Whatever is it the Senate Republicans have to hide? Or, who are they trying to protect?

This is a story you won’t find on Google News, folks, because no one in the mainstream media is bothering to report on it. Yet, it’s in plain sight. Just go to website of the United States Senate, and you can see the shameful roll call vote.

Yesterday, the Senate Republicans stood together with their backs turned to America, and every single one of them blocked an investigation to wasteful and fradulent corporate contracts as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Dorgan Amendment, offered by Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, would simply have created a special committee with the power to investigate corruption in government contracts awarded to private companies dealing with parts of the wars and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Go ahead and look at our progressive scorecard of Byron Dorgan, and you’ll see that he’s not a lockstep progressive senator by any means. He has a record of voting with Republicans when he thinks the issue is right. While we disagree with his choice to make those votes, the point is that Byron Dorgan is not the kind of senator who offers a piece of legislation just to score points with his political party.

The Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan have been riddled with corrupt corporate contracts. The contracts awarded to Vice President Dick Cheney’s old corporation, Halliburton, have received the most attention, including purposeful efforts by Halliburton to overcharge American taxpayers for fuel, and most shamefully, for food for American soldiers. Billions of dollars have gone missing in Iraq alone. That’s not hyperbole. Billions of dollars have just been lost. No one claims to know where all that money has gone.

This isn’t the first time that Byron Dorgan’s efforts to investigate the corrupt corporate military contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been defeated by stonewalling Republicans. Senator Dorgan offered a similar amendment one month ago, and the Republicans in the Senate unanimously voted to kill that amendment too. The Senate leadership said then that it wasn’t the proper time and place to create such an investigation. I suppose they’re using the same excuses now. When, I’d like to know, will be the proper time and place for an inquiry? Would a hundred years from now be too soon?

What the Republicans in the Senate are telling the American people is that they simply don’t want corruption to be investigated. Well, pardon me for puttin on my law-and-order pants, but that sends a dangerous message. The Senate Republicans are letting corporate executives know that they can cheat American taxpayers out of however much money they want to. The Senate Republicans are letting corporate America know that if it commits a crime by cheating the American people, nobody will lift a finger to stop them, not even the United States Senate, which has a constitutional responsibility to conduct such oversight.

Is this what the Republicans mean when they talk about “small government”? Big government contracts for corporations without even the tiniest bit of attention to where all that money is going? Conservative ideology, my foot. That’s nothing more than plain, old-fashioned greed.