In the sad, pathetic case of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson’s alleged bribery scheme, which prompted Republican Speaker J. Dennis Hastert to protest the search of Jefferson’s offices, Congress has demonstrated just how perverse the double-standards have become for its members relative to the constituents they purport to serve.
Here is a Republican-controlled Congress that has so abandoned its oversight duties that it was prepared to avoid hearings into the Sept. 11 attacks until political pressure forced them to, and still hasn’t conducted a serious inquiry into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war.
Here is a Congress where Democrats bemoan daily that the nation’s health care and pension systems leave taxpayers uncovered and unprotected, yet they happily enjoy the health insurance and retirement packages paid for by those very same taxpayers.
Here is a Congress brimming with “public servants” who, as the Center for Public Integrity reported this week, fly on private jets to luxuriant locales where they gulp down cocktails and expensive meals on “fact-finding trips” paid for by lobbyists who, we are told, gain no political advantage from picking up the tab.
Here is a Congress which venerates “competition” as the panacea to raising the minimum wage, defending affirmative action or blocking free trade — yet hardly an outraged senator can be found protesting the higher prices constituents pay to equip, armor and feed our troops thanks to non-competitive defense contracts, and most House members come from districts so carefully gerrymandered that they never face any serious electoral challenge.
Most damning, here is a Republican-controlled Congress which has fallen dead silent as President Bush signed “clarifying” statements on more than 700 laws, signaling rather loudly that the White House will ignore whatever parts of these laws it deems unworthy of following. If Congress will not defend the very laws it passes, what purpose does it serve?
Oh, right, it passes the budget — but not a balanced one, of course. That would take effort and some guts.
If you or I performed this poorly at our jobs, we’d have been fired long ago.
And yet, with the Iraq fatalities inching ever closer to the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11, with the stock market still lower than the day George W. Bush signed into law his first tax cut measure in July 2001, with interest rates risingand the chances of an immigration bill passing Congress falling, what matter did Senate Republicans address this week?
A gay marriage constitutional amendment that had no chance of passing either chamber by the requisite two-thirds majorities. What a joke.
Whatever it may have accomplished initially, the 1994 “Republican revolution” is over. The Congress has abdicated its power and, more damning, its authority and legitimacy. Since Bush came to power in 2001, Congress has produced not one serious legislative accomplishment.
The two biggest measures are a Patriot Act that many fear tramples upon Americans’ inalienable liberties, and a Medicare prescription drug benefit promised at a 10-year pricetag of $400 billion which will actually cost twice that. The rest of the legislative agenda is tax cuts during wartime and symbolic junk.
Last I checked, the Stars and Stripes fly over every building in the congressional complex on Capitol Hill. Given the near total surrender by Congress of its legislative and oversight duties, the red and blue ought to be bleached out. White flags of constitutional surrender seem more appropriate.
After Democrats got slaughtered in the 1994 midterms, a frustrated President Bill Clinton howled that the presidency is “still relevant.” Can Speaker Hastert’s assertion about the relevancy of Congress be too far behind?
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
