AN AXIOMATIC TO GRIND

Character Witness (Peter Beinart, 05.22.03, New Republic)

To conservatives, the Bush administration is everything its predecessor was not: decent, ethical, honest. It doesn't abuse government power or the public trust. As Wall Street Journal columnist and presidential hagiographer Peggy Noonan has put it, "Bush brings character to the table."

That's the claim. Here's the record over the last eight months:

TEXAS
Since at least the 1960s, congressional redistricting has been governed by a simple rule: It occurs once per decade, following the national census. (The exception being when courts invalidate a state's redistricting plan, thus requiring a second one.) Usually, then, states draw the maps. But, when they cannot do so in a timely fashion, the Supreme Court has stated that judges may draw them themselves.

That's what happened in Texas in 2001. The state legislature deadlocked, so a three-judge panel drew new U.S. House districts. In November 2002, voters elected candidates in those new districts, and everyone assumed that would be that.

But those same elections handed the GOP control of both houses of the state legislature. And so Texas GOP boss and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay did something unprecedented: He redrew the map to create four more Republican seats. Republicans rushed the new plan through the state legislature until desperate Democratic legislators fled the state, thus preventing a quorum.

FILIBUSTER
Throughout the Senate's history, its members have been able to block legislation through endless debate, or filibuster. Under Bill Clinton, Republicans filibustered the 1993 economic stimulus plan, campaign finance reform, and higher cigarette taxes. Now the Bush administration is upset that Democrats are filibustering two of its judicial nominees. So Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has called for eliminating the filibuster as we know it. Breaking a filibuster requires 60 votes, but Frist proposes changing that so 60 are required only on the initial filibuster vote; subsequent votes would require 57, then 54, then 51. The filibuster, in other words, could be broken with a simple majority--rendering the device virtually useless. Frist has also threatened to employ a rare parliamentary maneuver to ban filibusters on judicial nominees altogether. Had the Clinton administration tried that during the GOP's (far more frequent) filibustering in the 1990s, I suspect conservatives might have said something about abuse of executive power. Today, they seem unconcerned.

IRAQ
Once upon a time, conservatives thought presidential duplicity was a grave offense. Not anymore. On October 7, 2002, President Bush declared in a nationally televised speech that "Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." That was a functional lie. Iraq's drones, the Bush administration later admitted, had a maximum range of several hundred miles. They could reach the United States only if flown from a warship stationed off America's coast (a virtually impossible scenario given Iraq's almost nonexistent navy). [...]

These stories of Bush administration dishonesty and abuse have not been denied in the conservative press as much as they have been ignored. In researching this column, I could not find a single substantive defense of Bush's UAV claim, or his filibuster plan, or his uranium allegation, in any elite conservative publication. Fred Barnes last week defended the Texas redistricting plan in The Weekly Standard but, incredibly, never acknowledged the key issue: that states traditionally limit themselves to one redistricting per decade. For conservatives, it seems, this administration's decency and honesty are ideological axioms that require no empirical defense. President Bush is not President Clinton. That's all they need to know.

Mr. Beinart seems to believe in the principle of--if you'll excuse the expression---once screwed, screwed for good. If his column cited George W. Bush's signing of the Campaign Finance Reform bill, which the President himself said violates the First Amendment, we'd agree that's an abuse of power. The examples he chooses instead represent not genuine abuses of power but mere politics and despite his implicating Mr. Bush in them, it's not clear what role, if any, he's played in a couple. To begin with, the Texas redistricting of 1991 rather notoriously shortchanged Republicans. Then, as he notes, the two parties deadlocked in 2001 so the courts drew up the new districts. What he fails to mention is that the court used the '91 districts as its starting point, thereby once again giving the Democrats greater representation than the votes of Texans would warrant. Now the GOP has sufficient control of the legislature--despite these anti-democratic Democratic shennanigans--and they're getting a little revenge. Boo hoo! Did the New Republic complain about the "abuse" by the Texas Democrats in '91?

As to the filibuster, this is merely a Senate rule. The majority in the Senate may change the rule because the minority is "abusing" it. It's not clear, nor does Mr. Beinart make any effort to demonstrate, that this is a White House initiative. Even if it is, it will require a Senate vote. How would encouraging people to vote on an issue constitute abuse of power?

We'll almost give him Iraq. President Bush may well have over-stated the threat from Iraq, though on the specific issue of a UAV, why couldn't it be shipped to and assembled here? But he also never rested the case for war solely on the threat that Saddam himself posed, but also on the possibility that he might supply weapons to terrorists. If Mr. Beinart is conceding that the UAV program was real, he would also have to acknowledge at least the possibility that once operational they could have been used by terrorists against targets either in the United States or against Americans in the Middle East, right? Oh dear, has Mr. Beinart abused the public trust by not acknowledging this possibility?

At any rate, if these three are the best examples he can muster of President Bush's indecency, dishonesty, and "abuse" of power, that's pretty pitiful. That he also thinks conservatives should be up in arms about this pifflery is absurd. The first two examples in particular are nothing more than cases of the GOP getting back at Democrats for their own "abuses"--welcome to politics, pally.

Now, if Mr. Bush should mire himself in a Watergate or Iran-Contra scandal, Republicans will be right there helping to investigate, just as they did in those cases, in marked contrast to the way Democrats obfuscated the many Clinton scandals. But until something serious comes along, we'll leave the nit-picking to the Beinarts. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2003 12:02 PM