The soon-to-be congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, have vowed not to invoke the old Boston Irish axiom that says: “Don?t get mad ? get even” when they take power in January.
Though mindful that the outgoing Republican leaders ? Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist ? shut the Democrats out of much of the legislative process during their tenures, Pelosi and Reid have promised there will be no retribution.
Reid at a recent breakfast with reporters said: “I like the golden rule. I?m not going to treat the Republicans the way they treated us.”
He and Pelosi have pledged to end the Republican practice of one-party decision-making through closed bill-writing, sharp curtailment of amendments and House-Senate conference committees that left the Democrats outside looking in.
If the new Democratic leaders follow through on this promise, they will be taking a major step toward the bipartisanship in Congress that has been so conspicuously absent during the current administration, with President Bush sharing the blame.
That doesn?t mean, however, that the new gang in charge will not press the advantages gained in the midterm elections. They interpret the outcome not only as a repudiation of Bush but also as a ticket to enact their own agenda, long shelved by GOP supremacy on Capitol Hill.
Pelosi particularly has come out of the gate in a sprint well before taking over as speaker. She has laid out an agenda for the first 100 hours of the new House that includes at least a start on seven specific undertakings. They include stiff lobbying reform, putting new spending on a pay-as-you-go basis, raising the minimum hourly wage, cutting interest rateson federally supported college loans, ending Big Oil subsidies, lowering prescription drug rates and enhancing stem-cell research.
It?s a large order of items the Democrats campaigned on in the fall elections, and will be an initial test of the willingness of the Republicans to deal with them in a bipartisan way. One item on Reid?s list for the Senate, campaign finance reform, is certain to hit a stone wall in the person of the new Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, the GOP?s toughest foe of any sort of public financing.
Pelosi has also announced that even before January, House Democrats will hold a Dec. 5 forum that has all the earmarks of a long-awaited examination of Bush?s radical and beleaguered policy in Iraq. A prime critic, former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, will be on the panel, along with former Clinton United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. John Batiste.
This forum shapes up as a forerunner of an intensive autopsy on Bush?s stalled adventure in Iraq and the concept of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The Republicans in Congress can either boycott it or join in as a way to temper the anti-Bush picture that is likely to emerge if they opt out of it.
More than the domestic agenda the Democrats plan to push, this review of the Iraq war ? essentially non-existent during Republican control of Congress ? will be the greater test of the bipartisanship to which both parties have pledged in the wake of the Nov. 7 election results. Perhaps the best prospect that it will be achieved is the growing erosion of support for Bush?s Iraq policy within his own party on Capitol Hill. Many Republican candidates distanced themselves from him and stay-the-course in the midterm elections, and along with the Democrats they are looking for an honorable way out of the failed policy.
Of leading Republicans in Congress, Sen.John McCain is practically alone in pressing for sending more troops to Iraq. And even he says, along with President Bush, that he is awaiting a new Pentagon review and the report of the Iraq Study Group authorized by Congress to find an alternative course.
For all the Democrats? talk of new bipartisanship, they are not likely to pull their punches in demanding answers on the war as soon as they have in their hands the subpoena power denied them as the minority party.
Jules Witcover is a Baltimore Examiner columnist whose memoir, “The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch,” has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
