(Also posted on markgreenblog.com)
I was sitting on the pulpit of the Canaan Baptist Church last Monday on Martin Luther King day waiting to speak when Hillary Clinton made her now famous comment that today's House is run like a "plantation."
Reverend Al Sharpton, as head of the National Action Network, was the MC and choreographer of the day-long event. There had been a stream of prominent public speakers -- Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer, Billy Thompson, later Harry Belafonte -- and then a series of 2006 candidates. We candidates each spoke for a few minutes and took a couple of questions.
Senator Clinton was asked a very tough question about why "Democrats lack spine" to stand-up to President Bush and why she voted to authorize the war in Iraq.
Her answer focused on the domestic accomplishments of Clinton Administration and the values of the Democratic minority in Congress. Then came her plantation metaphor. The audience applauded ... and then the right-wing attack machine got switched on. (For whiners who protest, please see David Brock's convincing analysis showing that the only imprecision calling it a "vast right wing conspiracy" is that it's not a hidden conspiracy.)
The Fox cable news network, Senator Trent Lott, Rep. Fossella, Laura Bush and others feigned outrage and tried to shift the debate from Republican autocracy and corruption -- as well as Republican hostility to civil rights -- to whether she should or shouldn't have used the supposedly politically incorrect word "plantation." In their exertions, they proved Michael Kinsley's famous crack that a gaffe in politics is not when you lie, but when you tell the truth.
But it's an old trick to attack the critic and the critic's language while ignoring the criticism itself.
The indisputable fact is that the House of Representatives under Speaker Dennis Hastert and Tom Delay has been run like a legislative dictatorship. They've squelched the ability of the minority party to introduce amendments, hold hearings, or have any serious say in conference committees. Indeed, they've also eliminated the ability of moderate republicans from collaborating with Democrats for the good of the country.
Even worse, the House GOP leadership has flouted longstanding rules and traditions of the House to secure their reign. For example:
· They've routinely extended the length of a House vote up to three hours in order to bludgeon wavering GOP House members to abandon their conscience in close votes. One notorious example was the Medicare prescription drug vote after the initial vote came out against the proposal 216-218. During the extra time, the House leadership even tried to bribe GOP Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) by threatening to sabotage his son's House candidacy. The final bill passed 220-215.
· They've issued rule after rule forbidding amendments to bills.
· They've introduced bills on the floor of the house at the last minute, ignoring the rules requiring 72 hour notice so Representatives and their staffs can read them.
And they enforce discipline by cracking the whip of "partyology," in ex-Representative's Tim Penny's phrase -- forcing Republicans to comply to keep their party funds, their perks, their White House cuff links, and to avoid a primary from the right. (For more on this problem, see Hacker's and Pierson's excellent new book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy.)
In 1972, I wrote Who Runs Congress (the largest-selling book on the American Congress) that exposed how big money ran the people's legislature. In 1994, I watched how Congressman Newt Gingrich himself called the House a "plantation" because of how Democrats ran the place. Since 2003, I've been teaching a class at NYU on government and we closely study Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate, a book about LBJ's tenure as a forceful -- to put it mildly -- Senate Majority Leader.
Yet there has never been top-down autocratic control of either chamber of congress as there is in today's House of Representatives. This week in the New York Times, noted Congressional scholars Norm Orenstein and Thomas Mann lamented that in 36 years they "have never seen the culture [in Congress] so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional."
Congress, and especially the House, is supposed to be the people's branch of government. Today it's more like a broken branch -- and everybody knows it. Congress has become little more than a west wing of the White House (which helps explain why President Bush has never vetoed a bill.)
So, congratulations to Senator Clinton! Whether her comment was intentional or spontaneous -- she told the truth. So Messrs. Hannity, O'Reilly, Delay and Lott all need to calm down. The country will not fall for their magician-like trick of drawing attention to the left hand (the plantation remark) -- while manipulating the truth with the right hand (the corruption of this imperial Congress).
- Mark Green Jan, 20th 2006