What’s at Stake, Part I

Oversight:

Today, Let me back off my hubris-laden agenda posted in the upper right-hand corner of my site. Once you acknowledge that the chain of succession implies Dick Cheney becoming president, your ardor for impeachment cools. So, impeachment is not at stake in tomorrow's election.

Neither is Bush's un-provoked, unnecessary, largely unilateral invasion and unplanned occupation of Iraq (UULUIUOI) at stake tomorrow. However, unquestionably, the continuance our Anglo-American occupation just to referee a free-for-all Iraqi civil war is highest on voters' list of grievances.

Still, on Tuesday's ballot there are no specific policy recommendations alternatives to Bush's entrenched and unpromising stay-the-course. You have your solution and I have my solution, and each Member of - or candidate for - Congress has his or hers. If Democrats seize one or both houses of Congress, policy in Iraq will not immediately change.

What's at stake tomorrow is Oversight. As Howard dean has said,

The election is broader than just a referendum on George Bush. It is a referendum on the Republican Party, its honesty and its competence.

In an important new book, Broken Branch, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution focus on the loss of the House of Representatives' institutional identity as a source of the Bush administration' excesses. Members act more like field representatives of their party than as members of the first branch of government. As Howard Baker used to say, congressional leaders of a president's party are supposed to work with the president, not for him. The Constitution gives both houses congress powers of oversight over executive agencies and of the budget, but the Republican majority has not shown any interest in using them. As a result, Congress members spend more time raising money and running for re-election than holding hearings on, or reading the print of, legislation on which they vote.

Part of what is at stake tomorrow is the re-leveling of playing field in Washington so that governmental institutions and powers separated in our Constitution resume working autonomously and not like automatons. A Democratic majority in Congress will reinvigorate the use of subpoenas and robust hearings.

~ by vigilante on November 6, 2006.