Your “Democracy” at Work

Remember when “compromise” meant finding some acceptable intermediate position between opposing viewpoints? In the dim reaches of the history of what used to be our representative democracy, this was the purpose of Congressional conference committees, whose job was to iron out differences between versions of bills passed by majorities in the Senate and House.

Instead, in what has become a standard democracy-subverting tactic under Total Republican Rule™, negotiators appointed by the Republican leadership to conference committees are often all Republicans with zero commitment to the expressed will of the majorities of their respective Houses on the specific legislation under consideration (occasionally, a token Dem willing to sign off in advance to the Repub leadership’s agenda is allowed to provide “bipartisan” cover — my own Sen. Baucus has shamefully filled this role on occasion, e.g., for Bush’s initial tax cuts for the rich, though he seems more recently to have seen the folly of being “rode hard and put away wet” in this manner by the Repubs).

Under this corrupted system, since Repubs have controlled both Houses of Congress, far from representing “compromise” that meets somewhere “in the middle” to resolve conflicting provisions of bills passed by majorities of the two Houses, legislation emerging from conference committees has frequently defied the expressed will of majorities of BOTH Houses (and, by extension, of their constituents, aka, you and me).

In possibly the most egregious such example to date, Republicans just killed a provision, approved UNANIMOUSLY in both Senate and House, to prevent use of any part of a supplemental appropriation to establish permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. (Of course, a strong argument for such a provision is to counter the widespread perception, which helps fuel the Iraq insurgency/civil war, that long-term dominance of Iraq and its oil is a/the U.S. objective.)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Congressional Republicans killed a provision in an Iraq war funding bill that would have put the United States on record against the permanent basing of U.S. military facilities in that country, a lawmaker and congressional aides said on Friday.

The $94.5 billion emergency spending bill, which includes $65.8 billion to continue waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is expected to be approved by Congress next week and sent to President George W. Bush for signing into law.

As originally passed by the House of Representatives, the Pentagon would have been prohibited from spending any of the funds for entering into a military basing rights agreement with Iraq.

A similar amendment passed by the Senate said the Pentagon could not use the next round of war funding to “establish permanent United States military bases in Iraq, or to exercise United States control over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq.”

The Bush administration has said it does not want to place any artificial timelines on a U.S. presence in Iraq and that it wants to begin withdrawing troops when Iraqi security forces are better able to protect the country. But it has not ruled out permanent bases in Iraq. . . .

So, to recap (in case that was overly complex): 1) House and Senate both vote, not just bipartisanly, but unanimously, that the supplemental appropriation is not to be spent to establish permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. 2) Repub leaders/conferees, flexing their awesome Constitutional oversight muscles, cave to admin wishes and strip the unanimously approved provision from the conference bill.

(So, does that really leave any serious doubt that Iraqis who fear that long-term U.S. hegemony is indeed the goal of U.S. policy are, in fact, probably quite perceptive?)