>> See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen and read what people are saying in our politics blog.
There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in
the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a
federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a
hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself
named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited
Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the
corridors of Capitol Hill these days?
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt
and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative
branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a
historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of
Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed
crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to
turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater,
a Burkina Faso with cable.
To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological
cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of
bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one
long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial
conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and
snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we
Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class
except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a
laugh of recognition a hundred years later.
But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight
deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing
less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The
Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they
have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite
unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated
the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities
mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive
borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of
semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to
commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has
ever aimed, and they nailed their target.
"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is
a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional
scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George
Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol
Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they
created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no
principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The
Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future
would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has
become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid
delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White
House."
The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury,
frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal
government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes.
In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:
STEP ONE
RULE BY CABAL
If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP
control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional
office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the
minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will
inevitably find exactly the same character -- a Democratic staffer in
rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single
lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on his wall, his eyes wide
and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is
as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven
years.
It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always
found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked
difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans
have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a
systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of
power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to
humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington
was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed
together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even
shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and
congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of
the country that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.
American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule
by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way
to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit
and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking
process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of
a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a
Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for
show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even
bother to conceal.
"I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says
Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican
staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete
Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the
Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my boss
gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going
to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out
in the open."
Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into
the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the
offices of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once
worked for both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas
Democrat David Pryor simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers
trapped in the basement laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever
happen again. These days, they consider themselves lucky if they
manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove's well-oiled
legislative machine delivers it up for Bush's signature
this only page one of eight
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The Worst Congress Ever
How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and
perverts -- in five easy steps
MATT TAIBBIPosted Oct 17, 2006 2:36 PM
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>> See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen and read what people are saying in our politics blog.
