Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House government reform committee, has called on the committee chairman, Republican Congressman Tom Davis, to convene hearings into the role senior White House advisor Karl Rove played in the 2003 leaking of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

Waxman told Davis that placing Rove under oath in front of a Congressional committee ”remains the simplest and most effective means for Congress and the public to learn the truth about this disgraceful incident. ”

I first wrote to you to request a hearing about this matter on September 29, 2003, and I renewed my request in a second letter on December 11, 2003. During this period, we met with Ambassador Wilson, but you turned down my request for a hearing because you wanted to see what the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald would uncover.

The recent disclosures about Mr. Rove’s actions have such serious implications that we can no longer responsibly ignore them. The intentional disclosure of a covert CIA agent’s identity would be an act of treason. If there were evidence of such a serious breach during the Clinton Administration, there is no doubt that our Committee would have immediately demanded that the Deputy Chief of Staff testify at a hearing. This would have been the right course of action then, and it is the right course now. For this reason, I am renewing my request that the Committee schedule an immediate hearing at which Mr. Rove is called to testify.

Waxman’s Government Reform Minority Office website sometimes resembles a graveyard for investigations that should have been launched during the past five years. Issues the minority staff and members have explored themselves, acting without benefit of the majority’s full legal powers, include Halliburton’s Iraq contract billing practices, attempts by the administration to politicize the work of government Inspectors General — the internal agency watchdogs who are meant to operate outside the influence of elected and appointed officials — and the catalog of administration misdirections leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

Most recently, Waxman has taken Republican Joe Barton to task for attempting to intimidate scientists whose findings conflict with Barton’s sensibilities.

Waxman’s strongly-worded letter to Davis — although Republicans are often quick to impugn their Democratic colleagues’ patriotism, it isn’t often one sees a Democrat suggesting a senior member of a Republican administration may have committed treason — is no doubt aimed in part at keeping the press spotlight on Rove and the administration’s unwillingness to address even the now publicly-acknowledged fact that Rove was if not the only White House official to leak Valerie Plame’s identity and occupation to the press, at least among them.

On another level, it’s a direct challenge to Davis, an effort to publicly define the extent to which Davis and his fellow Republicans will ignore an issue which has now passed the point that the White House themselves have said would warrant the firing of any White House official.

If the past is any guide Davis will not hold hearings, probably on the ostensible basis that they would interfere with the ongoing investigation into the leak. But Congress has held many hearings that paralleled and sometimes overlapped law enforcement investigations, and the fact that the White House has said in the past they would dismiss anyone who did what Rove has now acknowledged doing should argue against any stalling from Davis.

And given the extent of the public exposure the case has received, there would be no question of providing Rove with immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony, a Congressional practice that has interfered with criminal investigations in the past.

The White House could, of course, expedite and uncomplicate the hearing process by firing Rove. The odds of that are roughly equal to those of Davis convening a hearing.

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