What the Dems Will Do If They Take Over

By Matt Taibbi
Created Oct 18 2006 - 9:15am

Late last week, toward the tail end of my research for the "Worst Congress
Ever" story in the current Rolling Stone, New York congressman Charlie
Rangel told me an interesting story.

Rangel recounted an incident in the House in which he went over to say hello
to Florida Republican Clay Shaw, who had been ill. Although the two men had
been longtime political antagonists, and had frequently ripped each other in
public during hearings of the Ways and Means committee (Shaw is the
committee's second-ranking Republican, while Rangel is the ranking minority
member), they had always maintained a friendly personal relationship. So
when Rangel saw that Shaw was back at work, he went over to pay his
respects.

"But then a funny thing happened," said Rangel. "When I got back to my seat,
a young Democrat [congressman] leaned over to me, and he said, 'What was
that all about?' Like there was something wrong with saying hello." Rangel
sighed. "Even in our party, for the younger generation of congressmen, this
is all they know. That's how bad things are between the two parties."

Rangel was one of a number of people I talked to in congress who spoke
wistfully of an age long gone, when congressmen could cross party lines to
socialize. But starting in the mid-to-late nineties, things began to change.
Among other things, the famed freshman class of 1994 was comprised to a
large degree of young congressmen who ran against the institution of
congress in their campaigns, promising to shun "Washington politics" and
spend more time in their home districts. A new strategy of ironclad party
discipline ushered in by Newt Gingrich furthermore decreased opportunities
for crossing the aisle on votes; the old days of horse-trading and committee
compromises brokered over the weekend on the links of northern Virginia were
replaced by party line votes and the three-day work week. A decade later,
congress was setting the record for fewest working days ever, and House
freshmen don't even shake hands with the guys on the other side of the
floor.

"We used to travel the world together," sighed Rangel. "Now we don't even
come to Washington long enough to get to know each other."

There is no question that congress has plunged to historic lows in the last
six years, rolling up an impressively ugly record of corruption, failing to
get much of anything accomplished in the way of major legislation, racking
up an $8 trillion debt and provided the ultimate in matador-defense
oversight for the most dangerously incompetent president in recent memory.
But there's a big question about exactly how much of that is the fault of
the Republican party alone.

While the fall from grace happened on the Republicans' watch, the
institution in general has seen a massive influx of campaign money and a
radical change in the way its members do business since the beginning of the
Gingrich years, with lobbyists actually writing the legislation in some
cases and members of both parties routinely cramming bills chock full of
earmarks and other favors. On the '04 election cycle, the Republican party
and its politicians collected an obscene $782 million in hard money
contributions, but the Democrats weren't far behind, at $679 million. Those
numbers dwarf the amounts seen the last time the Democrats controlled
congress - the '93-'94 totals were $244 million and $133 million,
respectively.

While congressional Democrats have undoubtedly indulged mightily in the
earmark revolution, it's hard to find their fingerprints on the worst abuses
of the past decade for the simple reason that the Republicans have done such
an incredible job of dominating the legislative process. They have not been
targets of corruption because Tom Delay and co. have literally left them
with nothing to sell.

"Seriously, one of the reasons you're not seeing Democrats getting indicted
in corruption scandals is that we've been out of the loop," says Rangel,
laughing but not joking.

What no one in congress knows -- and a lot of staffers I spoke to worried
aloud about this -- is if Democrats will be any different in that respect
than the Republicans if they win this November. The corruption issue is only
part of it. More than anything, a lot of Democratic staffers are worried
that ten years or so of having the light shut out on them by the majority,
being frozen out of conference committees, having cops called to rouse them
out of the library, and being denied the chance to offer even the most
harmless amendments -- that all of this will lead to a long, ugly period of
payback time.

"I hope we don't do the same stuff," says Jim Berard, a Democratic staffer
on the Transportation and Infrastructure.

The upcoming congressional elections are going to important for a lot of
reasons, not the least of which being the dramatic change in Congress's
oversight profile should the Democrats win one or both houses. But I don't
see any reason to expect that there will be a dramatic increase in civility
or a sudden challenge to corporate influence on the Hill if the Democrats
take the House. And as for political partisanship -- who knows, it might
just be that politics are different now. There are plenty of people out
there who think that a lack of cross-party primary voting (leading to fewer
centrist candidates) and the increasing sophistication of party fundraising
mechanisms (which allow party leaders to exercise greater discipline of its
members) are just contributing generally to a more polarized congress,
divided up into two homogenous bodies of legislators utterly hostile to each
other. The young Democrat sitting next to Rangel who looks at a Republican
like a Crip lining up a Blood might be the future of politics generally.

"If Feingold or whoever is president in '08," says defense analyst and
former Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler, "don't expect a sudden flowering of
oversight."

Which is not to say the two parties won't work together. They will - -just
not on anything constructive. What most people fail to understand about
congress is that there have been some highly consistent areas of consensus
even in these incredibly contentious past ten years. In the areas in which
both parties typically agree, like military spending and giveaways to the
more generous donor industries, Democrats and Republicans have worked
swimmingly even in the most publicly antagonistic periods of the Bush and
Clinton years. They helped each other sign off on the Iraq war and stroke
the credit industry with the bankruptcy bill. They cooperated to pass a
spate of free-trade agreements, the WTO, the MAI, GATT, and a host of other
legislative monstrosities.

Where they couldn't cooperate was in the area of upholding their
constitutional responsibilities, and practicing bureaucratic self-defense.
The social divide between Republicans and Democrats had to be a big part of
the reason congress lacked the institutional stones to really stand up to
the president on the torture issue, to fight back when the Vice President
ignores a subpoena of the GAO, to demand someone's head when the defense
department openly refuses to audit itself. The Republicans in congress have
been so busy in the last ten years figuring out ways to shut Democrats out
of the process that they forgot how to stop the Executive Branch from giving
it to them up the ass. The result is a congress that is not only grossly
corrupt and completely beholden to financial interests, but totally
castrated in the national political arena, a tawdry little sideshow that
drones on idiotically on CSPAN while the White House rules the country more
or less absolutely (an additional insult; not only is the congress a
disgrace to two millennia of democratic tradition, it's the worst show on
television).

Think about it; if there's ever been anything sadder than John McCain
"taking a stand" against Bush on the torture bill a few weeks back, have you
seen it? I sure haven't. McCain bent over faster than a college student on
his first night in Attica. But I wouldn't expect anything better out of the
Democrats -- at least not until they show they can act like adults, and not
like the hired clowns of their party's financial backers. Until that
happens, we can expect more of the same: vicious partisan bitching while the
cameras are on, obscene handouts behind closed doors.

"You can either govern or you can get even," says Rangel. "But you can't do
both. I hope we make the right choice."
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson