Which is why I find it interesting that Dave and I have such markedly different opinions about the play of domestic politics re Iraq. At the end of an excellent discussion of assumptions underlying the "National Victory Strategy" presented by the President on Wednesday, Dave "couldn't resist" the following remark about "a good part of the Democratic Party" including at least one of what we might call war-Dems, Senator Clinton:
C’mon, folks. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.In response, I too "couldn't resist" -- commenting in part:
Sorry Dave, you should have resisted. The critiques by the “war-Dems” have been the same as the Republican Senators like McCain, Hagel, Lugar (and even increasingly Warner!) — and they’ve been on the money for the last several years in terms of where the big weaknesses have been in the Admin’s abysmal planning and execution. The changes in policy we’ve seen over the past 4-6 months under the Casey/Khalizad team are the sorts of things that “war-Dems” and the more serious of the Republican Senators have been calling for since 2003. Note Lugar-Biden attempts to deal with these issues in hearings that the media have generally ignored.Dave clarified what he had meant by his off-the-cuff slap, I responded with a monstrously long essay in the comment thread, and Dave has now penned a further post that goes to what I believe is the heart of the matter. Rather than continue to bury this discussion in comment threads, and eat up vast quantities of his bandwidth, I figured I'd post my response here.
I don’t see what the war-Dems have been doing as anything other than responsible. They’re not in a position to “lead”, they surely shouldn’t be expected to have “followed” the criminally incompetent Admin without insisting on changing course, nor do I see them as “in the way.”
Dave's new post is appropriately titled “The President proposes, Congress disposes” -- "a play on a much older apothegm: 'Man proposes but God disposes'."
When you realize that in the Washingtonism “Man” has been replaced by “The President” and “God” by “Congress”, the meaning becomes quite clear: the President is the handmaiden of Congress and subject to its will, not the other way around.
Under our system the president has primary responsibility for the military, the conduct of foreign policy, and the administration of the departments of government:The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.and enforcing the law. The Congress has primary responsibility for the creation, passage, and promulgation of laws (and, of course, raising and apportioning revenue).
Here’s what the Constitution says about the president’s responsibilities in formulating domestic policy:He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.It should be clear that ours is a system in which the bulk of the responsibility particularly in the area of domestic policy devolves upon the Congress; we expect leadership and courage from our Congress; when you have cowardice and venality and a willingness to wait for the President to act and then snipe you get, well, what we have now. But that’s not our system it’s a perversion of our system.
[...]
Like it or not Senators are leaders. The slim Republican majority in the Senate doesn’t absolve the Democrats in the Senate from the responsibility to lead.
Let me be very clear: I’m not just critical of Senate Democrats. I think the Senators of both political parties did not fulfill their responsibilities when they authorized the president to go to war with insufficient debate. But I further think that those Senators who voted “Nay” had a responsibility to hold their peace once our soldiers had gone into harm’s way and those who voted “Aye” had an affirmative responsibility to defend their vote and advocate the position to the American people. This is manifestly not what happened and that’s why I’m convinced that many Senators, particularly Senate Democrats, did not vote their consciences but voted with one eye (as Nadezhda pointed out) on the midterm elections and the other on the upcoming presidential primaries. Of course there will be political calculation from Senators. But there should be more than political calculation. Where is the statesmanship? We aren’t just warring factions; we’re all Americans.
I also freely acknowledge that the greatest incompetency of the Bush Administration has been in communicating with the American people, with the Iraqi people, and with the world. But the Administration doesn’t have sole responsibility for communicating with the American people. Congress has substantial responsibilities in that area, too.
I share Dave's visceral commitment to what at times seems like an old-fashioned notion of separation of powers, with each branch responsible for playing its part and protecting its prerogatives in order for the system's checks and balances to work. Since I began blogging, one of my recurrent themes has been that our checks and balances haven't been working properly in recent years.
Dave and I are also certainly on the same page in believing that Congress has not been living up to its responsibilities. In my view, only the courts have provided an occasional check on executive power. I am personally hopeful, with the first small indications of a reassertion by the Senate of its institutional prerogatives, that a rebalancing is starting to emerge.
I don't, however, put Congress' failure down to sheer cravenness on the part of either individuals or their respective parties. Instead, I see several (hopefully transient) structural factors that have recently inhibited the sort of Democratic leadership Dave calls for -- or encouraged the media to ingnore attempts at constructive leadership by either Democrats or Republicans on the Hill -- while producing a quasi-parliamentary arrangement that fits poorly with the US system.
As Jack Balkan points out in a very nice short essay on the subject of checks and balances, James Madison's assumptions didn't include political parties. When US parties start acting as cohesive blocks, the system's potential weaknesses become glaring. Even before 9/11, some political trends had converged to produce a far more disciplined party-based organization (running the House, extending into the Senate once the party took over the White House, and maintaining its power base through especially effective political-financial connections) than has traditionally been the case in our national politics.
When one party hits the rare "constitutional trifecta" as Balkin calls it -- when all three branches of government "are working more or less together to achieve the party's goals" -- a parliamentary-style system is likely to emerge. And today, the power base that supports the GOP's trifecta is unusually insulated from voter sentiments by the current arithmetic of geographic representation. (See e.g. Hacker & Pierson's The Center No Longer Holds in the NYT Mag from a couple of weeks back.) The cohesion of this party-based organization has been more financial and electoral than ideological. It remains to be seen whether it can renew its cohesiveness now that its primary strengths -- electoral (Bush's popularity) and financial (DeLay-KStreet connection) -- are eroding and ideological fissures are widening.
It is my strong hope that we've not been going through a permanent change in America's political system. Rather, I prefer to believe that we've encountered a sort of perfect storm that has produced an excess of executive power which will be soon begin to be corrected. The combination of 9/11's trauma and the peculiar (to the US) polarizing style of this White House and GOP congressional leadership, when combined with the related growth of executive-branch patronage, has overridden the inherently conservative brakes of our system, not only in the legislative branch but within the executive branch itself. It's not simply the problem of the so-called "Mayberry Machievellis" who ignore substantive policy issues in favor of a purely political calculus. We have seen a widespread pattern of the Bush Administration trying to run a government via little groups of ideologically-committed but inexperienced appointees who bypass the bureaucracy (whether civil service, foreign service, military or intelligence). These practices have served neither the Bush Administration nor the country well.
Post-invasion Iraq and Katrina are two sides of the same coin. Organization Theory 101 teaches us that when you don't involve the folks with experience who are going to have to execute policy in your policymaking or planning, then when it comes time for action and you put your foot on the accelerator, you won't get to where you want to go. The engine may reve, but the connections to the gears and steering are missing or broken. This has not been a problem for the Bush Administration exclusively in the realms of military action or homeland security. The Administration has also been hollowing out the most professional and effective, and least partisan, parts of the bureaucracy, such as Justice and Treasury, and seeding the second tier of departments and agencies with political hacks and ideological naifs. The costs to the government and the nation are increasingly visible, and Congress is finally starting to push back on the appointment process.
In recent months, as more buried problems from Bush's first term start rearing their ugly heads in the press and Senators of both parties increase their pointed critiques of Administration policy, we're starting to hear indirectly from government, military and intel professionals who have been bypassed by the White House (or the Vice President's office) and its political apparatus in the departments and agencies. The whole "torture" and "detainees" issue is a perfect example -- the WH, OSD and DoJ ignored the accumulated wisdom of both the government departments and the military. The bipartisan opposition in the Senate, being led as much by Republicans as Democrats, is starting to give voice to those views. The same has been happening with a number of aspects of the Administration's military, political and diplomatic efforts in Iraq and the Middle East more boradly. Jack Murtha, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, John McCain and Joe Biden each have a different approach for the future course the US should take. But though their conclusions differ, they are all reflecting the facts and opinions they are regularly receiving from officials and officers who have been unable to be heard within the Administration's own decision-making processes.
I think Dave and I agree that a more robust system of Congressional (and especially Senatorial) oversight would and should have brought those voices and views to the fore years ago. As I see it, however, better late than never. I think we are starting to see a natural and healthy process of rebalancing, although it will be a noisy and acrimonious process. But then, it takes a good deal of noise and acrimony to effect a rebalancing when the system has gotten so far out of whack.
My principal disagreement with Dave is that I do not see the noise as the actions of a minority political party adopting the role of "parliamentary opposition" or failing to embrace the fact that "we're all Americans" when it comes to issues of war and peace. We should not be surprised by an occasional "parliamentary opposition" stance taken by the Democrats, primarily in the House given the way it's run. And perhaps on the Alito nomination in the Senate, especially if his files keep producing a stream of worrisome evidence of his opinions and habit of thought on some key issues.
But on the Iraq war, I don't see a "parliamentary opposition" emerging or likely to emerge. The Democrats have agreed to disagree among themselves for the past three years. As the debates heat up, they are already reverting to form (and to the incentives of the US system of constituency representation), with a considerable variety of individually-defined and rather nuanced positions. I assume that Reid and Pelosi won't even try for a unified party position on the war, since they know better than anyone it's like trying to herd cats. As the President's power has started to erode, the same phenomenon, by the way, has been emerging on the Republican side in the Senate, though the critiques of the President's performance by Republican Senators are more implicit than explicit.
Instead, we're likely to see more and more highly charged debates over policy positions that are, on close examination, difficult to distinguish. Battles to the death over distinctions without significant differences may simply be the way the American political system deals with disagreements over war, as Ed Kilgore has recently reminded us.
I had one of those old-guy moments today when I suddenly remembered a moment in the debate on Vietnam which reminds me of the odd disjunction between the relatively small policy differences dividing most Democrats and many Republicans on Iraq, and the big tonal and intepretative differences they sometimes convey.The challenge of reconciling policy with political imperatives isn't unique to Democrats. Praktike and I have written repeatedly on the huge gap between the President's political rhetoric on Iraq and the evolving (and improving) policies being adopted by both the military and the State Department in his second term. The primary virtue of what the President accomplished in his speech this week was to narrow the rhetoric/reality gap, as did his spokesman in somewhat disingenously claiming that Senator Biden's proposals represented Biden's embrace of the President's own strategy, as described by Eric Martin.
In the famously fractious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the big platform debate over Vietnam (note to young people: this was back when big platform debates were still possible) involved a majority plank which endorsed free elections in South Vietnam to create a coalition government including the National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong), and a minority plank endorsing a coalition government including the NLF that would be required to sponsor free elections. The policy distinctions between these two planks were about as meaningful as today's difference between supporters of a benchmarked withdrawal from Iraq based on estimated dates, and a timetable withdrawal contingent on benchmarks.
Yet at the time, these two proposals were almost universally described by the news media as "pro-war" and "anti-war" platform planks.
The lesson is this: So much as many of us might wish to focus on the policy details of proposals about what to do now in Iraq, you can't take the politics out of politics, and the "tonal" or "contextual" implications of various proposals, despite their substantive similarity, matter a great deal.
These sorts of "failures to communicate" that Dave bemoans are, in part, driven by political considerations of the White House and politicians of both parties positioning themselves with the electorate. Let's hope for all our sakes that the politics this time serves a broader purpose than acting as a circular firing squad of Democrats. At the close of Jack Balkin's admittedly partisan essay on the structural reasons for recent failures of Congressional oversight, he asks:
If Congress won't perform its assigned function of oversight, the only recourse is the American people. Will they become sufficiently engaged to put our constitutional system back in order, and once again let ambition counter ambition?Many media commentators, especially the purveyors of "moderation" and the "pox on both your houses" punditocracy, argue that the Democrats shouldn't run so heavily against the performance of the Bush Administration since Bush won't be on the ballot in 2008. But that misses the point that one of the major political themes running across both domestic and foreign policy is a rebalancing of the system of powers. It's in the interest of the health of the body politic that we "once again let ambition counter ambition."
[cross-posted at American Footprints aka Liberals against Terrorism]
The first afoe European weblog awards