The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Bush's revenge

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Friday, May 27, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Bush's revenge

Sidney Blumenthal

His dream of dominating every government institution in tatters, the U.S. President is already plotting his revenge.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush's drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the Supreme Court, with lockstep ideologues. Sheer force would prevail. But just as his blitzkrieg reached the outskirts of his objective, he was struck by a mutiny. Within the span of 24 hours he lost control not only of the Senate but temporarily of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to be regimented by unquestioned loyalty. Now he prepares to launch a counterattack — against the dissident elements of his own party.

Mr. Bush's wonder weapon for total victory was a device called the "nuclear option." Once it was triggered, it would obliterate a 200-year-old tradition of the Senate. The threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate of his appointments to the federal bench would set the doomsday sequence in motion. The Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, would call for a change in the rule, and a simple majority would vote to abolish the filibuster. Mr. Bush's nominees would sail through.

Unlike the House, the Senate was constructed by the constitutional framers as an unrepresentative body, with each State, regardless of population, allotted two Senators. Currently, the Republicans have 55 Senators who represent only 45 per cent of the country. The Senate creates its own rules, and the filibuster can only be stopped by a super-majority of 60 votes.

Historically, it was used by southern Senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton Presidency, the Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless.

The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Mr. Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.

For many Senators the fate of the filibuster was only superficially about an arcane rule change. And shameless hypocrisy was the least of the problem. (Mr. Frist, like most Republicans in favour of the nuclear option, had enthusiastically filibustered against Mr. Clinton's court nominees, 65 of whom were blocked from 1995-2000.) If Mr. Bush succeeded he would have effectively removed the Senate's "advice and consent" on executive appointments, drastically reducing its power.

Over the weekend, two elders, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, pored over the federalist papers, written by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking about the inviolability of the Senate. On Monday, seven Republicans and seven Democrats signed a pact that preserved the filibuster under "extraordinary" circumstances and allowed several of Mr. Bush's appointments to be voted on.

The day after Mr. Bush was frustrated by Republicans in the Senate, 50 Republicans in the House deserted him on the issue of stem cell research. His policy limiting scientific work is a sop to the religious right that views the stem cell question as an extension of abortion. Debate in the House was marshalled by Republican majority leader Tom DeLay, who argued that Mr. Bush's policy must be supported because "Jesus of Nazareth" began life as an embryo. Mr. Bush promised to veto the stem cell bill passed with massive Republican defections, the irony of his opposition to the filibuster unmentioned.

The compromise pact in the Senate on the filibuster hardly postpones the coming storms. The White House intends to push judicial nominees that the Democrats are almost certain to filibuster. With the elimination of the nuclear option, the filibuster may also be used against Mr. Bush's Supreme Court appointments.

Meanwhile, the conflict has focussed attention on the Republican presidential succession of 2008, pitting Mr. Frist — positioning himself as the darling of the right — against cantankerous John McCain, one of the Republican magnificent seven.

Within the party, metal is scraping on metal. But the more the resistance, the more Mr. Bush presses forward. His unilateralism abroad has been brought home, with a vengeance, to his partisan wars.

—

(Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars.)

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