GOP: Bill's Just Like Fidel
Republican leaders accused the Clinton administration of using Fidel Castro's tactics to snatch Elian Gonzalez from relatives in Miami to be reunited with his father.
The presumptive Republican nominee in November, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, blamed President Clinton for deciding to resolve a custody dispute "in the terror of middle-of-the-night raids."
"The moral authority of our law comes from the understanding it will be applied in a fair and measured way," Bush said. "The chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America."
Bush said Vice President Al Gore, the presumed Democrat candidate, shared the blame.
Sen. Trent Lott, the Senate Republican majority leader, said the armed raid "clearly was not justified" and blamed Mr. Clinton.
"When I awoke in my hometown with my family today - Easter weekend - and learned of the tactics that had been used to seize Elian Gonzalez, my first thought was that this could only happen in Castro's Cuba," Lott said. "President Clinton should not have allowed this to happen."
Rep. Tom DeLay, the third-ranking Republican in the House, accused the administration of kidnapping the boy, "more reminiscent of Castro's communist Cuba than the America I thought I knew."
He apologized "to all Americans who are morally offended" by the raid.
Republican Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who flew to Washington with members of the Miami family after Saturday's raid, berated President Clinton and the Justice Department for the action.
``This president of the United States, defender of human rights, a president who invokes the name of Martin Luther King...snatched a little boy on Easter weekend from his home at the point of a gun,'' Smith said.
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, said the Justice Department action was illegal and vowed there would be an investigation.
``You bet there will be congressional hearings,'' DeLay told NBC.
At the White House on Saturday, spokesman Joe Lockhart accused Republicans of ignoring repeated President Clinton's pleas to keep politics out of the Elian saga.
"It's disappointing that those leaders today continued that effort to exploit the case of a six-year-old boy for political purposes," Lockhart said.
Cuban-born Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Miami said he will demand a congressional investigation of Reno and Mr. Clinton's conduct and wants to know what was behind the raid. "I accuse William Jefferson Clinton...of committing his most cowardly act," Diaz-Balart said.
Another Florida Republican, Sen. Connie Mack, expressed repulsion and outrage and said the pre-dawn raid on the house where Elian has lived marked "a tragic day in the United States of America."
"These are the tactics of the Cuban government, not a free democracy which respects human rights and the rule of law," Mack said.
In a statement from Gore's campaign office, the vice president repeated his previous stand that "this issue should have been handled through a family court and with the family coming together."
As street violence struck parts of Miami in protest to the boy's seizure, Gore appealed to "all Americans, no matter what their position on this issue, to obey the rule of law."