Stop The Do Nothing Democratic Congress

I've been looking at my laptop for the past two days, too depressed to come up with a blog about the capitulation of the Democratic leadership to Bush and the Republicans on the Iraq War. Doesn't the Democratic leadership see that one of the effects of their capitulation is to depress their own most loyal supporters whom they will need energized in order to take back the White House and to maintain or increase their majorities in Congress? Don't they understand that the only reason the Democrats took back Congress was because of the American peoples' disgust at the endless war and of business as usual in Washington? Why does the Democratic leadership think that the country will trust them to protect its security, if they don't even have the courage to stand up to a Republican President with a 28 percent approval rating?

The Democratic leadership has betrayed its own supporters in other ways this past week:

--The Democratic leadership made a deal with the Bush administration to support a series of secret trade agreements, so secret in fact that they are not available to be read by members of Congress, the press and the public. As David Sirota has eloquently written on HuffPo, the secret agreements almost certainly do not provide for strong and enforceable labor and environmental standards. Good luck to Democrats in key industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania after the Democratic leadership sells them down the river on trade protection.

--After running on a pledge to clean up the "culture of corruption" of the Republican Congress, the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee has set about watering down its own ethics reform bill. Among other things, it has stripped away a provision that would require former Congress people and staff members to wait two years before they can take jobs lobbying their former colleagues, thus keeping open the revolving door between Congress and K Street. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass) complained that such a provision would "cut off my profession" and long-time liberal Judiciary Chairman John Conyers warned requiring them to wait two years to become paid lobbyists would hurt Congress's ability "to attract and retain top-flight staff." It's as though the Democrats are declaring that the career path for Democratic Congress people and staff is to build their credentials for a few years on the Hill so they can then earn hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying their former colleagues on behalf of wealthy special interest.

--Anti-war hero Rep. John Murtha (D. Pa.) has called ethics reform "total crap." One of the key ethics reforms that Democrats have passed was a new rule forbidding trading votes for "earmarks" (special interest provisions tacked on to unrelated legislation to spend money on projects in a Congress person's district) and requiring that the name of the Congressman proposing an earmark must appear on the bill. On Monday, Murtha was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, attaching a $23 million provision for an unnecessary "Drug Intelligence Center" in his district. When Republican Rep. Mike Rogers called him on it, Murtha, who is the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, threatened Rogers, allegedly saying "I hope you don't have any earmarks in the defense appropriations bill because they are gone, and you will not get any earmarks now and forever." Rogers, a former FBI agent, accused Murtha of acting like The Sopranos and filed a resolution accusing Murtha of violating House rules. The resolution was tabled on a largely party-line vote, as the LA Times points out, "not before Democrats were put excruciatingly on the defensive on what Pelosi has made a signature issue." (Despite his early leadership against the Iraq War, I've always worried about progressives making too big a hero out of Murtha, an old-time pol of the worst sort.)

--Of the five pieces of legislation that Nancy Pelosi promised in the first 72 hours of Democratic majority rule, none have yet become law, although they have been passed in the House. I understand the difficulty of the Democrats having only a single vote majority in the Senate (negated by Sen. Tim Johnson's long illness and the unreliability of "Blue Dog" Democrats). But with 80 percent of the public supporting an increase in the minimum wage, it's hard to see how the Senate Democratic leadership failed to stuff it down the Republican's throat, or forced them to veto it over and over again so the American people could see. $100 billion for the continued Iraq War, and the needless loss of more lives, is too steep a price to pay for passing the minimum wage increase. With that kind of money, Congress itself could pay every minimum wage worker a couple of dollars more an hour and still have money left over for schools and health care.

The Democratic leadership's capitulation on the war is the big one, however. Actually, the battle was lost months ago by the failure of the Democratic leadership to properly frame the issue. The Democrats never challenged the Republican's frame that putting a deadline on funding the war meant leaving our troops helpless in the field. They allowed the Republicans to create an image of a lonely American soldier, being shot at on the streets of Baghdad, with no way to defend himself because the Democrats had taken away the money to buy him a gun. They should have long been framing the defunding of the war as the best way to support the troops, by taking them out of harms way in an unnecessary war of choice which had turned into a sectarian civil war in which American military might could do no good. The American people were ready to accept this, with a substantial majority telling pollsters that they support a schedule for American troop withdrawal. Congressional Democrats could have sent the same bill Bush vetoed back to him, and if he vetoed it again, made it clear that it was Bush who was denying funds to the troops.

The best hope we have right now is that a large number of Democrats will vote against the war funding resolution, perhaps even a majority of Democrats, forcing the Democratic leadership to pass the bill by relying on Republican votes. At least those Democrats could show themselves as people who won't be intimidated and stand on principle.

On a day like today, it's very tempting to give up on the Democratic Party and start calling for a third party. Unfortunately, the winner-take-all American electoral system makes it all but impossible to create a third party which can win (unless you have $100 million of your own money like NYC's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and can finance your own campaign.) Like it or not, progressives still have no choice but to continue the long fight for a Democratic Party which will end the Iraq War and will stand up to the special interests.