Democrats’ responsibility for Bush radicalism

From Common Dreams:

Democrats’ Responsibility for Bush Radicalism
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
August 4, 2007

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 — almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history — that George W. Bush can “demand” that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

I just finished a discussion panel with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero which was originally planned to examine his new (superb) book about the work his organization has done for years in battling the endless expansion of executive power and presidential lawbreaking. But the only issue anyone in the room really wanted to discuss — including us — was the outrage unfolding on Capitol Hill. And the anger was almost universally directed where it belongs: on Congressional Democrats, who increasingly bear more and more responsibility for the assaults on our constitutional liberties and unparalleled abuses of government power — many (probably most) of which, it should always be emphasized, remain concealed rather than disclosed.

Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush’s radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits — and then go far beyond — by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

Grave dangers are posed to our basic constitutional safeguards by the replacement of Sandra Day O’Connor with Sam Alito, whose elevation to the Supreme Court Congressional Democrats chose to permit. Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. And we remain in Iraq, in direct defiance of the will of the vast majority of the country, because the Democratic Beltway establishment lacks both the courage and the desire to compel an end to that war.

And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA — a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

The intense rush to amend this legislation means that most of them have no idea what they are actually enacting — even less of an idea than they typically have. But what they know is that George Bush and Fox News and the Beltway establishment have told them that they would be irresponsible and weak and unserious if they failed to comply with George Bush’s instructions, and hence, they comply. In the American political landscape, there have been profound changes in public opinion since September of 2001. But in the Beltway, among our political and media establishment, virtually nothing has changed.

I don’t have time this morning to dissect the various excesses and dangers of the new FISA amendments, though Marty Lederman and Steve Benen both do a typically thorough job in that regard. Suffice to say, craven fear, as usual, is the author of this debacle.

There are many mythologies about what are the defining beliefs and motivations of bloggers and their readers and the attendees at Yearly Kos. One of the principal myths is that it is all driven by a familiar and easily defined ideological agenda and/or a partisan attachment to the Democratic Party. That is all false.

The common, defining political principle here — what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea — is a fervent and passionate belief in our country’s constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power. Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable. With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who — having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it — instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it.

Democrats halt Senate debate on Iraq war

The World Socialist Web Site, one of the only publications I usually agree with these days, because it's one of the only ones that refuses to sell out its principles, has this article condemning the Democratic Party for its "unspoken collaboration with Bush" in continuing the American occupation of Iraq.

Democrats halt Senate debate on Iraq war
By Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site
20 July 2007

Senate Democrats abandoned an effort to impose restrictions on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq after losing a procedural vote Wednesday to halt a Republican filibuster. After 24 hours of desultory debate on Iraq war policy, the Democratic leadership caved in to the White House, effectively conceding that there will be no change in US policy in Iraq for as long as Bush has congressional Republican support to continue the present course.

Just before noon the Senate fell well short of the 60 votes required to force a vote on the plan offered by Democrats Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, which would give the Bush administration 120 days to begin withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. The amendment to the defense authorization bill would have set an April 2008 deadline for withdrawal of all combat forces, but allowed tens of thousands of US troops to remain in Iraq indefinitely for the stated purpose of fighting terrorists, training Iraqi troops and protecting US assets.

Only four Republicans joined 48 Democrats and one independent to support the amendment. Majority Leader Harry Reid switched his vote at the last minute in order to preserve his right to seek reconsideration at a later stage, making the final margin 52-47. But minutes after this parliamentary maneuver, Reid announced he was pulling the defense bill from the Senate calendar and would not permit votes on any other amendments related to the Iraq war.

This sudden change of tack—votes on various amendments had been planned, including a measure to require closure of the US concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay—was actually decided upon at a private conclave of Senate Democratic leaders Monday.

According to press reports, the Democrats feared that several more modest war-related measures might pass if they reached the floor for a vote, including a bipartisan measure to adopt the report of the Iraq Study Group as government policy, and an amendment by Republicans Richard Lugar and John Warner requiring Bush to develop operational plans for a draw-down of US troops, while not mandating any actual pullout.

Both amendments would have given Senate Republicans an opportunity to go on record in a vote against Bush administration policy in an effort to appease public antiwar sentiment, while doing nothing in practice to interfere with the ongoing escalation of the war. By blocking their consideration, Reid was essentially saying that the privilege of offering toothless amendments that do not end the war would be reserved for the Democrats, who need the political cover even more than the Republicans.

One prominent Republican, Senator Lugar, spoke sympathetically of Reid’s difficulties. “He recognizes that Iraq is the major issue that brought Democrats into a majority in both houses,” Lugar said. “That constituency is unsatisfied and restive, and therefore politically this becomes the top priority by quite a distance.”

The additional amendments would also have brought to the surface divisions among the Senate Democrats. The Republican filibuster has obscured those divisions. It is not even certain that the Levin-Reed amendment would have passed if it had come up for a vote, as several Democrats who voted to end the filibuster were not committed to vote for the amendment itself.

One of the Democratic candidates elected in November 2006, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, emphasized that he believed the Senate should neither order removal of all troops nor set policy for the conduct of military operations. He backed a vote on the Levin-Reed amendment more as a symbolic gesture of the need for a change in policy. “It still gives the commander-in-chief the flexibility he needs as commander-in-chief,” Tester said.

The Montana senator added, “[T]here was a significant number of troops in the Middle East before we started this thing; there’s going to be some troops in the Middle East; there’s US interests involved and that’s the nature of the beast.” Indicating his support for an open-ended US presence in Iraq, he said, “We’ve been there for four years and I don’t think you can anticipate that everybody is going to be out. I don’t think that’s going to be the case. There’ll be some left, as needed.”

The decision to end further consideration of war-related legislation, at least until mid-September, means that scores if not hundreds more American soldiers and thousands more innocent Iraqi civilians will be slaughtered. But Reid was the picture of complacency. “You cannot fight against the future,” he told his Republican counterparts. “Time is on our side.”

Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin declared during the debate, “This war was born in deception. At the highest levels of our government, it has been waged with incompetence and arrogance.” These are, however, empty words, given that the Democrats have flatly rejected any effort to remove Bush and Cheney from office.

In a fundamental sense, the entire framework of the Senate debate was a fraud, since Reid, Durbin & Co. have already pushed through the emergency funding bill required by the Bush administration to finance the war through September 30. Pentagon officials had warned that they would be compelled to halt military operations in Iraq for lack of funding, but the House and Senate buckled and passed the appropriations bill with top-heavy bipartisan majorities at the end of May.

The congressional Democrats have thus foresworn both the constitutional method for ending the US occupation of Iraq—using Congress’s “power of the purse” to force a withdrawal of US forces—and the constitutional method for removing those responsible for a criminal and aggressive war, impeachment.

Instead, they have devoted their efforts to a public relations campaign aimed at portraying themselves as opponents of the war while permitting Bush and Cheney to continue it unhindered. This has included such measures as non-binding resolutions, resolutions that will not be brought to a vote (in the Senate), and resolutions that cannot survive a presidential veto (in the House), combined with passage of the bill providing $100 billion to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this duplicitous attempt to delude the vast majority of Democratic voters who oppose the war, the congressional Democrats have received political assistance from liberal pressure groups like MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice, and publications like the Nation, which have portrayed the legislative play-acting as though it were a titanic battle for the soul of the republic.

Tom Matzzie of MoveOn.org hailed Reid’s decision to pull the defense authorization bill from the Senate calendar, declaring, “I think Senator Reid took an important step toward confronting Republican obstructionism and ending the war.” Matzzie told the Washington Post that his organization would focus on the 21 Senate Republicans facing reelection next year, with the goal of “forcing the entire Republican Party to look over the side of the cliff” in contemplating the electoral consequences of continued support for the war. “Ultimately, we end the war by creating a toxic political environment for war supporters like the Republicans in the Senate,” he said.

A similar group, Progressive Democrats of America, admitted in an email to supporters Tuesday, “The Levin-Reed Amendment does not end the occupation and it leaves too many troops and all military contractors behind in Iraq.” Nonetheless, it said that passage of the amendment would be “a good first step” and offered the prospect of further action in the fall when senators would be urged to “step forward to offer an amendment to bring the troops home by the holidays.”

Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, an umbrella for the pro-Democratic Party groups critical of the war—including MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, the Service Employees International Union, Win Without War, and the Campaign for America’s Future—said it would encourage lobbying to “keep the heat on” the Republican senators who claimed to oppose the White House on Iraq policy.

It was left to the Nation magazine to make a bald admission that the antiwar pretense of the Senate Democrats was wearing thin. In a column hailing the beginning of the round-the-clock debate on war policy as a vigorous new effort by the Democratic leadership, the magazine observed that because of the continuation of the war, more than eight months after the Democratic victory in November 2006, there was the danger that “more and more Americans came to see Reid and the Democrats as, at best, ineffective; and, at worst, in unspoken collaboration with Bush.”

This is, in truth, the real state of affairs in official Washington. None of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration, whether in Iraq or at home, could have been carried out without that “unspoken”—and frequently overt—collaboration by the Democratic Party.

American Congress surrenders to Bush, part 2

More on the complete and total surrender of the American Congress to Commander-in-Chief Bush, from the World Socialist Web Site. Excerpts:

It is no doubt puzzling to many that, despite the massive popular opposition to Bush and the Iraq war, the Democrats are powerless against the Bush administration. In the past—in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and in the 2004 presidential election—the Democrats justified their prostration and complicity by the supposedly overwhelming popular support for the president.

The fundamental reason for the Democrats’ impotence is the character of the Democratic Party. It is, no less than the Republicans, a party of US imperialism. The Democrats have from the onset supported the basic imperialist aims underlying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the broader striving of the American financial elite to utilize its military power to dominate the world’s resources and markets.

The war was never simply “Bush’s war.” The Democrats repeated the lies used by the administration to drag the American people into the war and supplied the necessary votes in Congress to give Bush the authority to launch an unprovoked war of aggression. Their criticisms have been directed not against the war itself, but rather against the administration’s incompetence in conducting it and the military and political disaster it has produced.

The Democrats have done, and will do, nothing to actually halt the war or impede its expansion, because the overwhelming consensus within the US ruling elite is that any outcome perceived as a defeat for the United States would have catastrophic consequences for the global position of American capitalism.

The Republican Party, no matter how unpopular and discredited among the people, prevails because it represents most directly the interests of the most determined and ruthless sections of the ruling elite. The Democrats, on the other hand, serve a very specific function within the political establishment. They defend the basic interests of the ruling class, while promoting the fiction that their party is something it is not now and never was—a party of average working people. This is what imparts to the Democratic Party its inveterate duplicity, half-heartedness and cowardice.

...

It is instructive to review the process by which the Democratic leadership has come to its final capitulation to Bush. When the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress last January, propelled into power by the massive antiwar vote in the November 2006 congressional elections, they began by relegating the entire question of the war to the background.

Pelosi’s “100 hours” legislative agenda at the start of the 110th Congress entirely ignored the issue of the war. The resulting anger and indignation among Democratic voters, intensified by Bush’s January 10 announcement of a “surge” of tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, compelled the party leadership to shift tactics. What followed was an elaborate and carefully calculated effort to dupe the population into believing that the Democrats were seeking to end the war, while they swore off any actions that would actually impede its prosecution.

This included the non-binding resolutions against the “surge” in February. Beginning in March the Democrats passed measures in the House and Senate that gave Bush his requested funds to continue the war, with various timetables attached for partially withdrawing US combat troops. All of the Democratic proposals allowed for an indefinite continued presence of tens of thousands of troops after the supposed deadlines for withdrawal.

When Bush, on May 1, vetoed the Democratic bill that resulted from negotiations between the House and Senate, the end game was already clear. Democratic leaders in both houses gave repeated assurances that they would under no circumstances cut off funding “for the troops,” even as the toll of American soldiers killed and wounded soared, and Iraq sank ever further into a state of hellish chaos, death and destruction.

They announced that they would come up with a bill acceptable to Bush prior to the May 28 Memorial Day holiday, producing the inevitable and final capitulation that has now occurred.

At every step of the way, the Democratic leadership was aided and abetted by supposedly antiwar Democrats such as the Out of Iraq caucus, who provided the necessary votes to pass war-funding measures, and left-liberal forces such as the Nation magazine and the leaders of protest groups such as United for Peace and Justice, who presented the Democratic Party as a genuine vehicle for opposing and ending the war.

These events have fully confirmed the analysis and perspective of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site. On November 8, one day after the midterm elections, the WSWS published an editorial board statement that said:

“The Democratic Party is the beneficiary of overwhelming antiwar sentiment that it did nothing to encourage and which stands in stark opposition to its own pro-war policy. There is a vast chasm between the massive antiwar sentiment within the electorate and the commitment of Democratic Party leaders to ‘victory in Iraq’ and continued prosecution of the ‘war on terror.’...

“Those who voted for the Democratic Party in order to express their opposition to the Bush administration and the war will rapidly discover that a Democratic electoral victory will produce no significant change in US policy, either abroad or at home.”

American Congress surrenders to Bush

This article from The Nation is a good summary of the surrender of the Democratic majority in Congress to the president, when they supposedly have equal power and are constitutionally responsible for restraining his power. They could easily adopt a power-of-the-purse strategy such as the one proposed by Mike Gravel. This only solidifies my distrust and lack of support for the Democratic Party.

Not a "Compromise," It's a Blank Check
John Nichols
The Nation
May 23, 2007

The question is not whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid flinched in their negotiations with the Bush administration over the continuation of the Iraq occupation.

They did. Despite some happy talk about benchmarks that have been attached to the Iraq supplemental spending bill that is expected to be considered by Congress this week, the willingness of Pelosi and Reid to advance a measure that does not include a withdrawal timeline allows Bush to conduct the war as he chooses for much if not all of the remainder of his presidency. This failure to abide by the will of the people who elected Democrats to end the war will haunt Pelosi, Reid and their party -- not to mention the United States and the battered shell that is Iraq.

This "compromise" legislation is such an embarrassing example of what happens when raw politics overwhelms principle -- and political common sense -- that House Democrats have divided the $120 billion measure into two sections. That will allow Republicans and sold-out Democrats to vote for the president's Iraq funding, while anti-war Democrats and their handful of Republican allies can vote "no." Then both Democratic camps can vote separately for the second section -- including a federal minimum-wage increase and more than $8 billion in funding for domestic programs -- while Republicans oppose this section.

Presuming that both parts pass the House, they will then be sent to the Senate as a single bill for members of that chamber to accept or reject. The end result of this confusing set of legislative maneuvers will be twofold: Lots of House members will be able to avoid accountability for their votes, while Bush will get his blank check. Even Pelosi says she'll vote against the Iraq funding section of the House bill because it lacks "a goal or a timetable" for extracting U.S. troops from the conflict. But, no matter how she votes, Pelosi will have facilitated a process that gives the president more war funding than he had initially requested

But the real story now is not the refusal of the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to hold steady in the face of the president's cynical claim that refusing him a blank check to maintain his war through the end of his presidency somehow threatens U.S. troops. That has happened and no matter what games are played with voting procedures, the reality is that the Democratic leadership has failed to lead at the most critical juncture.

The question that remains to be answered is a frustrating but significant one: How many Democrats and responsible Republicans will refuse to accept this ugly political calculus?

What we know is that there will be opposition. MoveOn.org, which provided critical cover for the Democratic leadership during earlier fights on the supplemental and related matters, is now urging all Democrats to vote "no" on the war funding -- and it is threatening in-district ad campaigns against Democrats and Republicans who back the measure.

The most genuinely anti-war members will not need any encouragement to reject the deal.

Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who has led the fight to get Congress to use the power of the purse to bring the troops home, immediately announced that he would not follow Reid into the abyss of surrender to a White House that is getting everything that it wants.

"Under the president's Iraq policies, our military has been over-burdened, our national security has been jeopardized, and thousands of Americans have been killed or injured. Despite these realities, and the support of a majority of Americans for ending the President's open-ended mission in Iraq, congressional leaders now propose a supplemental appropriations bill that does nothing to end this disastrous war," says Feingold. "I cannot support a bill that contains nothing more than toothless benchmarks and that allows the President to continue what may be the greatest foreign policy blunder in our nation's history."

Anticipating the cynical gamesmanship of the debate that will play out this week, the Wisconsin Democrat says, "There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action. Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq."

Feingold is, of course, right. But how many senators will join him in voting "no"? That question is especially significant for the four Senate Democrats who are seeking their party's presidential nomination: New York's Hillary Clinton, Illinois' Barack Obama, Delaware's Joe Biden and Connecticut's Chris Dodd. Dodd says he is "disappointed" by the abandonment of the timeline demand; if he presses the point as he did on another recent war-related vote, he could force the hands of the other candidates. If either Clinton or Obama do go ahead and vote for the legislation, and certainly if both of them do so, they will create a huge opening for former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, who has staked out the clearest anti-war position of the front runners for the nomination. But this is about more than just Democratic presidential politics: A number of Senate Republicans who are up for reelection next year -- including Maine's Susan Collins, Minnesota's Norm Coleman and Oregon's Gordon Smith -- may well be casting the most important votes of their political careers.

Collins, Coleman and Smith have tried to straddle the war debate. If they vote to give George Bush another blank check, however, they will have removed any doubt regarding how serious they are about ending the war -- as will their colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

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John Nichols's new book, THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism has been hailed by authors and historians Gore Vidal, Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn for its meticulous research into the intentions of the founders and embraced by activists for its groundbreaking arguments on behalf of presidential accountability.