I was planning to write a blog today on how congressional Democrats need to stop playing checkers while Congressional Republicans play chess -- how they can refuse to allow an up and down vote on Bush's new attorney general nominee until the Republicans allow an up and down vote on restoring the constitutional right habeas corpus; how they can refuse to pass any further Iraq funding bill without a timeline for redeployment and an up and down vote on Sen. Webb's legislation requiring troops to have home leave equal to their overseas deployment; how they can allow the six month interim FISA revision to expire unless phone companies are held responsible for their illegal actions and the FISA court is required to issue warrants approving phone taps on people on American;
I may have the heart to write that blog tomorrow. But after watching the appalling behavior of congressional Democrats yesterday, it's getting hard to believe that they have any desire to seriously challenge the Republican agenda.
**By a vote of 76-22 (including 27 Democrats, a majority of the Democrats in the Senate) the Senate approved the Joe Lieberman/John Kyl Amendment declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, without so much as a hearing on the facts and the implications of such a resolution. (Note: It's the legal job of the State Department to list terrorist organizations. Congress has never before voted to do so.) While Bush, Cheney and Giuliani bang the drums to extend the Iraq war to Iran, congressional Democrats handed Bush a loaded pistol which he can use to claim congressional support for military action against Iran. Democrats voting for the amendment included Majority Leader Harry Reid, Jack Reed, Carl Levin, Debby Stabenow, and worst of all, Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee. In what's starting to seem like a pattern of evasion, Barack Obama did not vote.
As Democratic Sen. Jim Webb (a former Secretary of the Navy under Pres. Reagan) pointed out on the Senate floor, there are 180,000 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard which is part of the Iranian state's organized military. If they are attacking the United States, that would make them an attacking army, not a terrorist organization The response to an attacking army is to attack them back. But Sen. Webb questioned the evidence on the extend of Iranian military involvement in Iraq. Sen.Webb noted that American ally Saudi Arabia supplies the plurality of foreign insurgents and the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq today. Moreover, he pointed out that in the Vietnam War, in which he personally fought, China was a nuclear power bordering Vietnam that spouted a lot of anti-American rhetoric and supplied arms to the North Vietnamese who were fighting American troops. "We engaged China aggressively, through diplomatic and other means. And we have arguably succeeded, along with the rest of the world community, in bringing China into a proper place in the world community." When cool heads and clever diplomacy is called for in dealing with Iran, a majority of Senate Democrats supported an inflammatory resolution that handed Bush and Cheney Congressional cover for military action against Iran.
**By a vote of 341-79 (with 146 Democrats voting for and only 79 Democrats voting against) the House passed a resolution that condemned "in the strongest possible terms" MoveOn.org's ad criticizing the reliability of Gen. Petraeus' congressional testimony.
I have already noted in these pages that despite MoveOn's impressive work opposing the war and helping to bring about a Democratic majority in the '06 elections, the "Betray Us" headline was a tactical error -- but even the best of us make mistakes. For over 2/3 of House Democrats to use congressional power to try to intimidate MoveOn from exercising it's first amendment rights to criticize government officials, and to condemn an organization that helped put Democrats in the majority, is an act of abject cowardice, far worse than any tactical mistake MoveOn may have made.
**When Democrats were stampeded in April into supporting a six month amendment to the FISA Act temporarily allowing warrantless wiretaps of people on American soil communicating with people overseas, and providing immunity to telecom companies that may have violated privacy laws, the Democratic leadership promised to fix it when they came back from summer recess. Yesterday, reports coming out of the Senate Intelligence Committee indicated that it may not insist that the Bush administration provide information on the use and extent of it's past illegal wiretaps and may make permanent legislation that bypasses the need for a warrant from the FISA court and gives permanent immunity to telecoms who broke the law.
**In yesterday's Democratic presidential debate, all three leading Democratic contenders -- Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton -- refused to rule out keeping American troops in Iraq until 2013. At least Edwards ruled out continued combat troops, but odds-on favorite Hillary Clinton indicated that there might still be a role of American combat troops until 2013. This after Democrats won the '06 election on the voter's hopes to bring an end to American military involvement in the Iraq civil war. If the Democratic presidential candidate can't even rule out continued American military involvement in Iraq by the end of their first term (if elected) in 2013, how does s/he plan to run against a Republican candidate who will almost certainly be campaigning for the illusion of American military victory?
It was a truly depressing day for a progressive Democrat. It's almost enough to make one give up on the Democrats and call for a third party. Unfortunately, the winner-take-all American political system makes the creation of a viable third party all but impossible. Bringing real progressive change to the country is a long hard fight and for better or worse, it will need to be fought within the Democratic Party.
Tomorrow I'll be back with proposals for a fighting Democratic Party instead of a party of cowards who cave in to the Republican framing of issues. For today, however, I can only weep.