Let me say what's important about how we go forward. Because for some reason the Republicans, while I am barred from talking about what goes on in meetings and I could be charged for revealing classified information, they seem to feel at liberty to talk about everything that went on at every meeting as they saw it.

What's important is this. Members of Congress are called upon to make important decisions that affect the intelligence gathering and therefore the security of our country. They are barred by laws that say only a limited number of people can see this information and those who do cannot reveal it to anybody else.

What I am asking the intelligence community to do is to look at that and say, if Congress is responsible, if the members of the Intelligence Committee are responsible for these decisions, they have to know what they're deciding upon.

So as we go from here, he said-she said, it can go on forever. What we should do is to say more members should have access to this so that there can be accountability and you can talk about it.

You're really a hostage if you're notified that something has happened. They're not asking for your thoughts. They are notifying you that this is their opinion. They later may have notified, I don't know, because I wasn't part of any of those briefings, of what they were doing, but they notify you that they have an opinion.
If you want to take it to another place, who do you call, the chief justice of the Supreme Court? The president of the United States whose policies these are? You have no recourse or else you are breaking the law. We have to change that.

CROWLEY: Inside that meeting, you could have said, this is unacceptable to me, I don't care what your legal people are telling you, we should not…

(CROSSTALK)

PELOSI: And to what end? To what end? No, we're not -- they didn't say they were doing it. But you know what, I'm not getting into that. The fact is, is that I know what they told us and I know that they did not share our values.

So any briefing that you would get from the Bush administration on the subject is one that is probably something you're not going to agree with, and two, maybe not the whole truth anyway.

So there you have it. It doesn't matter what Pelosi knew or when she knew it, because the Bush administration didn't share her values and was probably lying anyway.

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