Great Moments in Legislating: Brian Nieves edition

Unwilling or unable to make any progress on things that matter to Missouri families -- health care, jobs, etc -- the House took up the pressing matter of a nonbinding resolution asking Congress to ask the President to not let Guantanamo detainees come anywhere near Missouri and Kansas.

Apart from the general absurdity of the meaningless resolution (none of these now-outraged state reps were outraged when convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman was imprisoned in Springfield), the most ridiculous bit of bloviating (in my mind) came from GOP Majority Whip Brian Nieves, who (ironically) took to the floor to bemoan what he saw as the bloviating of others. In the clip below, you can hear Nieves' disgust with the fact that some people call Guantanamo detainees "suspects."  This was a particularly dumb complaint, since the resolution under consideration was titled, "HCR 16 - TERROR SUSPECTS IN MISSOURI."

And then shifted his attention to waterboarding:

The mocking of the controversy about waterboarding as "putting a little bit of water in their face" is really offensive. If Nieves doesn't think that waterboarding doesn't reach the threshold for torture, fine. I think he's wrong (as do more than 70% of Americans, including weak-kneed libruls like John McCain), but the minimizing of the practice as just "water in the face" is way beyond the pale.

It's also worth noting that Nieves said he had no concerns about the military's ability to keep the Guantanamo detainees safely away from the public, undercutting the whole justification for the resolution in question.