Over the weekend, there was a great deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth over the likelihood of Samuel Alito's nomination sailing through the Senate. Understandably so.
It was bad enough to see Judiciary Committee Democrats perform like a lousy NBA team, a bunch of prima donnas with bad chemistry, with Joe Biden the ballhog-in-chief.
But then we saw Dianne Feinstein run up the white flag on filibustering Alito. Once again, we see Capitol Hill Democrats back down from a fight out of fear of looking bad with voters.
What will it take to convince people like Feinstein that Team Bush isn't playing "politics as usual"? This is the most radical administration in living memory. Its aim is to take this country back to an alt-history version of the 1950s that never existed. And they're willing to do anything to make it happen.
This should have been clear five years ago. Even though George W. Bush finished second in the popular vote, got only 47 percent and change of the votes cast, and entered the White House under a
Bush v. Gore cloud, he acted like he'd won by 10 million votes and had been given a mandate to move the country sharply to the right.
In the wake of all that, what did the Democrats do?
This, according to a story in yesterday's New York Times:
The Democratic push began in earnest on the last weekend of April 2001, when 42 of the 50 Democratic senators attended a retreat in Farmington, Pa., to hear from experts and discuss ways they could fight a Bush effort to remake the judiciary.
A retreat? Experts? Shouldn't it have been obvious by then what this administration was up to? Did these senators really need to watch a PowerPoint presentation to figure out what was going on?
That's the problem with Capitol Hill Democrats. They're become the Party of Retreat, not the opposition.
Let's look back at their performance over the past five years:
- The Florida recount. Remember the scene at the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, with Al Gore gaveling down every black congressman who objected to the counting of Florida's electoral votes? Not one senator rose to support those objections. Not one. Supposedly, Gore asked them to roll over and play dead (thanks for speaking for the millions who voted for you, Al), but that's no defense. Some senator should taken him aside and said, "That's not your call, Al. We have to answer to history."
- The Ashcroft nomination. As if it weren't already clear that the administration was radical (look at how many alumni of the Project for the New American Century found their way in), the president nominated a hard-right social conservative--who had just been fired from his previous job by the voters of Missouri--as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer. That nomination cried out for a filibuster (in fact, there were 42 senators who voted "no"). Then, once the filibuster got under way, a delegation of senior Democrats should have dropped in at the White House and told the president, in person, "Sir, you don't have a mandate."
- The Patriot Act. In the days after September 11, the aforementioned John Ashcroft warned Democratic lawmakers that another terrorist attack was coming and that the blood would be on their hands if they didn't pass the Patriot Act ASAP. The party leadership meekly submitted. Even worse, they told the rest of the caucus to shut up. There was less discussion of this far-reaching law than there was over steroids in baseball or Terri Schiavo's medical condition. In the end, only one senator displayed any courage. The vote was 98 to Feingold.
- The Iraq resolution. In the summer and fall of 2002, there was plenty of skepticism about how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed to our country, and opinion polls showed Americans closely divided over going to war, especially without a U.N. resolution. But the administration wasn't just determined to go to war, they wanted to make it a wedge issue. The Democratic leadership not only caved in to demands for a vote before the midterm elections but also brushed aside narrower resolutions in favor of the blank check they handed the president. How did that strategy work out? Ask Max Cleland.
- John Roberts. He bobbed and weaved his way through the hearings, much the same way as Alito. What did we learn from the hearings? That he had a great resume and cute kids. But he was a foot soldier in the lawyers' brigade of the right-wing army. Only 50 years old, too. Faced with the prospect of him being on the bench for a generation or more, the Democratic leadership passed on a filibuster and said, "keep your powder dry" for the next nomination. And so we come full circle. The next nomination was Alito.
Alito's confirmation (sorry, folks, but the fix is already in) is just the beginning of what will be an ugly year on Capitol Hill. The Patriot Act renewal is coming up, and if the GOP leadership doesn't ram it through Congress, it will sneak it in on a piecemeal basis, just like they did with the Real ID Act. There will be more right-wing nominees to the lower courts and the executive branch, most of whom won't show up on the radar screen.
Last but not least, there's Iran. Count on this: you're going to see a lot of Iranian exiles, first on Fox and later in the mainstream media. You're going to hear stories of torture and terror, and the words "caliphate" and "Islamofascism" will become the buzzwords of 2006. The administration will once again paint stark pictures of mushroom clouds over American cities. And the vote on the Iran Resolution will take place in October.
How will the Capitol Hill Democrats react to this? They'll retreat. Every single time.
And while they do so, its highest-profile members--Biden, Evan Bayh, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the current crop of senators running for president--will tell us to buck up. They'll assure us that the damage of the Bush years will magically go away once they're elected in 2008.
Time and time again, Capitol Hill Democrats have told us, "we'll win tomorrow." There's just one problem. They keep losing today, and tomorrow never comes.