[Mb-civic] Democrats: MIA

[Michael Butler]

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    Democrats: MIA
    The Nation | Editorial

    11 April 2005 Issue

    After giving George W. Bush far too easy a ride in his first term, the
Democratic leadership in Congress promised that the second term was going to
be different. "This is not a dictatorship," announced Senate minority leader
Harry Reid. The new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, declared, "The President neither has
the mandate he thinks he has nor a majority to make policy." But three
months of watching the Democrats' stumbling, often incoherent responses to
Administration appointments and initiatives shows clearly that the party is
making the same mistakes that cost it so dearly in the 2002 and 2004
elections.

    It's easy simply to blame the GOP majorities in the Senate and House
when bad legislation passes those chambers. But too frequently it has been
Democratic disorder rather than Republican treachery that has made possible
the Bush White House's legislative victories. That's what happened with the
mid-March Senate vote on a budget amendment that would have protected the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Seven Republican senators voted to protect
ANWR from oil drilling. Had the Democratic caucus simply held firm in
support of the amendment, it would have won by a 52-to-48 margin. But three
Democrats--Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu of
Louisiana--broke ranks to back the Administration. All three had their
excuses, and if this had been the only bill on which Democrats failed to
hold together, it might not be a cause for serious concern. But this is
hardly an isolated example of Democrats doing the bidding of the President
and the special interests that support him.

    Consider the February Senate vote on tort "reform," another issue on
which Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of the common good against
the rapacious Republicans. The battle lines could not have been clearer:
Bush and his allies wanted to limit sharply the ability of citizens to file
class-action lawsuits against corporations that injure or defraud them. A
united Democratic opposition in the Senate could have mounted a populist
challenge that might well have won GOP allies for a fight to preserve the
sovereignty of state courts, which will be lost under the legislation.
Instead, Democrats helped give Bush the first major legislative victory of
his second term. Only twenty-six Senate Democrats opposed the proposal,
while eighteen--including serial compromisers Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh
and some who ought to know better, like Charles Schumer and Jay
Rockefeller--sided with the GOP. It was just as bad in the House, where
fifty Democrats--including Rahm ("no mandate") Emanuel--backed the bill,
handing Bush an easy win that provides momentum for an agenda that includes
proposals to restrict asbestos litigation and curb medical malpractice
suits.

    Even more disappointing was the mid-March vote on legislation designed
to make it harder for middle-class and poor Americans to declare personal
bankruptcy, leaving crooked companies like Enron free to declare bankruptcy
themselves and thus be protected from claims like those by employees who
lost their pensions. The vote on the measure, which had been blocked for
years by such progressive Democrats as the late Paul Wellstone and a timely
veto from then-President Bill Clinton, passed by an overwhelming 74-to-25
vote. Eighteen Democrats--including Reid and key players like Joseph Biden
of Delaware and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico--aligned themselves with the
President and the credit card companies that wrote and promoted the bill.

    Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that
Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social
Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against
privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under
pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give
ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on
scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of
solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception
rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House
and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the
basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes
needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination
for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of
Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of
Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite
concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding
Gonzales's role in approving torture.

    House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than
their Senate colleagues. Despite polls showing that the vast majority of
Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die
case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida
state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's
most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency
Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as
a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is
free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for
another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related
military misadventures.

    In 2002 and 2003 the Democrats tried the strategy of giving the
President blank checks for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and then
criticizing how the President spent them. That strategy cost the Democrats
any chance to frame the debate about the war and ultimately cost them at the
polls. But while some individual Democrats, like California Representative
Henry Waxman, have come to recognize the folly of such an approach, the
party as a whole continues to cede too much ground to the President--on Iraq
and on most other issues.

    Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots,
will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end,
we've initiated a biweekly "Minority/Majority" feature that identifies--by
name--Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who've
helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If
Democrats don't define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they
could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.