Timeline
January 3, 2006
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. In court papers, prosecutors refer to only one congressman: Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio). But Abramoff, who built a political alliance with House Republicans, including former majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas, agrees to provide information and testimony about half a dozen House and Senate members.
January 9, 2006
Even conservative bastion The Wall Street Journal decries the Republicans' naked lust for power: "The real House GOP problem isn't about lobbyists so much as it is the atrophying of its principles. As their years in power have stretched on, House Republicans have become more passionate about retaining power than in using that power to change or limit the federal government. Gathering votes for serious policy is difficult and tends to divide a majority. Re-election unites them, however, so the leadership has gradually settled for raising money on K Street and satisfying Beltway interest groups to sustain their incumbency.
"This strategy has maintained a narrow majority, but at the cost of doing anything substantial. The last year in particular was an historic lost opportunity. House Republicans were also the main culprit in watering down Medicare reform, while Ohio's Mike Oxley has run the Financial Services Committee more or less as liberal Barney Frank would. Beyond welfare reform and tax cuts (and perhaps health-savings accounts), the GOP has achieved little in the last decade that will outlast the next Democratic majority."
January 11, 2006
January 17, 2006
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) denies that his Tuesday K Street Project meetings are designed to secure lobbying jobs for Republican congressional staffers and other loyalists. Santorum claims the K Street Project "vrhas not been about putting pressure on people to hire individuals. We never did that. We don’t do that and we wouldn’t do that."
January 29, 2006
February 28, 2006
Steve Heller, the whistle-blower who leaked documents that proved that Diebold was using dodgy machines to run an election, is charged with three felonies: stealing computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. Heller eventually pays a $10,000 fine and gives his former employer an apology.
March 2006
Bruce Funk, an elections official in Emery County, Utah, discovers discrepancies in the Diebold touch-screen voting machines sent to his county. The New York Times later calls it the "nuclear bomb" of security flaws. After six Diebold lawyers fly to Utah to meet behind closed doors with Emery County officials, Funk is removed from his elected position, although he denies he agreed to resign.
March 6, 2006:
The Defense Department launches a new probe into aspects of the friendly-fire death of Patrick Tillman in Afghanistan, including allegations by his family that the Army covered up the facts. His family wasn't told the truth about Tillman's death until five weeks after the incident, when Tillman's unit returned home.
April 4, 2006
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, under indictment in Texas, announces he will not seek re-election and resigns his seat in Congress.
April 30, 2006
The Boston Globe reveals that President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
May 2, 2006
In Cleveland), seventy memory cards that record votes disappear during the May 2, 2006 election.
May 8, 2006
June 10, 2006
The Denver Election Commission acknowledges losing 150,000 voter records while moving offices. It later claims to have recovered 87,000, but the rest remain missing.
June 28, 2003
The U.S. Supreme Court today upholds all but one district of Texas' Republican-friendly U.S. House election district map. June 30, 2006
About 18 months after his nomination to serve as head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kerik pleads guilty to accepting more than $165,000 in gifts while a city official and failing to report the money as required. He pays more than $200,000 in fines and is spared any jail time.
September 12, 2006
Retiring Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid tells the Hampton Roads Daily Press that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had specifically instructed war planners not to plan for a post-war occupation of Iraq:
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid. "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that."
September 20, 2006
Judge Elizabeth LaPorte of the U.S. District Court Northern District of California rules that the Administration illegally repealed the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, sets aside the State Petitions Rule and reinstates the Roadless Rule nationwide except in the Tongass National Forest.
September 22, 2006
EPA Administator Steven Johnson rejects a unanimous recommendation by the 22 scientists on the agency's advisory panel urging tougher standards on soot polluton. NPR obtains internal government documents showing an additional 5,000 Americans might die each year because because of the lower standards.
September 25, 2006
President Bush uses his veto power Wednesday for the first time since taking office 5 1/2 years ago, saying that an embryonic stem-cell research bill "crossed a moral boundary." The bill, which the Senate passed Tuesday, 63-37, would have loosened the restrictions on federal funding for stem-cell research.
September 29, 2006
Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, resigns after it is revealed he sent sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to teenaged Congressional pages. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is criticized over how soon Republican leaders knew of Foley's behavior and whether they tried to cover it up. Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, also resigns his current post as chief of staff for Rep. Tom Reynolds. The scandal is widely believed to be a contributing factor to the Republicans' loss of Congress in the November elections.
October 3, 2006
The New York Times reports that, tucked away inside the latest military spending bill, is $20 million allocated for a victory celebration to commemorate success in Iraq and Afghanistan. The money goes unspent and rolls over to 2007.
October 9, 2006
North Korea carries out a successful underground test of a nuclear weapon.
October 17, 2006
Bush signs the Military Commissions Act, which strips "unlawful enemy combatants" of Geneva protections and the right to habeas corpus, establishes military tribunals, and legalizes "advanced interrogation tactics."
October 18, 2006
The Bush Administration is putting plans in place to approve more than 118,000 new gas and oil wells on public lands in Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana over the next two decades, which is nearly double the current total number of producing wells on public lands throughout the Rocky Mountains.
October 27, 2006
The Nation reports that Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel in the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, is defending Blackwater against a wrongful-death suit brought by the families of four contractors killed in Fallujah in 2004.
November 5, 2006
Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church of Colorado Springs resigns, saying he is guilty of "sexual immorality." The disgraced former president of the National Evangelical Association is accused of paying for the services of a male escort and using methamphetamine. Haggard's defense is that he only paid the escort for a massage, and bought the methampetamine from him but never used it. At the height of his power, Haggard spoke weekly by phone with President Bush and his top advisors.
November 6, 2006
Rumsfeld writes letter of resignation. But Bush doesn't announce the news until two days later, after Election Day.
November 8, 2006
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigns the day after Republicans lose both houses of Congress.
November 9, 2006
A Democrat who narrowly lost the Congressional race here seeks a recount after a significant number of ballots had no recorded votes in the high-profile race. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, lost to her Republican opponent, Vern Buchanan, by just 373 votes out of a total 237,861 cast — one of the closest House races in the nation.
More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, or 13 percent of those who went to the polls Tuesday, did not seem to vote in the Congressional race when they cast ballots, a discrepancy that Kathy Dent, the county elections supervisor, said she could not explain.
In comparison, only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in another skipped the Congressional race, according to The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota. And many of those who did not seem to cast a vote in the House race did vote in more obscure races, like for the hospital board.
More than 100 voters have told the Jennings campaign that their votes for her did not show up on the summary screen at the end of the touch-screen voting process, and that they had to re-enter them. The candidate’s lawyers said they feared that not everyone had noticed the problem or realized that they could re-enter the vote.
November 15, 2006
A US Army soldier pleads guilty to raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and helping murder her and her family in their home south of Baghdad last March. Specialist James Barker, who agreed to a plea deal to escape a death sentence, is one of four US soldiers charged with murder. They are alleged to have helped a former private to plan, carry out and cover up the attack. Two of the soldiers could face the death penalty if found guilty.
December 5, 2006
After serving a 16-month term, John Bolton resigns his recess appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations after it is clear the Senate will not approve his re-nomination.
Late 2006
December 30, 2006
Saddam Hussein is hanged. Initial news reports of the execution and Saddam's final words are contradicted when a cellular phone video is discovered, showing a mob of black-clad Shi'ite militia gleefully chanting "Muqtada Al-Sadr! Muqtada Al-Sadr!" shortly before the rope nearly separates Saddam's head from his neck.
December 31, 2006