The Daily Campus

Issue date: 1/20/09 Section: Commentary

Today it becomes official: Barack Obama takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts at the Capitol building. With millions of people looking on in person and billions watching around the globe, Sen Obama will become President Obama and formally commence his process of bringing "change" to America. As the Obamas move into the White House and the Bushes move out, some high ranking Democrats have begun speaking in earnest about possibly levying criminal charges against officials from the Bush administration. Such actions, if undertaken, would not only be a prime example of petty politics at its worst, but would also be detrimental to the process of moving America forward, a process Obama and the Democrats so vigorously supported during the 2008 campaign. This past Friday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) announced that he wants to establish an "independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities [leading the United States into the Iraq war, as well as the use of questionable tactics in the War on Terror]." As we have learned in recent months, Congress can barely handle what it already has on its plate. Undertaking a costly "probe" for political gain after the fact will serve no valid purpose. Bush, Cheney and officials from their administration are no longer in power. President Bush will return to Texas today with the lowest approval ratings in history, and hardly any of his original supporters still behind him. His ineffectiveness and poor leadership have been well-documented; we don't need another congressional committee to tell us how bad a job President Bush did.

Obama has not made it explicitly clear whether he supports such an investigation, telling ABC News, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

Though Obama has presented compelling arguments in many of his denunciations of the Bush administration, he would be well-suited to focus on his theme of changing America for the better and not harp on mistakes of past officials.

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