If you could draw one overriding conclusion from current and past administration scandals, it might be that Republicans, at least the ones in power, have little use for democracy. They like the trappings but they distrust and fear the actual process.
The scandal now dominating the news neatly illustrates the point in several ways. First, at least some of the fired US attorneys were dismissed for not pursuing voter fraud and corruption cases against Democrats aggressively enough to suit the White House. The goal was to influence elections overtly by targeting Democratic participants in them and, more subtly and more perniciously, to call into question the legitimacy of close elections in general by using bogus or questionable investigations of specific elections to create an expectation of fraud.
Congressional oversight is another target of the scheme. The Senate is constitutionally mandated to scrutinize US attorney nominees. By using a now-rescinded Patriot Act provision to bypass the confirmation process, the administration directly attacked a fundamental democratic precept. In the administration’s view, Congress has no business interfering with the executive in any fashion, and the executive has every right to bend government offices to politics rather than policy. Throughout the attorney scandal, administration officials have insisted that the practices are perfectly legitimate; it’s just the explanation of them that was inadequate in this instance.
Along with the actual firings and the successful attempt to appoint the new attorneys absent Senate participation, the administration’s refusal to submit to any reasonable degree of scrutiny in connection with the plot arises from that same resistance to Congressional oversight. The insistence that not only should administration officials be excused from testifying under oath but from even having their words transcribed is part and parcel of the attempt to neuter Congress (and with which the Republican Congress has been more than okay). No doubt it’s meant to protect the officials from any criminal consequences of their lies, but the larger purpose is resistance on the principle that what the White House does is its own business and not that of Congress, the courts or the public.
Overshadowed by the furor about the attorneys is the FBI’s abuse of national security letters, extra-judicial devices that allow the agency to collect information on anyone without judicial oversight and with the guarantee of silence from the institutions and organizations providing the information. The FBI is overseen by the Justice Department; when the latter is uniformly politicized, the former’s potential for abusing an inherently dangerous tool is magnified. The letters effectively gut the judicial protections against government intrusion our citizens are meant to enjoy, and in the hands of partisans can and probably did become instruments of politics rather than of security.
The past six years have seen a near-total breakdown in our system of checks and balances. We have had an executive that doesn’t subscribe to the notion, a Congress that didn’t care and a judiciary that was often bypassed or, in the wake of 911, overly deferential to the executive. It’s almost the perfect anti-Constitutional storm: what is supposed to be a self-regulating system became one in which ensuring the legitimacy of government became the province of a relatively few conscientious individuals rather than the institutions within which they work.
Washington Post writer Jim Hoagland authored a smug column last week mocking the idea that the US is becoming or could become a police state. “Some police state,” he said, where someone like Scooter Libby goes to jail for obstructing an investigation of high government officials, and attacking the administration is a lucrative career move.
Fortunes and reputations are made in show business solely by ridiculing, denigrating and belittling President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their acolytes. Real dissent today consists of swimming against this tide of invective by defending Bush and Cheney — should they unexpectedly do something that merits defense and assuming that they could adequately explain it to a disillusioned and skeptical American public.
Police states are not uniformly successful in implementing their agendas. The Bush administration has violated US law, abrogated treaties without the consent of Congress, passed new laws immunizing themselves from prosecution for breaking existing ones, used the Justice Department for political purposes and, not least, used a campaign of intimidation and lies to coerce and mislead Congress and the public into more or less supporting a disastrous and probably illegal war. They have institutionalized kidnapping and torture; they have assumed dictatorial powers over anyone the president chooses to designate as an enemy of the state.
Hoagland’s decision to cheapen the meaning of “dissent” by painting the administration as a hapless object of mockery and derision is a measure of the administration’s success. They don’t need to declare martial law or suspend Congress to accomplish much of their agenda; they rely on the active or passive cooperation of other elected officials, of pundits such as Hoagland who like to think of themselves as coldly objective, of a news industry whose public faces have the attention span and analytical skills of a precocious gnat, and of a public benumbed by a constant onslaught of doomsday rhetoric and lobotomized by corrupted or missing information. “Real dissent” remains the practice of attempting to hold the administration accountable for their abuses, not defending them in the hypothetical instance that they do something defensible. The success of show-business types such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as the administration’s fiercest critics isn’t really a cheery sight when they occupy that territory nearly alone, as they did for much of the past six years.
The Democratic success in the mid-term elections is something of a miracle under the circumstances; the cautious establishment of a Constitutional beachhead in Congress is a hopeful sign but not one we should take as an indication that the country and the Constitution are secure from administration depredations. Bush and Cheney still adore the concept of the imperial presidency, they’re still in office and, as Don Rumsfeld might say, when it comes to administration excesses there are a lot of unknown unknowns — we don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Satirically skewering the president or even getting his officials to consent to a transcript of their answers to long-overdue questions, if that happens, don’t constitute a “Mission Accomplished” moment in the real world.
Hoagland references Alexis de Tocqueville in savoring what he sees as the healthy clamor of democracy. Maybe a better if somewhat out of context literary reference would be Shakespeare, from Macbeth: “… it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Great article!
One consolation is that they are losing the support of the military (see Fort Irwin).
One small ominous consolation.