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How Congress Can Speed the Downfall of the Bushites
By Andrew Bard Schmookler (about the author) Page 2 of 4 page(s)
Not only do the wheels of Congress grind slowly, but most of the politicians are proceeding like a blind man crossing an unfamiliar room.
Or here's another metaphor.
I see Congress as like a big flock of birds on the wing, the kind of flock that --in some mysterious and not altogether predictable way-- wheels in formation, with each bird responding exquisitely to the little perturbations in the group as a whole and the changes of direction of those birds on their flanks. They're making it up as they go along, with a kind of group mind that's influenced by the shifting of the forces of wind and terrain.
The way the flock in this Congress will fly will be shaped by the forces that impinge upon them in flight, such as:
**how the war in Iraq goes;
**what is disclosed in the Scooter Libby trial;
**what is uncovered through hearings held by Congress;
**what unfolds in other court cases involving presidential abuses of power;
**whether the president continues to pick fights with Congress (as with the surge);
**how the media covers all these events;
**and above all --and the means by which all the above elements exert their impact-- how much or little American public opinion turns against the Bush regime.
THE DYNAMICS BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS
The bottom line for the great majority of the members of Congress is how to avoid losing their office and, if possible, to gain in power. Given the nature of the American political system, their fates are not their own alone. They are tied to the fate of their political parties. And inevitably, the fate of the Bushite regime is tied in opposite ways to the fates of the two major parties.
Not only are the Republicans tied to Bush through their party identification, but they are also tied to him because of the abject and disgraceful way in which they enabled and supported the Bushite regime, even as they knew what kind of thugs they were dealing with. It appears that they figured that it paid to bind themselves to a gangster regime for the power and security its success was bringing them. Now that this success has turned to ashes, the Republicans are clearly worried that the punishment the voters inflicted on them in 2006 will be compounded in the elections of 2008.
For now, it seems that most Republicans are still calculating that they are tied to the Bushite ship, and that their best chance of survival is to try to keep it afloat by whatever means might work. But as the ship takes on more and more water, and looks more and more likely to sink, their calculations will doubtless change.
In the meanwhile, belonging as they do to a political party in which loyalty is regarded as the paramount virtue, few Republicans are getting out front in denouncing their leader, as Chuck Hagel has done. They probably figure that, as was the case with Watergate (e.g. with this president's father, George H.W. Bush, who was chairman of the Republican Party during that time, and who spoke up in defense of Nixon until near the end), they are more likely to survive if they wait to jump ship until the band has stopped playing. It helps that the American people have short memories (except for Republicans who don't readily forget disloyalty).
But if the fortunes of the Bushite regime continue to sink --especially in Iraq, and thereby also in public opinion-- the Republicans will be in a most difficult situation.
One commentator, Michael Green (my thanks to Richard Stein for calling his essay to my attention), has described their circumstance in this way:
Rest assured that the only folks in Congress who despise Bush more than the Democrats are the Republicans. They saw what he did to them in the 2006 election, and they know that that was nothing next to the rout that's coming their way in 2008. Already they're jumping ship on the war, and pretty soon you'll see a lot more than that. ...The one thing any candidate for any position in any race will not want in 2008 is an (R) following their name on the ballot. Bush has turned that into the kiss of death. A pedophile running for sheriff might do better.
It is for this reason that I have begun to believe that Bush's chances of survival are now overshadowed by the likelihood of his early political demise. He is essentially already in a free-fall without doing anything. Imagine what will happen when Congressional oversight investigations reveal the true workings of this administration, or even if the public sees its members continually refusing to answer questions posed by Congress. Republicans who facilitated those crimes by bottling up such investigations for six years will now be furiously attempting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this one-man wrecking machine, ditching him any way possible. Indeed, it is not at all unimaginable that we could now witness the counterintuitive sight of Republicans leading the charge to take down Bush (and thereby amputate their gangrene-infested limb before the whole body is irreversibly and fatally infected), while Democrats actually sit back and drag their heels, leaving him to fester in office, prolonging the agony and damage.
I'm not sure that I would count on things getting to that point, with "Republicans leading the charge to take down Bush." Even if Bush is their gangrene-infested limb, they will also be afraid of what the pack of Democrats might do to them if they break out of the circled-wagons formation that comes naturally to the Republican Party. Every exposure of Bush will also be an exposure of the complicity of the congressional Republicans, who weren't even interested in knowing about the law-breaking and lies the Bushites were engaged in, who preferred re-writing laws to accommodate the Bushite crimes to actually preserving America's being a nation of laws.
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