Atrios calls it "High Broderism"--the "worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake 'pox on both their houses' attitude" as practiced by that High Priest of the Beltway establishment, David Broder.
Broder is at it again with this morning's column, entitled "Thankless Bipartisanship."
On Monday, with few of his colleagues present and the Senate press galleries largely unoccupied, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee took the floor to make one of those statements that fill the Congressional Record but rarely go any further.
"Last week," he said, "while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent three days debating and passing perhaps the most important piece of legislation of this two-year session. Almost no one noticed."
Alexander has a point. The bill, boldly named the America Competes Act, authorized an additional $16 billion over four years as part of a $60 billion effort to "double spending for physical sciences research, recruit 10,000 new math and science teachers and retrain 250,000 more, provide grants to researchers and invest more in high-risk, high-payoff research."
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Alexander's larger point is that this is the model Congress and the president need to follow -- if any of the major challenges facing the country are to be met.
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Iraq looms as the supreme test, of course, and Alexander, a Bush supporter, nonetheless says "it was a mistake" for the president not to seize on the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations as the basis for a bipartisan answer to the dilemma of the war. "It's still sitting there on the shelf," he said, implying that Bush will have to come back to Baker-Hamilton at some point.
Meantime, Alexander has a gentle reminder for the press that our mind-set means that "unfortunately, bipartisan success, even on the biggest, most complex issues, has an excellent chance of remaining a secret."
Let's see how many errors we can spot in a cursory examination:
- I don't have any bones to pick with the America Competes Act, but the "most important piece of legislation" and one of the "biggest, most complex issues" before Congress--really? Wow. USAgate and Iraq, it turns out, are just tempests in a partisan teapot.
- Broder's implication is that across-the-aisle bickering killed the bill in last year's "bitterly divided House." But how, exactly, was partisanship at fault when both houses of Congress and the presidency were in GOP hands, and the president claimed to support the bill? That's not a failure of bi-partisanship, but of one party rule.
- Broder and Lamar! do eventually work their way back around to Iraq, by way of trying to breath life back into the Iraq Study Group report. Again, tho, they insist on falsely implying that "partisanship" was to blame for the report's almost immediate irrelevancy. In fact, Congressional Democrats and Republicans praised the ISG's goals of drawing down troops and negotiating with Iraq's neighbors. It wasn't Democrats or Republicans as a party, but one man--the President--who decided to shitcan those recommendations and opted instead for this disastrous surge.
What's needed at this point, in other words, isn't cooperation between the parties but cooperation between the executive and legislative branches. For that to happen, of course, Bush would have to admit that Congress is a co-equal branch of the government.
I'm not holding my breath for Bush to realize that--or Broder either.