MANY A bone-dry political science disquisition has by now been written about the institutional combat between White House and Congress during the first year of the Bush administration. Our current president is a man who seems especially determined to protect the authority and prerogatives of his office. Which determination has already produced a series of high-profile controversies over restricted House and Senate access to government documents and personnel–West Wing resistance to congressional inquiries about Dick Cheney’s energy-policy task force being the best known example. What pretends to be the latest such flap about the federal system’s proper “separation of powers”–administration spokesman Ari Fleischer calls it “a classic executive-legislative struggle over information”–involves the question whether Tom Ridge, the White House “homeland security” adviser, should make himself available to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee concerning the president’s domestic anti-terrorism budget. The Appropriations Committee’s chairman, Robert Byrd, and its ranking Republican, Ted Stevens, both insist that Ridge appear. The president is asking that a great lot of new money be spent on terror-related public safety programs, $38 billion in all. Byrd and Stevens have a responsibility to ensure that the money is spent wisely. So Ridge, whom Bush has made his “point man” on the project, is the one administration official the senators are most eager to quiz about it. The White House, for its part, does not dispute that Ridge plays a central role in the anti-terror campaign. Instead, the administration is withholding his testimony on grounds of formalist principle. Bush aides point out that Ridge is not a Senate-confirmed officer of the government; his job was created unilaterally by the president. Therefore, they reason, unless a public integrity violation has been alleged, Congress has no statutorily specified “oversight” rationale to question Ridge about anything. Technically, at least, Ridge is only a “staffer.” And if mere staffers are compelled to answer publicly for their work–something that would represent a “dramatic break from . . . longstanding traditions,” according to Ari Fleischer–then their ability and willingness to offer the president “confidential advice” will be permanently and grievously compromised. It’s an interesting argument, we suppose: To what extent might the constitutional order be implicated and the presidency weakened were Tom Ridge to spend a televised hour on Capitol Hill listening to the octogenarian Robert Byrd deliver his memorized, all-purpose speech about ancient Macedonia? But before we get to that, perhaps we should talk about . . . well, what happens to your luggage when you board a commercial airliner in the United States. Let’s say, just hypothetically, you’re a citizen of one of those Arab countries that are America’s “partners for peace” in the Middle East. Let’s further say you share certain political views peculiarly native to such countries, and you think blowing the arms and legs off women and children is a noble deed. Finally, let’s say your student visa application has recently been approved by the Immigration and Naturalization Service Tom Ridge is supposed to be straightening out. So you’re here in the States, and you’ve boarded a packed transcontinental flight, and you’ve checked a valise full of explosives into the belly of the plane. But during a layover at Chicago’s O’Hare, let’s say, you’ve disembarked and vanished, leaving your valise, a ticking time bomb, behind. They’ve got a system in place to cross-match connecting-flight passenger manifests with pre-checked luggage, don’t they? So as to deter precisely this kind of horrifying plot? Actually–amazingly–they don’t, even now, six months after September 11, and three months after the connecting-flight luggage loophole was first publicly acknowledged, and two months after the Transportation Department announced a pilot program to close that loophole. MSNBC’s Alex Johnson reported last week that the pilot program is not yet underway, and that Transportation still has no set plans to institute it. Moreover, the recent congressional mandate that would moot this problem–a requirement that every piece of checked luggage on U.S.-flag commercial airliners be subjected to point-of-departure electronic screening–has already been more or less ignored. A system to effect such screening was to have been introduced by the end of this year. But Transportation Department officials have lately admitted that they will miss the deadline. And most industry analysts don’t expect them to finish up until–believe it or not–sometime in 2004. Between now and then, millions of people will board flights making at least one layover in an American airport. Provided not a single one of them is intent on murdering his fellow passengers, everything ought to be okay. But that seems to us the kind of lottery-ticket gamble a true “director of homeland security” would not be inclined to take at the moment. And so, whether or not he is technically the proper object of a congressional call for testimony, the more urgent question becomes: What exactly is Tom Ridge doing? Earlier this month, at a much-promoted White House ceremony, Ridge unveiled what appears to be his principal accomplishment to date: the development of a “Homeland Security Advisory System”–the result of an “extraordinary effort” and a job “well done,” if he did say so himself–which will henceforth provide Americans with “the information necessary to respond to the threat” of terrorism. See, “based on the information we know there may be some information and some things going on in the world or in this country that we will know about,” such is the efficiency of your national government. And so as to communicate this information to the grass roots, the administration now plans to publicize a continuously updated series of color-coded, general threat assessments, from low-risk green to severe-risk red. The country is now in a code-yellow “elevated” threat situation, incidentally, right in the middle between green and red. But it’s not clear what we’re meant to do about it; Ridge says he and his colleagues “hope that businesses and hospitals and schools, even individuals working with their community leaders . . . will develop their own protective measures for each threat condition.” Nor is it clear that Ridge understands his mission to extend much beyond this kind of “hope.” The federal government’s executive branch, he proclaims, “will not mandate” that individuals working with their community leaders actually do develop their own protective measures. “If, for example, governors or mayors choose not to take extra protective measures in [the] face of a credible and specific threat” . . . well, “that is their right.” So far as the nation’s director of homeland security is concerned, apparently, it is the “right” of locally elected ward heelers to make catastrophically bad decisions that might cost thousands of people their lives, and officials in Washington have a corresponding duty to stand aside while it happens. This is quite incredible, really, a federalism-for-dummies simplemindedness that can only give the constitutional separation of powers a very bad name. We would like to believe–we’re fairly certain, in fact–that President Bush, Tom Ridge’s boss, has a rather more sophisticated understanding of both domestic security and executive branch responsibility. We’re also fairly certain that President Bush is entirely sincere about his refusal, so far, to make Ridge available to the Senate Appropriations Committee. It is true, as a legal and procedural matter, that Congress has no ordinary or obvious claim on the testimony of a non-statutory executive official like Ridge; were Robert Byrd to issue a subpoena to Ridge, we have no doubt that a federal judge would rule in favor of the White House. It is also true that Capitol Hill’s current interest in Ridge seems motivated less by substantive worry over national security than by childish pique and insecurity. Senator Byrd has gone so far as to threaten a delay in next year’s Defense Department budget unless Ridge shows up at his committee hearing. David Obey, ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has threatened the president’s anti-terrorism budget directly: “No information, no money,” he says. Here, Congress’s priorities would appear to be upside down. Nevertheless, it strikes us as odd that the White House would deny Senator Byrd his preferred witness on the basis of that witness’s ostensibly intimate relationship with the president. Is Tom Ridge, in some essential respect, really a private “staffer,” the confidentiality of whose advice to Bush would be fatally compromised were he to appear before Congress? How is it, then, that just last week the administration felt free to leak to the New York Times a detailed account of Ridge’s “confidential” advice to the president about the bureaucratic consolidation of border security agencies–including the fact that Bush intends to reject the advice? For that matter, wasn’t Ridge appointed director of homeland security precisely to serve as the public face of domestic anti-terrorism efforts? And does anyone seriously suggest that other administration officials serving similarly public roles–Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance–are unable, by the very nature of those roles, to provide the president worthwhile, candid counsel? No. Perhaps, in this particular “separation of powers” dispute, there is more at work than meets the eye. Perhaps, indeed, Tom Ridge is not the perfect person to explain and answer questions concerning those steps George W. Bush’s many other competent and intelligent aides and appointees are taking to protect the nation against further acts of terror. But somebody’s got to do it. What’s up with those connecting-flight baggage checks, for example? –David Tell, for the Editors
