When Winston Churchill became British prime minister in 1940 (on the very day Hitler invaded France, Belgium and Holland) there were severe pressures on him to exclude from his Cabinet the “guilty men” of Munich. He wisely resisted the hue and cry and formed a successful coalition of all parties, including many who had been quite wrong about Munich, Hitler, and much else.
In his memoirs Churchill explained: “‘If the present,” I said a few weeks later, ‘tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.”
My friend George Kimball sent me a reminder of this bit of Churchill greatness this week, along with this thought: “The essential wisdom of Churchill’s magnanimity in a time of peril seems irrefutable and germane. Settling scores by criminal prosecution is a debilitating legacy of Watergate that ill serves the country. Magnanimity and generosity of spirit are marks of such men as Churchill and (closer to home) Lincoln (much admired by President Obama, we are told.) Alas, those qualities are not much in evidence just now. Bush, interestingly, so often maligned, was consistently gracious and respectful toward his foes.”
What Kimball was reflecting on was the ominous turn President Obama seemed to take this week, pulled by the deeply embittered hard left edge of his party. The very questionable release of the OLC memos – about which Speaker Pelosi admitted she had been briefed years and years ago – ignited the smoldering anger of the MoveOn.org wing of the party. On Tuesday, the president attempted what might be understood best as a political backfire by suggesting prosecution of the lawyers who wrote the memos. Prosecutors shook their heads at this risible proposition, so momentum shifted quickly to the idea of a Truth Commission with all of its wonderful opportunities for showy denunciations.
A New York Times writer, of all people, figured it out on Wednesday. ” Mr. Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned,” Scott Shane concluded in a Times “News Analysis”. “Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in C.I.A. interrogators.”
By week’s end the new president seemed to have recovered some sense of the peril to the country and his own political standing that a witch hunt led by Sen. Patrick Leahy or anyone else would entail, and leaks were springing everywhere suggesting another U-turn was imminent.
Then, to further trample on the last vestiges of the much vaunted “bipartisanism” of the new administration, Congressional Democrats announced that the United States Senate had agreed to neuter itself and allow health care legislation to become law with a mere 50 votes (plus Joe Biden’s.) The use of the obscure “reconciliation” rules to push through radical legislative change is an enormously significant departure from hundreds of years of Senate practice, a mirror image of the radical tactics used by Senate Democrats to filibuster Bush judicial nominees.
Where the filibuster has never not been available on matters of legislation before now, it had never been used on Circuit Court judicial nominees before the Senate Democrats embraced it in 2005. (It had been employed briefly in the late days of LBJ’s years to block the confirmation of Abe Fortas as Chief Justice, an extreme measure justified by the bipartisan support of the move and Fortas’ eventual resignation from the Court under a cloud of scandal.)
So the most liberal president in history is now in the saddle with a radical Congress willing to abandon even its own powers in order to impose massive change on the health care system of the United States. Republicans have threatened to shut down the Senate, and they should, even at the risk of bad press by a mainstream media that simply doesn’t grasp the enormity of the changes afoot. When the health care system is trashed beyond recognition and made into a more expensive version of Canada’s rationing, the GOP and centrist Democrats will want to at least be able to point to their principled opposition.
Democrats say that Republicans have a choice: They can “negotiate in good faith” on health care and no jettisoning of the rules would then be necessary. This of course is legislative thuggery, a sort of Sopranos-on-the-Potomac: “That’s a nice cloture rule you got there. Terrible if something were to happen to it.”
Republican Senate leadership must decide immediately to reject such tactics and begin to explain why they have moved to slow role the entire Congress to a crawl and hopefully a complete halt. It will be hard to persuade the country that constitutional majoritarianism and the separation of powers requires such drastic action, but the medical care that is the envy of the world will be lost. Worse, a radical innovation in governing will be imposed if the 41 Republicans do not mount the fight along with any centrist Democrats willing to stand against the most powerful interests in their own party.
President Obama seems to have arrived at this point almost by accident. The “new politics” of “hope and change” turns out to be a hard left jam down of historic proportions and one that may be accompanied by a witch hunt to boot. The second 100 days will commit the new president either to this radical course or recommit him to the promises on which he campaigned. The trouble with “magnanimity and generosity of spirit” is that once they are abandoned, they can never be reclaimed.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who bogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
