It may not be high on everyone’s agenda but if Congress stays strong on FISA and retroactive immunity, I think it will go a long, long way towards boosting the approval rating of the House and Senate among progressive Democrats. Something I am more uncertain about is the upcoming testimony of Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. I anticipate that they will testify before both the Armed Services Committee (Clinton is a member) and the Foreign Relations Committee (Obama is a member), as well as the respective House committees. Until recently the administration and the media had worked collaboratively to keep Iraq out of the news and paint the surge as a success. Obviously, recent events make that fairy tale an impossible sell to an increasingly restless Congress.
First of all, I spent all last year predicting that the Republicans would submit to a sense of self-preservation and turn on the president and his policy in Iraq. They never did, and the consequences have already been devastating. In many ways the Republicans have already lost the 2008 congressional elections due to the disparity between Democratic and Republican retainment, recruitment, and fundraising.
The Democrats are getting close to the point where they will be disappointed with anything less than 60 senators and another 30 seats in the House. A lot of those gains are already built in. In the Senate the Republicans did not recruit one candidate anywhere that can realistically hope to oust a Democrat (save Louisiana, where they recruited a Democrat). The list of possible House picks-ups is getting close to eighty. With no good news from Iraq and with an incredibly lame-duck administration, I can’t seen the Republicans maintaining the same kind of discipline this spring that they did last year.
On the other hand, the anti-war movement has gone into hibernation, and the Democrats have not articulated what they want in a new Iraq policy. Even Obama and Clinton are only talking about what they will do as president, not what they would like to see done for the rest of this year. I advise them to think about that now and coordinate it with party leaders before Petraeus and Crocker testify again.
Part of the problem is that things look so good for the Democrats that they have no incentive to do anything bold or controversial. Yet, their ability to defy the president is limited, and if they achieve a realigning election in the fall, that will be a gift that keeps on giving for a long, long time.
What’s on your wish list for this year (before November, of course)?
Obviously it’s easier to start the list than end the list
But you know Inhofe doesn’t believe in polar bears.
did I mention that the polar bear is hungry?
I have too much respect for polars bears to go along with that.
You mean besides impeachments, frog marching, and handcuffs?
As you can see from my subject line my approval of congress has gone nowhere.
I can’t even begin to imagine what I would want from them in the next year, since that would only raise my hopes to be dashed again. Well, maybe they could assign Salazar to go with Imhoffe.
I’m going to lowball my wish list. I’d be happy if the FISA is dead and buried. This doesn’t require the Congress to do anything, or to put it in a more positive light, it requires them to do nothing.
As to the rest, if they aren’t going to impeach, it doesn’t matter.
Since they’re not going to impeach or really investigate, I won’t waste my time hoping for what will never happen.
So:
I want them to repeal the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005.
I want them to restore habeas corpus.
I want torture explicitly banned.
I want to see Joe Lieberman stripped of his chairmanship and seniority.
I want a Manhattan Project for alternative energy.
Extremist that I am, it’s hard to narrow the focus – but my first wish is to demolish the Department of Homeland Security and ban Chertoff from government service forever.
Today: April 1, 2008. No April Fools joke:
Rasmussen Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Primary Poll
can’t be helpful to funding, ‘we’re going all the way to Denver’
Why didn’t the repubs throw Bush under the bus?
Why is McCain still so high in voter’s approval ratings?
Why are the rethugs even contenders in the presnit race?
Why, if Conyers says he can, why hasn’t he begun impeachment? His excuse is too flimsy to be believed!
Why are we not planning a conga line around the wh the day Bush leaves dc?
Well, I was one of the people who said back in the spring of 2007 that once the Democratic Congress refused to go to the mattresses on the Iraq war– and instead engaged in “benchmark kabuki” and ultimately rolled over for Bush– they were in effect handing the war to the next President, which was all that Bush’s people were realistically hoping would happen. It was never going to be easy to stop the war with the slim majorities they have and the President we’re stuck with until January 2009. But the process had to be started almost immediately after the Dems took over for it to ever accomplish anything at all. That didn’t happen, and here we are: the next President will take over most likely with more troops in Iraq than were there when the Dems took Congress. So my expectations of Congress as to Iraq are just about nil at this point. Nothing they can do now will accomplish anything substantive before the elections. The question then becomes if the other conclusion some (including me) reached in 2007 will bear out: the next (hopefully and presumably) Democratic President will have little apparent political wiggle room on Iraq, even with a friendly Congress. Hillary for sure, and Obama most likely, will not want to be the President that “lost” Iraq. They will have mid-terms to think about, and then a second Presidential term. All the consultants who have been saying for years that ending the war is too great a political risk will still be around peddling their bullshit in the next administration, after all.
But back to Congress and the rest of this term, I think if they actually hold the line on retroactive immunity, they will have exceeded my expectations. My expectations are that low at this point.