The Hill: Roberts (R-KS) open to leaving Senate Intelligence panel

Roberts open to leaving Senate Intelligence panel
By Elana Schor

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said yesterday that he is awaiting a decision from Republican leadership on whether he will remain on the Intelligence Committee after relinquishing the gavel or leave the panel for a new assignment.

Speculation has mounted recently about Roberts’s future on Intelligence, where he and incoming Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) have long wrangled over a still-unfinished probe of the Bush administration’s conduct during the run-up to war. Roberts is considering leaving the Intelligence panel’s fierce partisanship behind and joining a committee where he could more directly help his home state, according to local media reports.

“I am perfectly willing and consider it a privilege to continue as ,” Roberts said yesterday. “On the other hand, if some other committee spot were to come open that would enable me to ,” a change in assignments would be foreseeable.

<SNIP>

Decisions about the Intelligence panel could play into the ranking-member race at the Environment and Public Works Committee, where departing Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is being challenged by term-limited Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.). Senior to Inhofe on the environment committee, Warner is also an ex officio member of Intelligence, making him a potential contender for that panel’s ranking membership. A Warner spokesman declined to comment on next year’s committee assignments.

Others in line to become ranking member should Roberts decide to depart Intelligence include Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who spent this Congress not chairing a committee for the first time in more than a decade, and Kit Bond (R-Mo.). Hatch and Bond co-wrote an “additional views” supplement with Roberts that was released alongside the Intelligence committee’s 2004 Phase I report.

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/120706/roberts.html

You treasonous bastard.

impediment for quite some time now. I wonder what he has in mind for "more directly helping his home state." I live in his home state, and would be most directly helped by his leaving Washington for good...

He needs to leave the political arena altogether. We really need to get him out of office.

I'm glad to get rid of Roberts, but we need some decent and ethical people in there who actually care about our country.

R's don't get to chair jack shit. I'll be sorely disappointed if the minority committee numbers didn't go to what they were when Gingrich took over in 1995 with 232-203.