In George W. Bush's second term, the unwarranted firings of eight U.S. Attorneys did become major news. The Department of Justice ousted Carol Lam of San Diego in a purge of U.S. Attorneys. She put Congressman Cunningham in prison, was in charge of following up on connections to his case, and was close to obtaining House documents on Representative Jerry Lewis, a Californian who had been appropriations chairman. She was one of eight US Attorneys who appeared to have been removed for political reasons. To prevent Senate questioning of the replacements, a new provision of the amended Patriot Act was used in appointing the replacements as interim US Attorneys, who could serve indefinitely and whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation.
The removal of Thomas Di Biagio in Maryland was attributed to his looking into people connected with the Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich funneling money from gaming interest to promote legalized slot machines. Di Biagio also examined their links with a Washington/DC prostitution ring run by Deboraj Jeane Palfrey, later known as the “DC Madame.” She was subsequently prosecuted and she claimed that she was a scapegoat for her customers, whose names were seqled by a federal judge. She speculated that some of her employees were involved in the sex ring associated with former Congressman Randy Cunningham and Mitchell Wade of MZM, Inc.
In Nevada, David Bogden was removed, and it was wondered if the cause was his looking into Governor Jim Gibson’s receiving payments or gifts from a firm that received secret military contracts when Gibson was in Congress. Senator Peter Domenici pressed for the removal of David C. Iglesias because he had not sped up an investigation in time to damage New Mexico Democrats in the 2006 elections. In Washington State, John McKay had angered superiors because he could not prove that the Democrats had stolen the gubernatorial election of 2004. He said he found no evidence and was unwilling to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury. Representative Doc Hastings, former chair of the ethics committee, had called him about the Washington Gubernatorial recount. A Justice official said McKay could have been removed because he was to aggressive in seeking a thorough investigation of the murder of an assistant US attorney, who had been a prominent anti-gun advocate.
Paul Charlton of Arizona was removed while he was investigating very questionable land deals on the part of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi. In Arkansas, Karl Rove associate Timothy Griffin was appointed to replace a man with a good record. Griffin had been research director of the Republican National Committee and in 2004 masterminded the “caging” of 70,000 would be voters. “Caging “ is a method of setting up voters to have their registration challenged by a variety of very effective procedures. Challenging potential voters based on caging lists can occur at the polls. The Republican National Committee was forced to forego caging some years ago in a consent decree because it had targeted black for caging, but the consent decree did not apply to state parties. In most cases they would not know they had been removed until it was too late. They were mostly minority people—some students, some soldiers, and some in homeless shelters. Caging is an extremely effective technique today the HAVA Act of 2002 appears to partially legitimize and facilitate it.
It developed that Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales had discussed this purge of federal attorneys even before Gonzales became Attorney General. However, Gonzales had said that he was not involved in the discussion of the removals. Kyle, Sampson, his former chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Attorney General was very much involved in the process. However, Sampson added that he himself had no idea that any of those prosecutors were involved in very sensitive political investigations. That seemed very implausible. But he admitted that he had suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the special prosecutor in the Plame Case. No wonder Republicans on the committee wanted to shut down that hearing.
Evidence was produced that Monica Goodling, once a senior aide to Gonzales, had created a political test for becoming an Assistant U.S. Attorney. This violated long-standing Department of Justice policies. Gonzales also gave her and Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff, the power to fire the department’s top officials. All this made it much more difficult to deny that the Justice Department had been politicized.
A study by professors Donald Shields and John Cragan showed that of 375 corruption cases under US attorneys under Bush to early 2007, 298 involved Democrats and 67 involved Republicans, and still another 10 involved independents. John Nichols of The Capitol Times, placed the Gonzales question in a larger context: “The Controversy that matters is not about the attorney general’s hiring practices. It is about a lawless administration, and the president who has led this country further and further from its constitutional moorings.” The Gonzales controversy has distracted attention from the sad fate of the Civil Rights Division, which has been gutted, with career lawyers forced out to make way for appointees with very conservative credentials.
It was recalled that U.S. Attorney Chris Christie in New Jersey opened an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez when he was in a close election contest, suggesting that the criminals he testified against at the risk of his life years ago were actually in league with him. It was also recalled that a career U.S. attorney in Guam was removed in 2002. He had been investigating Jack Abramoff’s activities there. Abramoff wrote in March 2002, “I don’t care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black,” That aspect of the Abramoff investigation ended.
The investigation of the firings was hampered through claims of executive privilege, claims of lost e-mails, and the refusal to turn over other documents. Nevertheless, it produced the admission and incontrovertible evidence that the Bush administration had violated prohibitions regarding the hiring of civil service attorneys on the basis of political affiliation. This was one more piece of evidence that Republicans in the Justice Department put the interests of their party above that of the people of the United States. Traditional barriers designed to separate the work of the DOJ from politics simply dissolved. Under Bush, 471 White House aides were authorized to talk directly to the top 30 people at Justice. In the past, only the President, Vice President, White House counsel, and chief of staff could contact people at the top of the Department of Justice.
In the end, it proved impossible measure the extent to which the Department of Justice had been politicized because the Executive branch simply refused to provide the documents Congressional investigators subpoenaed. The balance between the branches had been badly eroded, and there was little public outcry. The interesting investigation of Puerto Rico’s Democratic Governor, Anibal Acevedo-Vila, probably was related to all this. The island’s career US Attorney, who had been promised Republican backing for a permanent slot, carried on a long and apparently fruitless investigation of the governor. It began with claims of campaign finance irregularities and spread into every aspect of the man’s life including his relations with a delegate to Congress, clothing purchases, whether he had plastic surgery, and whether his hair was a replacement or original. The investigation was marked by many seemingly purposeful leaks.
The Congressional investigation of the political firings began to sputter to a close as the Executive Branch refused to provide needed information and witnesses. It also claimed that it somehow lost millions of e-mails. The final blow came when the Bush Justice Department announced that it was prohibiting US Attorneys from enforcing Congressional subpoenas.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Some Possible Abuses of Power under George W. Bush
There is strong reason to believe that the FBI was used in an effort to influence a Philadelphia election. The Philadelphia mayoral election of 2004provided a blatant example of how the abuse of federal power was used in an effort to influence voters. The FBI installed listening devices in the ceiling of Philadelphia Mayor John Street’s office before a regularly scheduled security sweep. The FBI also seized one of the Democratic mayor’s handheld computers. The agency quickly leaked that he was a subject of investigation, possibly in connection with fixing parking tickets or the fact that his brother got a part of a construction contract. The timing of these moves left the popular mayor in limbo, unable to defend himself against undisclosed charges and likely to lose votes as a result of the situation. Skeptics thought these actions part of an “October surprise,” aimed at placing City Hall in Republican hands in time for the presidential election of 2004. Believing Ashcroft was abusing his powers for political ends, black voters turned out in droves to give Street another term.
There are strong indications that the Department of Interior also used its power to help key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff do business with Indian Tribes. Secretary Gail Norton also proved adept as using her supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the advantage of her party. In the fall of 2001, she met with leaders of the Mississippi Choctaw, the Chitimacha, and the Coushatta. Bush fundraiser Jack Abramoff represented these tribes. Each tribe was reported to pledge amounts approaching a million dollars to the 2002 campaign. Wayne Smith, second in command at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reportedly used former business partner Phil Bersinger to raise funds. Bersinger’s approach to Linda Amelia of the Chinooks was so blatant that Ms. Smith thought an FBI sting operation was underway. Another group of Indian tribe leaders met with President Bush at a meeting arranged by Americans for Tax Reform, a group they helped to finance.
Norton’s accounting methods, designed to help wealthy ranchers, also reveal an inclination to abuse power. In September 2002, a federal district judge found Norton guilty on four counts of “fraud on the court” for lying about efforts to improve accounting methods with respect to collecting money from leased Native American lands. Apparently, millions had not been collected for decades. Other administrations had been remiss in correcting problems in the system, but the judge claimed Norton had reached new heights in disregard for court orders. Norton’s Department of the Interior also opened Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to as many as 51, 444 gas wells which will threaten water sources ranchers depend upon and interfere with agriculture in numerous ways.
There was evidence of monumental waste and fraud in the conduct of the Iraq War, but it was difficult to get a complete picture of what was going on. Even the staid Department of State joined in the cover-ups. Its inspector General suppressed reports that showed waste and fraud in the construction of the embassy complex in Baghdad, the largest in the world. The Department’s Inspector General derailed investigations of the Blackwater security firm and warned the former head of Public Broadcasting that both Congress and the Justice Department were investigating him for collecting twice for the same work and for billing two public agencies. Many thought the man shielded Blackwater because his brother was on a Blackwater board, but it is doubtful that he had this information. Although there have been some real horror stories about waste and fraud in the Iraq War, it has proven difficult to access detailed information. Contractor fraud cases are often dealt with under the Civil War’s False Claims Act. Someone with information files a “qui tam” suite in hopes that the Department of Justice will take up the case and that the filer will obtain about 18% of the judgment. The law provides that the information be sealed for 60 days while the Department decides what to do. In the past, it was not unusual for the DOJ to seek extensions of this time, but the Bush Department of Justice has developed a pattern of repeatedly seeking extensions and, thus, effectively gagging indefinitely those with information about fraud. The decision not to insist that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root adhere to established DOD accounting standards has effectively thrown a veil of secrecy over KBR’s activities there. Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction has complained that KBR did not “have certified billing or cost and schedule reporting systems” in place. There was no good way of knowing if the taxpayer was getting adequate value for payments. These payments were on a cost plus basis. Two years after made that comment, the Army Material Command made the same complaint in reference to learning what subcontractors were doing.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
There are strong indications that the Department of Interior also used its power to help key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff do business with Indian Tribes. Secretary Gail Norton also proved adept as using her supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the advantage of her party. In the fall of 2001, she met with leaders of the Mississippi Choctaw, the Chitimacha, and the Coushatta. Bush fundraiser Jack Abramoff represented these tribes. Each tribe was reported to pledge amounts approaching a million dollars to the 2002 campaign. Wayne Smith, second in command at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reportedly used former business partner Phil Bersinger to raise funds. Bersinger’s approach to Linda Amelia of the Chinooks was so blatant that Ms. Smith thought an FBI sting operation was underway. Another group of Indian tribe leaders met with President Bush at a meeting arranged by Americans for Tax Reform, a group they helped to finance.
Norton’s accounting methods, designed to help wealthy ranchers, also reveal an inclination to abuse power. In September 2002, a federal district judge found Norton guilty on four counts of “fraud on the court” for lying about efforts to improve accounting methods with respect to collecting money from leased Native American lands. Apparently, millions had not been collected for decades. Other administrations had been remiss in correcting problems in the system, but the judge claimed Norton had reached new heights in disregard for court orders. Norton’s Department of the Interior also opened Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to as many as 51, 444 gas wells which will threaten water sources ranchers depend upon and interfere with agriculture in numerous ways.
There was evidence of monumental waste and fraud in the conduct of the Iraq War, but it was difficult to get a complete picture of what was going on. Even the staid Department of State joined in the cover-ups. Its inspector General suppressed reports that showed waste and fraud in the construction of the embassy complex in Baghdad, the largest in the world. The Department’s Inspector General derailed investigations of the Blackwater security firm and warned the former head of Public Broadcasting that both Congress and the Justice Department were investigating him for collecting twice for the same work and for billing two public agencies. Many thought the man shielded Blackwater because his brother was on a Blackwater board, but it is doubtful that he had this information. Although there have been some real horror stories about waste and fraud in the Iraq War, it has proven difficult to access detailed information. Contractor fraud cases are often dealt with under the Civil War’s False Claims Act. Someone with information files a “qui tam” suite in hopes that the Department of Justice will take up the case and that the filer will obtain about 18% of the judgment. The law provides that the information be sealed for 60 days while the Department decides what to do. In the past, it was not unusual for the DOJ to seek extensions of this time, but the Bush Department of Justice has developed a pattern of repeatedly seeking extensions and, thus, effectively gagging indefinitely those with information about fraud. The decision not to insist that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root adhere to established DOD accounting standards has effectively thrown a veil of secrecy over KBR’s activities there. Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction has complained that KBR did not “have certified billing or cost and schedule reporting systems” in place. There was no good way of knowing if the taxpayer was getting adequate value for payments. These payments were on a cost plus basis. Two years after made that comment, the Army Material Command made the same complaint in reference to learning what subcontractors were doing.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Impatience with Dissent
Under George W. Bush, Republicans have evinced a great impatience with legitimate dissent. Republican campaigning techniques demonstrated an impatience with dissent and a disregard for the rights of dissenters to express themselves. During the campaigns of 2000 and 2004, the Bush campaigns carefully screened non- Republicans from their rallies. This is perfectly legal and has a precedent in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, but it is hardly democratic. After winning reelection in 2004, Bush barnstormed the nation speaking for his so-called Social Security reforms but it was reported in at least one location that his advance people provided a non-admit list for Fargo, North Dakota, rallies so that known Democratic activists would be excluded from the rally at a local high school. At other rallies, people were required to sign pledges to support the Bush privatization plan before being admitted to rallies. In Denver, a Republican operative posing as a Secret Service agent ejected three people from a rally.
In the same year one Steve Howards approached Cheney in a Denver mall and told him that his policies were reprehensible. Ten minutes later, the Secret Service handcuffed him and charged him with harassment. In 2006, anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan had a ticket to view the state of the union address from the fifth gallery of the House, but she was cuffed and arrested in an elevator because she wore an anti-war shirt. A policeman said she was being held “ because you were protesting." Later a Republican Congressman’s wife was removed from a gallery because she wore a pro-war shirt. She was not arrested. In late 2005, Veterans Administration officials investigated nurse Laura Berg because she wrote a letter to the editor critical of the Bush administration. First, they seized her computer, hoping they could prove she wrote the letter while at work. When that failed, they informed her they were continuing an investigation of sedition.
That the Bush campaigns used police and secret service to keep protesters away from the traveling chief executive is also troubling because it impinged upon free expression. Outrage over the outcome of the disputed 2000 election in Florida led placard-carrying protesters to show up at Bush appearances in his first year as president. Claiming these citizens threatened the president’s security; they were kept out of sight. The real reason may have been a desire to keep them out of the range of television cameras. When Bush flew into Green Bay, Wisconsin, to address friendly unionists in Kaukauna on Labor Day, protesters were kept off the tarmac and away from the parade route. When President Bush visited Greensboro, NC, on July 25, placard carrying peace demonstrators were kept more than a mile away from him. They had tried unsuccessfully to get permission to stand along his parade route with their signs.
In time, the Secret Service developing a policy of creating Free Speech or Demonstration Zone’s far away from parade routes and places where Bush would speak. By late 2003, the Free Speech Zone’s were sometimes half a mile away from where Bush would appear. When George W. Bush appeared at a carpenters’ rally on Labor Day, 2002 in western Pennsylvania, Bill Neel, 65, of Butler, Pa. showed up with a sign that read “The Bushes must truly love the poor--they’ve made so many of us.” Neel refused to stay in the protest pen and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Neel argued, “the whole country is a free speech zone.” By 2007, the name had been changed to First Amendment Zones, which seems like some sort of sick joke or at least an oxymoron.
In Oregon, Peter Buckley, 45, complained in the Oregonian that he and other protesters were rounded up and placed in a dirt compound that was surrounded by a six-foot high cyclone fence. Buckley ran for Congress in 2002. People in Tampa, Florida, including two grandmothers, were arrested in 2001 at a Bush rally because they held up signs outside a remote protest zone. Bush spokesmen claimed these people must be kept far away for security reasons, but people carrying pro-Bush signs were permitted along parade routes and very close to him at rallies. In the past, courts have invalidated protest pens, but the practice has become routine for the president. The point is to make protesters invisible to television cameras and journalists.
Eventually, investigators used the Freedom of Information Act to turn up a government manual on how to deal with protesters and demonstrators called “Presidential Advice Manual.” Published in October 2002, it outlined the procedures described above and emphasized that protesters and demonstrators should be kept out of the view of television cameras. They were also to be kept “preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.” There should be “rally squads” comprised of young people and “local athletic teams” to shout down protesters should they somehow get inside an event. When Vice President Cheney appeared at a fundraiser at an Estero, Florida resort in late 2003, security people forced protesters to move some distance from the resort entrance so they would not disturb Cheney. Efforts to curb protesters can also be seen as an effort to curb public discourse.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
In the same year one Steve Howards approached Cheney in a Denver mall and told him that his policies were reprehensible. Ten minutes later, the Secret Service handcuffed him and charged him with harassment. In 2006, anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan had a ticket to view the state of the union address from the fifth gallery of the House, but she was cuffed and arrested in an elevator because she wore an anti-war shirt. A policeman said she was being held “ because you were protesting." Later a Republican Congressman’s wife was removed from a gallery because she wore a pro-war shirt. She was not arrested. In late 2005, Veterans Administration officials investigated nurse Laura Berg because she wrote a letter to the editor critical of the Bush administration. First, they seized her computer, hoping they could prove she wrote the letter while at work. When that failed, they informed her they were continuing an investigation of sedition.
That the Bush campaigns used police and secret service to keep protesters away from the traveling chief executive is also troubling because it impinged upon free expression. Outrage over the outcome of the disputed 2000 election in Florida led placard-carrying protesters to show up at Bush appearances in his first year as president. Claiming these citizens threatened the president’s security; they were kept out of sight. The real reason may have been a desire to keep them out of the range of television cameras. When Bush flew into Green Bay, Wisconsin, to address friendly unionists in Kaukauna on Labor Day, protesters were kept off the tarmac and away from the parade route. When President Bush visited Greensboro, NC, on July 25, placard carrying peace demonstrators were kept more than a mile away from him. They had tried unsuccessfully to get permission to stand along his parade route with their signs.
In time, the Secret Service developing a policy of creating Free Speech or Demonstration Zone’s far away from parade routes and places where Bush would speak. By late 2003, the Free Speech Zone’s were sometimes half a mile away from where Bush would appear. When George W. Bush appeared at a carpenters’ rally on Labor Day, 2002 in western Pennsylvania, Bill Neel, 65, of Butler, Pa. showed up with a sign that read “The Bushes must truly love the poor--they’ve made so many of us.” Neel refused to stay in the protest pen and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Neel argued, “the whole country is a free speech zone.” By 2007, the name had been changed to First Amendment Zones, which seems like some sort of sick joke or at least an oxymoron.
In Oregon, Peter Buckley, 45, complained in the Oregonian that he and other protesters were rounded up and placed in a dirt compound that was surrounded by a six-foot high cyclone fence. Buckley ran for Congress in 2002. People in Tampa, Florida, including two grandmothers, were arrested in 2001 at a Bush rally because they held up signs outside a remote protest zone. Bush spokesmen claimed these people must be kept far away for security reasons, but people carrying pro-Bush signs were permitted along parade routes and very close to him at rallies. In the past, courts have invalidated protest pens, but the practice has become routine for the president. The point is to make protesters invisible to television cameras and journalists.
Eventually, investigators used the Freedom of Information Act to turn up a government manual on how to deal with protesters and demonstrators called “Presidential Advice Manual.” Published in October 2002, it outlined the procedures described above and emphasized that protesters and demonstrators should be kept out of the view of television cameras. They were also to be kept “preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.” There should be “rally squads” comprised of young people and “local athletic teams” to shout down protesters should they somehow get inside an event. When Vice President Cheney appeared at a fundraiser at an Estero, Florida resort in late 2003, security people forced protesters to move some distance from the resort entrance so they would not disturb Cheney. Efforts to curb protesters can also be seen as an effort to curb public discourse.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican Conservatism Falls Back on Authoritarian Roots
Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 about conservatives becoming nearly extinct. In 2006, the ran the country but still complain “that liberals run things even when they manifestly don’t....” They still complain that liberals are “snooty, snobby know-it-alls” who allegedly disparage the people in middle America as “those hicks in flyover country.” Of course, it was the creation of populist resentment now that made possible the Republican triumph.
In the late 19th Century, a similar situation sparked a great populist protest. One hundred years later, a potential populist uprising of that kind was unthinkable. The New Right had channeled populist energies into battling those who would limit gun ownership, advance reproductive rights, or defend people’s choice of lifestyle. The process of harnessing the energies of right-wing populists transformed most conservatives into the very antithesis of the conservatives of the 1950s. The new conservatives ballooned government’s size, the power of the executive, and the national debt, seemed contemptuous of reasonable debate, and erected new and very dangerous threats to civil liberties
John Wesley Dean of Watergate fame, believes that 1994 marked the beginning of what he calls the “postmodern period” of American conservatism, a time in which “it has regressed to its earliest authoritarian roots.” Traditional conservative Paul Craig Roberts became the object of their wrath when he opposed the invasion of Iraq. He likened his new enemies to the Nazi Brownshirts and claimed that obsession with power and force prevented the original Brownshirts from recognizing the implications for their country of their reckless doctrines. “Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder’”
Old style conservatives like Roberts are uncomfortable with the hyperventilated rhetoric of the new conservatives and are increasingly unwelcome in their company. Daniel Borchers, another old style conservative, edits a newsletter and web page that is critical of the tactics and rhetoric of Ann Coulter. When he attended a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference his newsletters were confiscated and organizers tried to strip him of his press credentials. Asked why he bucks the tide, he said “Honor requires outing. Silence is complicity.” By 2006, there was little indication that these traditional conservatives comprised more than a tiny fraction of the electorate.
From the outset, the administration of George W. Bush has sought to maximize its power by testing the customary and legal limits of executive power. Moreover it has incorporated into its modus operandi the same ugly, bare-knuckle tactics that marked its campaigns. Aside from arrogance, a number of factors might contribute to this inclination to employ ugly tactics and stretch legal limits. Richard Nixon believed in executive supremacy, and after his administration steps were taken to curb these tendencies. Vice President Richard Cheney was dedicated to the Nixonian vision and was bent on moving backward toward it .A preoccupation with national security matters might have led some to assume that the will of the commander essentially had the force of law.. In foreign affairs, Republican Neo Conservative thinking was marked by a “romance of the ruthless” that entertained the notion that a few bright, dedicated people could bring about great change, especially if they are unhampered by traditional or even legal restraints. Their willing allies were old-school nationalists--sometimes called foreign policy fundamentalists-- who long had chafed at the restraints placed on the use of military force. In domestic matters, some of the Neo Conservatives brought with them the old Leninist contempt for compromise and conviction that the end justifies the means and that it is perfectly justifiable to accuse your enemies of anything. David Horowitz, probably the brightest and most effective of them, has demonstrated this tendency. Some Christian Evangelicals--particularly the Restorationists-- share a similar approach.
A rather small example of a disregard for democratic protocols was President Bush’s inclination in his second term to denounce Democrats before military audiences. It is true that the military has become more and more Republican over time, but this breach of tradition as well as military protocol is, according to a retired Marine general “the sort of thing you find in other countries where the military and certain political parties are aligned.” It suggests the military is a red states militia. In 2000, the Bush campaign stepped over the line separating the military and politics by advertising in Army Times and other service publications.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
In the late 19th Century, a similar situation sparked a great populist protest. One hundred years later, a potential populist uprising of that kind was unthinkable. The New Right had channeled populist energies into battling those who would limit gun ownership, advance reproductive rights, or defend people’s choice of lifestyle. The process of harnessing the energies of right-wing populists transformed most conservatives into the very antithesis of the conservatives of the 1950s. The new conservatives ballooned government’s size, the power of the executive, and the national debt, seemed contemptuous of reasonable debate, and erected new and very dangerous threats to civil liberties
John Wesley Dean of Watergate fame, believes that 1994 marked the beginning of what he calls the “postmodern period” of American conservatism, a time in which “it has regressed to its earliest authoritarian roots.” Traditional conservative Paul Craig Roberts became the object of their wrath when he opposed the invasion of Iraq. He likened his new enemies to the Nazi Brownshirts and claimed that obsession with power and force prevented the original Brownshirts from recognizing the implications for their country of their reckless doctrines. “Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder’”
Old style conservatives like Roberts are uncomfortable with the hyperventilated rhetoric of the new conservatives and are increasingly unwelcome in their company. Daniel Borchers, another old style conservative, edits a newsletter and web page that is critical of the tactics and rhetoric of Ann Coulter. When he attended a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference his newsletters were confiscated and organizers tried to strip him of his press credentials. Asked why he bucks the tide, he said “Honor requires outing. Silence is complicity.” By 2006, there was little indication that these traditional conservatives comprised more than a tiny fraction of the electorate.
From the outset, the administration of George W. Bush has sought to maximize its power by testing the customary and legal limits of executive power. Moreover it has incorporated into its modus operandi the same ugly, bare-knuckle tactics that marked its campaigns. Aside from arrogance, a number of factors might contribute to this inclination to employ ugly tactics and stretch legal limits. Richard Nixon believed in executive supremacy, and after his administration steps were taken to curb these tendencies. Vice President Richard Cheney was dedicated to the Nixonian vision and was bent on moving backward toward it .A preoccupation with national security matters might have led some to assume that the will of the commander essentially had the force of law.. In foreign affairs, Republican Neo Conservative thinking was marked by a “romance of the ruthless” that entertained the notion that a few bright, dedicated people could bring about great change, especially if they are unhampered by traditional or even legal restraints. Their willing allies were old-school nationalists--sometimes called foreign policy fundamentalists-- who long had chafed at the restraints placed on the use of military force. In domestic matters, some of the Neo Conservatives brought with them the old Leninist contempt for compromise and conviction that the end justifies the means and that it is perfectly justifiable to accuse your enemies of anything. David Horowitz, probably the brightest and most effective of them, has demonstrated this tendency. Some Christian Evangelicals--particularly the Restorationists-- share a similar approach.
A rather small example of a disregard for democratic protocols was President Bush’s inclination in his second term to denounce Democrats before military audiences. It is true that the military has become more and more Republican over time, but this breach of tradition as well as military protocol is, according to a retired Marine general “the sort of thing you find in other countries where the military and certain political parties are aligned.” It suggests the military is a red states militia. In 2000, the Bush campaign stepped over the line separating the military and politics by advertising in Army Times and other service publications.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican Scandals in G.W. Bush's SEcond T4erm
When George W. Bush’s second term began, pundit Kevin Drum said it would be marked by scandal. He thought they would be particularly susceptible to scandal because “Both Bush and the current Republican Party leadership have already demonstrated a ruthlessness and disregard for rational political norms. A “ second reason for foreseeing scandal was that the Republican Congress had largely given up its role of oversight of the executive branch.” When Clinton was in the White House, committees in both chambers limited oversight largely to scandal hunting. When George W. Bush entered the White House, oversight ended and Congress became supine, while its leadership assumed the roles of his loyal lieutenants. Republican leaders gave no sign they understood the institutional prerogatives of Congress or that they could be characterized by institutional patriotism.
Beginning in 2005, the Republican Party was rocked by a number of scandals. Its key lobbyist Jack Abramoff and two of his partners were indicted, as was Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of staff. Libby was indicted for lying in connection with the outing of CIA covert agent, Valerie Plame. Her identity was first revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak who said he got the information from two administration officials CNN talk show host Chris Matthews subsequently called Ambassador Wilson to warn him that Karl Rove had called him to say “Wilson’s wife is fair game.” It appears that she was outed to embarrass her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson and UN weapons inspector David Albright had appeared on CNN together and criticized the claim that Iraq had negotiated with Niger to acquire nuclear materials. Vice President Cheney directed the CIA to dig up information to discredit Albright. He also held a meeting with NSA and CIA people in which he ordered a “work-up” on Wilson, whom he called “an ‘asshole’ [and] a son of a bitch.” They started spreading the word that Wilson was a “womanizer” and looked for more stories to circulate. In February 2005, Federal Judge Tatel ruled that the federal law protecting covert agents had been violated. Yet, the prosecutor apparently hit a stonewall in trying to learn who originally gave up her identity and was forced to only look at obstruction of justice matters. This apparently took both Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove out of the line of fire. The White House has refused to give the prosecutor e-mails that mentioned Plame and has maintained that malfunctions in the White House e-mail system erased many relevant communications. Reporters later found that all White House e-mails were backed up and stored elsewhere, but nothing was done to retrieve them. The story about the millions of missing e-mails changes several more times, as they became more important. For example, a Congressional committee wanted them to see if it was true that Karl Rove was behind the prosecution of Democratic governor, Don Siegelman of Alabama. The last story was that millions of e-mails were destroyed for 2—3-2005 when hard drives were destroyed because the White House was in the process of replacing a third of its computers.
Libby told prosecutors that he had been given the power to declassify information, and Vice President Cheney subsequently said there was an executive order that gave the president and vice president the power to declassify information. It later developed that this process was used to leak the intelligence estimate on Iraq’s military capacities to The New York Times. The most likely justification for doing so was to use such information to sell the war in Iraq. A court put the whole matter on the back burner, deferring a trial until two months after the 2006 elections. Republicans have been busily raising defense funds for Libby as though being involved in the treasonable outing of a covert agent was an act of high patriotism. In the end, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, and the true facts of the case never came out.
The second Bush term was marked by scandal. Most of it involved Republicans, but a black Democrat, Representative William Jefferson, was found with $100,000, with which he was supposed to bribe an African government. Of course, the matter was portrayed as though he was to get the full $100,000. The amount of money going to Republicans made the $100,000 look like chickenfeed. To be fair, it should be noted that the end of five Democratic dominance in the House were also marked by scandal. Speaker Jim Wright had to step down because he pressured some people to buy and distribute a book he had written. About $40,000 in sales was involved. Newt Gingrich, who played the central role in forcing Wright’s resignation, later quietly paid $300,000 to settle an ethics complaint. Representative Dan Rostenkowski was sent to prison for misappropriating government property. He gave away some furniture and ash trays, but he claimed he bought them for his offices with his campaign funds. Of course, once he placed them in a government office, they were government property. In 2006, there was concern that the scandal in Congress would metastasize “from a cancer on Congress to a cancer on the Republican Party in general and this presidency in particular.” Whether this would occur depended upon the level of public interest, and in this matter there was no Monica Lewinsky. It was said, “The Abramoff scandal, so far anyway, boasts plenty of cigars but no sex.” However, this proved to be partially wrong as Abramoff money was found to fund at least one sex for Congressional votes ring, but there was not a great deal of public interest directed at “Hookergate.”
Tom De Lay and two associates thought they had found a way around the Texas law forbidding corporate contributions to Texas political races. Instead a local grand jury indicted DeLay. He, at first, temporarily stepped down from his majority leader’s position, and it soon became clear the party would not let him reclaim it. He resigned the post and was replaced by John A. Boehner of Ohio, who unconvincingly presented himself as a reformer. However, he had voted against almost all ethics reform measures, and he soon displayed a “shockingly blasé,” wanting to consign the whole matter of reform to “the ultimate dead letter office, the House ethics committee.” Randy Cunningham of California was sent to prison for taking much in excess of $2 million in bribes. Mitch Wade of MZM, Inc, who gave Cunningham most of the money was also indicted. May James, wife of MZM’s second in command, worked in the Pentagon office that supervised the firm’s contract. MZM had been given a contract to handle and analyze some intelligence and was involved in cooking information to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wade, admitted to making illegal contributions to Virginia Republican Virgil Goode, Jr., and Katherine Harris of Florida. The Justice Department claimed neither representative realized the contributions were illegal. Republican Representative Bob Ney of Ohio accepted a 27-month plea deal for accepting a bribe. Ney was a former CIA operative who occasionally did back channel missions in the Middle East and had tripped onto a WMD network that allegedly involved Richard Cheney.
Cunningham did not use “earmarks,” special appropriations of a local nature, to achieve his objectives. His method was to increase a defense or intelligence appropriation and then make sure it was spent with designated firms, who then did favors for Cunningham or his friends. Congress reacted to the Cunningham scandal by trying to limit earmarks by making them more transparent and by clearly identifying what Senator or Representative was behind each earmark.
The Cunningham probe later showed that fifteen Republican congressmen were involved in “Hookergate,” receiving sexual favors at the Westin Grand and Watergate Hotels from male and female prostitutes proved by another San Diegan, Brent Wilkes, who had ties to the CIA and the Iran-Contra scandal. The man whose limousine service was used for these gatherings had a 62 page rap sheet, but the firm was a Department of Homeland Security contractor. Most of the fifteen Republican Congressmen were on the subcommittee that handled defense contract appropriations. . Wilkes was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case. Wilkes and Wade were both San Diego businessmen who had government contracts and routed some of the money back to the GOP through a firm run by two of Tom DeLay’s former aids and is suspected of being tied to Jack Abramoff. Wilkes’s ties to Congressmen went back to the 1980 when he was visiting CIA agent and close friend, Kyle “ Dusty” Foggo. Congressmen traveled there to view the progress of the secret war against progressives, and Wilkes said he got to know them during sexual encounters with women in Honduran villages. There was some talk that Mitch Wade tried to bribe Representative Katherine Harris, but one Capitol Hill figure said, “I think Mitch made a mistake trying to bribe Harris. She’s so incompetent, she can’t be bribed.”
“Hookergate” received little coverage in the mainstream press but it was covered far more than a similar one in the mid-eighties. Ed Rollins revealed that there had been a small sex for votes operation run by one lobbyist using one prostitute. Two dozen Republicans were involved, about half of whom were prominent. The scandal received no coverage, except as it involved Rep. Tom Evans of Delaware, who confessed to his wife and lost his seat.
Porter Goss, director of the CIA, resigned his position in May 2006 for unknown reasons, perhaps due to reports that he and “Dusty” Foggo had been seen at these parties where prostitutes were present. Foggo resigned soon thereafter, but this could have been due to his connection to a questionable CIA contract awarded to Wilkes. Foggo claimed that he was connected with the contract with Archer Logistics but had no idea his best friend owned it. A third figure who attended the parties was Brant “Nine Fingers” Bassett, who had been a CIA agent until 2000, when he joined Goss’s Congressional staff. In the brief time before leaving the CIA and joining Goss, he collected an “honorarium” from Wilkes for undisclosed services. It was difficult to determine if there were two sets of sex parties, hosted separately by Wilkes with contractor Mitchell Wade and Abramoff or whether they were the same operation. On “The Charlie Rose Show,” Republican strategist Ed Rollins confirmed that about fifteen sitting Republican congressmen were involved, a number of whom were on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. The CIA even went to the trouble of bring a dominatrix from Germany to take care of the needs of Republican Congressmen.
Titan Corporation, another San Diego defense contractor, was also a major contributor to Cunningham and Republicans. Its employees were accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and it was fined $28,000,000 for fixing an election in Benin. It also hired Makram Chams as a contractor in Saudi Arabia. This man was known to have befriended Mohamed Atta when he was in Venice, Florida. Titan has an economic relationship with Skyway Aircraft of Saint Petersburg, a firm whose plane was seized by the Mexican government. It had 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard. The firm’s chairman is Brent Kovar, who is linked to Tom DeLay. The DC9's co owner was Royal Sons Motor Yacht Sales, an outfit muckraker Daniel Hopsicker thinks is part of a interlocking group of CIA “dummy front” companies. Although the Mexican army surrounded the plane, its pilot escaped. The Sky Way plane operates out of the same Venice airport where Mohamed Atta trained and could have been involved in the drug trade. The DEA began to investigate this possibility, but Attorney General Ashcroft shut down this probe.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was under investigation for improper handling of a blind trust, and it was revealed that he used $456,000 from an AIDS charity to keep political operatives on the payroll in anticipation of a presidential bid in 2008 The Abramoff investigation involved an inquiry into the bribery of Congressman and staff members and was headed by Alice Fisher, who became head of the Criminal Investigations division through an interim appointment. She had been with the Office of Homeland Security and deputy counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee.
Strange things happened in respect to the Abramoff investigation since 2002. In November of that year, Frederick Black, acting federal attorney on Guam, was removed a day after he subpoenaed a contract between Abramoff and the government of Guam. One of Black’s colleagues said, “Fred was removed because he asked to indict Abramoff.” Prosecutor Noll L. Hillman, who had been working on the case for two years, was suddenly nominated for a federal judgeship, leaving open a key job that could be filled with a loyalist. Representative George Miller said the timing was “startling” and added, “You have one of the chief prosecutors removed from a case that has tentacles throughout the Republican leadership of Congress, throughout the various agencies and into the White House. Andrew Lourie, a man with an interesting history, replaced Hilman. He headed the Justice Department’s Division of Public Integrity in 2001 and 2002 after Republican Congressmen persuaded Attorney General Ashcroft to demote the career lawyer, Lee Radek, who headed it. The White House promised to make public all of Abramoff’s contacts with its staff, but press secretary Scott McClellan later announced that this information would not be given to anyone. This exercise in stonewalling was largely ignored by the press, but Paul Krugman did take fellow journalists to task for ignoring the matter.
A poll showed that 68% of the public thought Congress should force White House officials to testify about the firing of the attorneys, and even more thought Congress should investigate. Oddly, a CNBC correspondent complained about the invstigation saying the Democrats looked “Too political in exploiting this.” Time’s managing editor share4d this view , saying the Democrats should back off “because it is so bad for them.” He added that “That’s not what voters want to see.”
Most of the press tried to give the affair a “balanced” approach by claiming that the Abramoff affair was bipartisan. It was reported across the board that he gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. When a few people noted that he did not give one personal contribution to a Democrat, the response was that he “directed” his Indian tribe clients to send contributions to the Democrats. If fact, the tribes had donated to Democrats before, and their giving to this party declined by 9% after they retained Abramoff. The White House refused to release pictures of Bush and Abramoff together and also refused to provide information on the people Abramoff contacted there. The Associated Press reported that he and his employees had almost 200 contacts with White House people in the first ten months of the Bush administration. Few in the press looked at the full implications of the Cunningham scandal, ignoring the votes for sex part.
Instead the press showered great attention on two Democratic members of Congress and the minute details provided by the now highly politicized Capitol police. Cynthia Mc Kinney had foolishly hit a policeman with a cell phone when he acted in a way she considered disrespectful, and foolishly let the story dominate the front page for days before offering an abject apology. Congressman Patrick Kennedy had a car accident at 2:30 AM, in which he was either under the influence of medications or drugs, but he handled the manner in a way guaranteeing that it would be drug out endlessly. An August 2002 an August 2002 Salon article showed that the Capitol Hill police have a history of not recognizing Mc Kinney
.Charges of driving under the influence of prescription drugs were brought by the Capitol Police with lightning speed, and Kennedy entered a guilty plea. Another case that discredited Democrats was that of Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson, who was caught in a sting accepting $100,000, $90,000 of which he stashed in his refrigerator. That was allegedly to be used to brine Nigerian officials. The FBI subsequently raided his Capitol Hill office, which touched off a dispute about the separation of powers. The fact that both McKinney and Jefferson were African Americans made their offenses look so much worse to more than a few voters. A misleading story about Senator Harry Reid also helped the GOP deflect criticism. The Associated Press made much over the fact that Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Ried had accepted two fight tickets from the Nevada Gaming Commission. Its story was misleading and suggested Reid voted on a matter relating to the commission when he had not. AP stuck by its report as written and boasted in an internal memo that the story had set off a great deal of criticism of Reid.
The DC federal district judge who authorized the raid was Thomas Hogan. On January 1, 2004, he permitted nuclear triggers smuggler Asher Karni a $100,000 bail with the condition that he resides in a Hebrew Shelter Home operated by a friend and defender of Jack Abramoff. Karni, had worked for both Israeli and Turkish intelligence. He smuggled 60 USA nuclear triggers through South Africa to Pakistan. His operation had been a target of the CIA nonproliferation unit run by Valerie Plame. Karni received a very light sentence--three years.
By spring, 2006, the Republican scandals were enough under control that Representative Jerry Lewis, chairman of the appropriations committee, hired Jeffrey Shockey as the committee’s deputy staff director. Both men had been discussed in relationship to the various Abramoff scandals. Shockey said the Ethics Committee sanctioned the hire, but there is no paper record of this and Democrats have not been given the green light for similar hires. Shockey had somehow managed to collect $2 million from a lobbying firm in 2004 while working for Uncle Sam. Lewis was being investigated for his ties to Brent Wilkes, who contributed $60,000 to his last campaign. Lewis’s ties to the Copeland Lowery lobbying firm are also being scrutinized. That firm had failed to report $2,000,000 in income from 1998 to 2005 and found it necessary to submit a revised earnings statement. Most of these investigations were being carried out before grand juries in very conservative southern California.
Some speculated that there could be a reaction among the voters as great as that which deprived the Democrats of 50 House seats in 1994. However, political scientist Norman J. Ornstein calculated that there are so many safe Republican seats 2006 that at most their loss of House seats would be 20. That would turn out to be ten short of the actual number of lost seats, probably because experts on both sides had underestimated how many true independents there were in 2006. That would barely return control to the Democrats, but enough Democrats habitually vote with the Republicans in both houses that they could still advance their agenda In February 2006, the House and Senate Republican leadership moved to dampen the scandal by proposing modest reform legislation. It would prevent lobbyists under some conditions from making gifts to Congressmen or paying for trips. However, these practices were legal if they occurred as part of campaign functions. The Democrats offered a plan that was slightly tougher. It would prevent Congressmen from directing that lobbying firms hire people based on party membership.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Beginning in 2005, the Republican Party was rocked by a number of scandals. Its key lobbyist Jack Abramoff and two of his partners were indicted, as was Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of staff. Libby was indicted for lying in connection with the outing of CIA covert agent, Valerie Plame. Her identity was first revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak who said he got the information from two administration officials CNN talk show host Chris Matthews subsequently called Ambassador Wilson to warn him that Karl Rove had called him to say “Wilson’s wife is fair game.” It appears that she was outed to embarrass her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson and UN weapons inspector David Albright had appeared on CNN together and criticized the claim that Iraq had negotiated with Niger to acquire nuclear materials. Vice President Cheney directed the CIA to dig up information to discredit Albright. He also held a meeting with NSA and CIA people in which he ordered a “work-up” on Wilson, whom he called “an ‘asshole’ [and] a son of a bitch.” They started spreading the word that Wilson was a “womanizer” and looked for more stories to circulate. In February 2005, Federal Judge Tatel ruled that the federal law protecting covert agents had been violated. Yet, the prosecutor apparently hit a stonewall in trying to learn who originally gave up her identity and was forced to only look at obstruction of justice matters. This apparently took both Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove out of the line of fire. The White House has refused to give the prosecutor e-mails that mentioned Plame and has maintained that malfunctions in the White House e-mail system erased many relevant communications. Reporters later found that all White House e-mails were backed up and stored elsewhere, but nothing was done to retrieve them. The story about the millions of missing e-mails changes several more times, as they became more important. For example, a Congressional committee wanted them to see if it was true that Karl Rove was behind the prosecution of Democratic governor, Don Siegelman of Alabama. The last story was that millions of e-mails were destroyed for 2—3-2005 when hard drives were destroyed because the White House was in the process of replacing a third of its computers.
Libby told prosecutors that he had been given the power to declassify information, and Vice President Cheney subsequently said there was an executive order that gave the president and vice president the power to declassify information. It later developed that this process was used to leak the intelligence estimate on Iraq’s military capacities to The New York Times. The most likely justification for doing so was to use such information to sell the war in Iraq. A court put the whole matter on the back burner, deferring a trial until two months after the 2006 elections. Republicans have been busily raising defense funds for Libby as though being involved in the treasonable outing of a covert agent was an act of high patriotism. In the end, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, and the true facts of the case never came out.
The second Bush term was marked by scandal. Most of it involved Republicans, but a black Democrat, Representative William Jefferson, was found with $100,000, with which he was supposed to bribe an African government. Of course, the matter was portrayed as though he was to get the full $100,000. The amount of money going to Republicans made the $100,000 look like chickenfeed. To be fair, it should be noted that the end of five Democratic dominance in the House were also marked by scandal. Speaker Jim Wright had to step down because he pressured some people to buy and distribute a book he had written. About $40,000 in sales was involved. Newt Gingrich, who played the central role in forcing Wright’s resignation, later quietly paid $300,000 to settle an ethics complaint. Representative Dan Rostenkowski was sent to prison for misappropriating government property. He gave away some furniture and ash trays, but he claimed he bought them for his offices with his campaign funds. Of course, once he placed them in a government office, they were government property. In 2006, there was concern that the scandal in Congress would metastasize “from a cancer on Congress to a cancer on the Republican Party in general and this presidency in particular.” Whether this would occur depended upon the level of public interest, and in this matter there was no Monica Lewinsky. It was said, “The Abramoff scandal, so far anyway, boasts plenty of cigars but no sex.” However, this proved to be partially wrong as Abramoff money was found to fund at least one sex for Congressional votes ring, but there was not a great deal of public interest directed at “Hookergate.”
Tom De Lay and two associates thought they had found a way around the Texas law forbidding corporate contributions to Texas political races. Instead a local grand jury indicted DeLay. He, at first, temporarily stepped down from his majority leader’s position, and it soon became clear the party would not let him reclaim it. He resigned the post and was replaced by John A. Boehner of Ohio, who unconvincingly presented himself as a reformer. However, he had voted against almost all ethics reform measures, and he soon displayed a “shockingly blasé,” wanting to consign the whole matter of reform to “the ultimate dead letter office, the House ethics committee.” Randy Cunningham of California was sent to prison for taking much in excess of $2 million in bribes. Mitch Wade of MZM, Inc, who gave Cunningham most of the money was also indicted. May James, wife of MZM’s second in command, worked in the Pentagon office that supervised the firm’s contract. MZM had been given a contract to handle and analyze some intelligence and was involved in cooking information to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wade, admitted to making illegal contributions to Virginia Republican Virgil Goode, Jr., and Katherine Harris of Florida. The Justice Department claimed neither representative realized the contributions were illegal. Republican Representative Bob Ney of Ohio accepted a 27-month plea deal for accepting a bribe. Ney was a former CIA operative who occasionally did back channel missions in the Middle East and had tripped onto a WMD network that allegedly involved Richard Cheney.
Cunningham did not use “earmarks,” special appropriations of a local nature, to achieve his objectives. His method was to increase a defense or intelligence appropriation and then make sure it was spent with designated firms, who then did favors for Cunningham or his friends. Congress reacted to the Cunningham scandal by trying to limit earmarks by making them more transparent and by clearly identifying what Senator or Representative was behind each earmark.
The Cunningham probe later showed that fifteen Republican congressmen were involved in “Hookergate,” receiving sexual favors at the Westin Grand and Watergate Hotels from male and female prostitutes proved by another San Diegan, Brent Wilkes, who had ties to the CIA and the Iran-Contra scandal. The man whose limousine service was used for these gatherings had a 62 page rap sheet, but the firm was a Department of Homeland Security contractor. Most of the fifteen Republican Congressmen were on the subcommittee that handled defense contract appropriations. . Wilkes was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case. Wilkes and Wade were both San Diego businessmen who had government contracts and routed some of the money back to the GOP through a firm run by two of Tom DeLay’s former aids and is suspected of being tied to Jack Abramoff. Wilkes’s ties to Congressmen went back to the 1980 when he was visiting CIA agent and close friend, Kyle “ Dusty” Foggo. Congressmen traveled there to view the progress of the secret war against progressives, and Wilkes said he got to know them during sexual encounters with women in Honduran villages. There was some talk that Mitch Wade tried to bribe Representative Katherine Harris, but one Capitol Hill figure said, “I think Mitch made a mistake trying to bribe Harris. She’s so incompetent, she can’t be bribed.”
“Hookergate” received little coverage in the mainstream press but it was covered far more than a similar one in the mid-eighties. Ed Rollins revealed that there had been a small sex for votes operation run by one lobbyist using one prostitute. Two dozen Republicans were involved, about half of whom were prominent. The scandal received no coverage, except as it involved Rep. Tom Evans of Delaware, who confessed to his wife and lost his seat.
Porter Goss, director of the CIA, resigned his position in May 2006 for unknown reasons, perhaps due to reports that he and “Dusty” Foggo had been seen at these parties where prostitutes were present. Foggo resigned soon thereafter, but this could have been due to his connection to a questionable CIA contract awarded to Wilkes. Foggo claimed that he was connected with the contract with Archer Logistics but had no idea his best friend owned it. A third figure who attended the parties was Brant “Nine Fingers” Bassett, who had been a CIA agent until 2000, when he joined Goss’s Congressional staff. In the brief time before leaving the CIA and joining Goss, he collected an “honorarium” from Wilkes for undisclosed services. It was difficult to determine if there were two sets of sex parties, hosted separately by Wilkes with contractor Mitchell Wade and Abramoff or whether they were the same operation. On “The Charlie Rose Show,” Republican strategist Ed Rollins confirmed that about fifteen sitting Republican congressmen were involved, a number of whom were on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. The CIA even went to the trouble of bring a dominatrix from Germany to take care of the needs of Republican Congressmen.
Titan Corporation, another San Diego defense contractor, was also a major contributor to Cunningham and Republicans. Its employees were accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and it was fined $28,000,000 for fixing an election in Benin. It also hired Makram Chams as a contractor in Saudi Arabia. This man was known to have befriended Mohamed Atta when he was in Venice, Florida. Titan has an economic relationship with Skyway Aircraft of Saint Petersburg, a firm whose plane was seized by the Mexican government. It had 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard. The firm’s chairman is Brent Kovar, who is linked to Tom DeLay. The DC9's co owner was Royal Sons Motor Yacht Sales, an outfit muckraker Daniel Hopsicker thinks is part of a interlocking group of CIA “dummy front” companies. Although the Mexican army surrounded the plane, its pilot escaped. The Sky Way plane operates out of the same Venice airport where Mohamed Atta trained and could have been involved in the drug trade. The DEA began to investigate this possibility, but Attorney General Ashcroft shut down this probe.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was under investigation for improper handling of a blind trust, and it was revealed that he used $456,000 from an AIDS charity to keep political operatives on the payroll in anticipation of a presidential bid in 2008 The Abramoff investigation involved an inquiry into the bribery of Congressman and staff members and was headed by Alice Fisher, who became head of the Criminal Investigations division through an interim appointment. She had been with the Office of Homeland Security and deputy counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee.
Strange things happened in respect to the Abramoff investigation since 2002. In November of that year, Frederick Black, acting federal attorney on Guam, was removed a day after he subpoenaed a contract between Abramoff and the government of Guam. One of Black’s colleagues said, “Fred was removed because he asked to indict Abramoff.” Prosecutor Noll L. Hillman, who had been working on the case for two years, was suddenly nominated for a federal judgeship, leaving open a key job that could be filled with a loyalist. Representative George Miller said the timing was “startling” and added, “You have one of the chief prosecutors removed from a case that has tentacles throughout the Republican leadership of Congress, throughout the various agencies and into the White House. Andrew Lourie, a man with an interesting history, replaced Hilman. He headed the Justice Department’s Division of Public Integrity in 2001 and 2002 after Republican Congressmen persuaded Attorney General Ashcroft to demote the career lawyer, Lee Radek, who headed it. The White House promised to make public all of Abramoff’s contacts with its staff, but press secretary Scott McClellan later announced that this information would not be given to anyone. This exercise in stonewalling was largely ignored by the press, but Paul Krugman did take fellow journalists to task for ignoring the matter.
A poll showed that 68% of the public thought Congress should force White House officials to testify about the firing of the attorneys, and even more thought Congress should investigate. Oddly, a CNBC correspondent complained about the invstigation saying the Democrats looked “Too political in exploiting this.” Time’s managing editor share4d this view , saying the Democrats should back off “because it is so bad for them.” He added that “That’s not what voters want to see.”
Most of the press tried to give the affair a “balanced” approach by claiming that the Abramoff affair was bipartisan. It was reported across the board that he gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. When a few people noted that he did not give one personal contribution to a Democrat, the response was that he “directed” his Indian tribe clients to send contributions to the Democrats. If fact, the tribes had donated to Democrats before, and their giving to this party declined by 9% after they retained Abramoff. The White House refused to release pictures of Bush and Abramoff together and also refused to provide information on the people Abramoff contacted there. The Associated Press reported that he and his employees had almost 200 contacts with White House people in the first ten months of the Bush administration. Few in the press looked at the full implications of the Cunningham scandal, ignoring the votes for sex part.
Instead the press showered great attention on two Democratic members of Congress and the minute details provided by the now highly politicized Capitol police. Cynthia Mc Kinney had foolishly hit a policeman with a cell phone when he acted in a way she considered disrespectful, and foolishly let the story dominate the front page for days before offering an abject apology. Congressman Patrick Kennedy had a car accident at 2:30 AM, in which he was either under the influence of medications or drugs, but he handled the manner in a way guaranteeing that it would be drug out endlessly. An August 2002 an August 2002 Salon article showed that the Capitol Hill police have a history of not recognizing Mc Kinney
.Charges of driving under the influence of prescription drugs were brought by the Capitol Police with lightning speed, and Kennedy entered a guilty plea. Another case that discredited Democrats was that of Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson, who was caught in a sting accepting $100,000, $90,000 of which he stashed in his refrigerator. That was allegedly to be used to brine Nigerian officials. The FBI subsequently raided his Capitol Hill office, which touched off a dispute about the separation of powers. The fact that both McKinney and Jefferson were African Americans made their offenses look so much worse to more than a few voters. A misleading story about Senator Harry Reid also helped the GOP deflect criticism. The Associated Press made much over the fact that Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Ried had accepted two fight tickets from the Nevada Gaming Commission. Its story was misleading and suggested Reid voted on a matter relating to the commission when he had not. AP stuck by its report as written and boasted in an internal memo that the story had set off a great deal of criticism of Reid.
The DC federal district judge who authorized the raid was Thomas Hogan. On January 1, 2004, he permitted nuclear triggers smuggler Asher Karni a $100,000 bail with the condition that he resides in a Hebrew Shelter Home operated by a friend and defender of Jack Abramoff. Karni, had worked for both Israeli and Turkish intelligence. He smuggled 60 USA nuclear triggers through South Africa to Pakistan. His operation had been a target of the CIA nonproliferation unit run by Valerie Plame. Karni received a very light sentence--three years.
By spring, 2006, the Republican scandals were enough under control that Representative Jerry Lewis, chairman of the appropriations committee, hired Jeffrey Shockey as the committee’s deputy staff director. Both men had been discussed in relationship to the various Abramoff scandals. Shockey said the Ethics Committee sanctioned the hire, but there is no paper record of this and Democrats have not been given the green light for similar hires. Shockey had somehow managed to collect $2 million from a lobbying firm in 2004 while working for Uncle Sam. Lewis was being investigated for his ties to Brent Wilkes, who contributed $60,000 to his last campaign. Lewis’s ties to the Copeland Lowery lobbying firm are also being scrutinized. That firm had failed to report $2,000,000 in income from 1998 to 2005 and found it necessary to submit a revised earnings statement. Most of these investigations were being carried out before grand juries in very conservative southern California.
Some speculated that there could be a reaction among the voters as great as that which deprived the Democrats of 50 House seats in 1994. However, political scientist Norman J. Ornstein calculated that there are so many safe Republican seats 2006 that at most their loss of House seats would be 20. That would turn out to be ten short of the actual number of lost seats, probably because experts on both sides had underestimated how many true independents there were in 2006. That would barely return control to the Democrats, but enough Democrats habitually vote with the Republicans in both houses that they could still advance their agenda In February 2006, the House and Senate Republican leadership moved to dampen the scandal by proposing modest reform legislation. It would prevent lobbyists under some conditions from making gifts to Congressmen or paying for trips. However, these practices were legal if they occurred as part of campaign functions. The Democrats offered a plan that was slightly tougher. It would prevent Congressmen from directing that lobbying firms hire people based on party membership.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
The K Street Project
The so-called K Street Project was a potent tool for increasing Republican power. It was designed to force lobbying firms to purge Democrats, hire Republicans, and direct their contributions to Republican members and their political action committees. The House Republicans redoubled their earlier efforts to prevent their members from dealing with any lobbyists with Democratic connections. In the past, Democrats had sought contributions from lobbyists and the firms they represented. The Republicans broke new ground by demanding that these people and their firms sharply reduce what they contribute to Democrats. Republican members were also expected to shun environmental lobbyists and those for other causes favored by the Democrats.
Majority Leader Tom DeLay ruled that members should investigate lobbyists to be certain they have no connections to Democrats and do not work for corporations that have donated money to the Democratic Party. Democrats tried to bring Representative Oxley before the ethics committee when he insisted that the Investment Company Institute either fire Democrat Julie Domenick or get a Republican to work with her. Oxley, a member of the Financial Services Committee, was pressing for an investigation of how mutual funds disclose their fees to investors, and the Democrats use this connection to claim a breach of ethics. When DeLay was too obvious about refusing to deal with one firm’s representatives because its board chairman was a Democrat, the House Ethnics Committee found it necessary to issue a mild reprimand. In the Senate, former leader Trent Lott led a similar effort. Rush Limbaugh joined the effort by urging Republican House members to avoid lobbyist Linda Daschle, wife of the Senate minority leader.
The result of this so-called K Street Project is that Republican activists have been hired as lobbyists. Their chief loyalty is to their party, not the firms the represent and they channel almost all their firms contributions to the GOP In the past. The Republican Congressional leadership has learned how to exploit lobbyists to the fullest extent. Without making political contributions, firms learned they could not do business in Washington. The private e-mail of Westar Energy Inc. of Kansas said it was necessary to give to Republican POACs “to get a seat at the table.” The House Republicans redoubled their earlier efforts to prevent their members from dealing with any lobbyists with Democratic connections. Republicans rewarded contributing firms by allowing their lobbyists to sit with House committees in drafting legislation. These people often have desks in staff areas and draft legislation on government computers. In an effort to create a poll of lobbyists who were friendly to the Republican Party, De Lay called in lobbyists and lectured them about their hiring practices and political donations. He was equipped with data provided by Grover Norquist on each lobbying operation. His message was simple, “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” In 1996, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour and house leaders delivered the same blunt message to a meeting of CEOs. In theory, the strategy created an endless loop in which former Republican Congressmen and staffers occupied high-paying lobbying position, pumping huge amounts into the party, and electing more and more Republican senators and representatives.
Under Senator Rick Santorum, some Senate Republicans have joined the K Street Project, but lobbyists have not greatly increased their legislative roles in that chamber, Democrats had sought contributions from lobbyists and the firms they represented. The Republicans broke new ground by demanding that these people and their firms sharply reduce what they contribute to Democrats The mandatory hiring of Republican lobbyists was the key element in a carefully crafted play to lock Republicans into control of both Houses of Congress. It was expected that these highly partisan lobbyists would maximize contributions to Republican campaigns at the federal and state level. In return, they received more access to those in power; and, in the House, actually sat in on the drafting of legislation. Their funds at the state level helped elect Republican legislature that redrew Congressional and local district lines, creating many more invulnerable Republican seats. Of course, the two seats given by the Constitution to small, rural states enabled the party to slowly expanded on that great advantage facilitated the GOP hold on the Senate.
The result was that the GOP receives twice as much money as the Democrats from firms maintaining lobbyists in Washington. Tom De Lay had close ties with Republican lobbyists, particularly Jack Abramoff, and rose in the leadership by obtaining funds from lobbyists for other Republicans. Abramoff was the most successful Washington lobbyist and was a long-time intelligence asset for the apartheid regime in South Africa. His friend Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, was the informal “Mayor of Capitol Hill” and used his power to reward Congressmen who cooperated with De Lay. He was also close to the lobbyists and openly pulled strings to help them.
When the Electronic Industries Alliance hired a former Democratic congressman rather than a Republican, the EIA found that its legislation was stalled. Lobbyists also learned that they could not access Karl Rove unless Norquist first cleared them. Rove’s appointments secretary had worked for key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom DeLay had described as his best friend. Norquist, who stands at the center of the GOP policy apparatus, proclaimed, “What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs.” Lobbying firms learned to clear hires with Senator Rick Santorum and either DeLay or House Republican whip Roy Blunt. The K Street Strategy has produced a corps of lobbyists who are Republican Party operatives, whose first loyalty was to the Republican Party. A Senate Committee chaired by John McCain looked into some of Abramoff’s questionable relations with Indian tribes and found that some of their payments were channeled to political consultant Ralph Reed through Norquist’s Americans for Tax Justice and that Norquist took a processing fee. This finding should result in the powerful group losing its tax exemption.
One of the most interesting DeLay-Abramoff operations began in 1997, when DeLay visited Moscow ostensibly to meet religious people there. When he returned, he was working with a little-known Bohemian company and a London lawyer and--of course Abramoff-- to obtain legislation providing for the International Monetary Fund to assist certain Russian companies held by holdovers from the old Soviet regime. In return for this work, DeLay’s U.S. Family Network received $1,000,000 from the former Communists. According to the former chairman of its board, the network also received money from textile sweatshops in the Marianas that forced women to have abortions and backed prostitution. It was forced to pay a substantial fine for using its money for political advertisements. The real power behind the US Family Network was Ed Buckham, once De Lay’s chief of staff. The former chairman of the board said the organization operated to benefit Abramoff.
In May ABC reported that Speaker Dennis Hastert was a Justice Department target in the Abramoff scandal, but the Speaker denied it. Earlier, a major magazine hadrevealed that translator Sybil Edmonds had reported that Hastert had received $100,000 from the Turkish lobby, but a federal court subsequently gagged her. Hastert was also connected with a $207 million appropriation earmark to build a freeway west of Chicago, about five miles from some land he owned. He had a 67 acre farm in the name of his wife and a similar farm owned by him and two political associates. The highway made it possible for him to turn a $1.8 milli0on profit selling the land to a developer. This is what historians call “honest graft,” but he was infuriated when the Chicago press reported the story.
The Speaker had angered the Department of Justice when he criticized the FBI for raiding the office of Louisiana Democrat Bill Jefferson and carting off papers. The FBI refused to permit the Counsel of the House of Representatives or his attorney to witness the search. Jefferson had been stung in a sting operation accepting $100,000, (90,000 of which he deposited in his freezer). Jefferson had been deeply involved in assisting Americans do business in Nigeria and neighboring states. It has been speculated that he had files a huge bribe Halliburton paid in bribes to get a gas liquefaction contract. That was said to have occurred when Dick Cheney was chairman of the conglomerate. The FBI also searched the Pontiac, Maryland,home of the likely 2007 Nigerian presidential candidate Atiku Abubaker in an effort to scoop up and contain documents on the Halliburton bribe. The raid of a ranking foreign national was unprecedented.
Jack Abramoff received a light prison sentence, and several others have gone to jail.
The deeper meanings of the scandal have not been found and the Bush administration's firing of US attorneys derailed much of the investigation. The conviction and subsequent suicide of the DC Madam made it more difficult to probe the sex for Congressional votes part of the scandal.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Majority Leader Tom DeLay ruled that members should investigate lobbyists to be certain they have no connections to Democrats and do not work for corporations that have donated money to the Democratic Party. Democrats tried to bring Representative Oxley before the ethics committee when he insisted that the Investment Company Institute either fire Democrat Julie Domenick or get a Republican to work with her. Oxley, a member of the Financial Services Committee, was pressing for an investigation of how mutual funds disclose their fees to investors, and the Democrats use this connection to claim a breach of ethics. When DeLay was too obvious about refusing to deal with one firm’s representatives because its board chairman was a Democrat, the House Ethnics Committee found it necessary to issue a mild reprimand. In the Senate, former leader Trent Lott led a similar effort. Rush Limbaugh joined the effort by urging Republican House members to avoid lobbyist Linda Daschle, wife of the Senate minority leader.
The result of this so-called K Street Project is that Republican activists have been hired as lobbyists. Their chief loyalty is to their party, not the firms the represent and they channel almost all their firms contributions to the GOP In the past. The Republican Congressional leadership has learned how to exploit lobbyists to the fullest extent. Without making political contributions, firms learned they could not do business in Washington. The private e-mail of Westar Energy Inc. of Kansas said it was necessary to give to Republican POACs “to get a seat at the table.” The House Republicans redoubled their earlier efforts to prevent their members from dealing with any lobbyists with Democratic connections. Republicans rewarded contributing firms by allowing their lobbyists to sit with House committees in drafting legislation. These people often have desks in staff areas and draft legislation on government computers. In an effort to create a poll of lobbyists who were friendly to the Republican Party, De Lay called in lobbyists and lectured them about their hiring practices and political donations. He was equipped with data provided by Grover Norquist on each lobbying operation. His message was simple, “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” In 1996, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour and house leaders delivered the same blunt message to a meeting of CEOs. In theory, the strategy created an endless loop in which former Republican Congressmen and staffers occupied high-paying lobbying position, pumping huge amounts into the party, and electing more and more Republican senators and representatives.
Under Senator Rick Santorum, some Senate Republicans have joined the K Street Project, but lobbyists have not greatly increased their legislative roles in that chamber, Democrats had sought contributions from lobbyists and the firms they represented. The Republicans broke new ground by demanding that these people and their firms sharply reduce what they contribute to Democrats The mandatory hiring of Republican lobbyists was the key element in a carefully crafted play to lock Republicans into control of both Houses of Congress. It was expected that these highly partisan lobbyists would maximize contributions to Republican campaigns at the federal and state level. In return, they received more access to those in power; and, in the House, actually sat in on the drafting of legislation. Their funds at the state level helped elect Republican legislature that redrew Congressional and local district lines, creating many more invulnerable Republican seats. Of course, the two seats given by the Constitution to small, rural states enabled the party to slowly expanded on that great advantage facilitated the GOP hold on the Senate.
The result was that the GOP receives twice as much money as the Democrats from firms maintaining lobbyists in Washington. Tom De Lay had close ties with Republican lobbyists, particularly Jack Abramoff, and rose in the leadership by obtaining funds from lobbyists for other Republicans. Abramoff was the most successful Washington lobbyist and was a long-time intelligence asset for the apartheid regime in South Africa. His friend Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, was the informal “Mayor of Capitol Hill” and used his power to reward Congressmen who cooperated with De Lay. He was also close to the lobbyists and openly pulled strings to help them.
When the Electronic Industries Alliance hired a former Democratic congressman rather than a Republican, the EIA found that its legislation was stalled. Lobbyists also learned that they could not access Karl Rove unless Norquist first cleared them. Rove’s appointments secretary had worked for key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom DeLay had described as his best friend. Norquist, who stands at the center of the GOP policy apparatus, proclaimed, “What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs.” Lobbying firms learned to clear hires with Senator Rick Santorum and either DeLay or House Republican whip Roy Blunt. The K Street Strategy has produced a corps of lobbyists who are Republican Party operatives, whose first loyalty was to the Republican Party. A Senate Committee chaired by John McCain looked into some of Abramoff’s questionable relations with Indian tribes and found that some of their payments were channeled to political consultant Ralph Reed through Norquist’s Americans for Tax Justice and that Norquist took a processing fee. This finding should result in the powerful group losing its tax exemption.
One of the most interesting DeLay-Abramoff operations began in 1997, when DeLay visited Moscow ostensibly to meet religious people there. When he returned, he was working with a little-known Bohemian company and a London lawyer and--of course Abramoff-- to obtain legislation providing for the International Monetary Fund to assist certain Russian companies held by holdovers from the old Soviet regime. In return for this work, DeLay’s U.S. Family Network received $1,000,000 from the former Communists. According to the former chairman of its board, the network also received money from textile sweatshops in the Marianas that forced women to have abortions and backed prostitution. It was forced to pay a substantial fine for using its money for political advertisements. The real power behind the US Family Network was Ed Buckham, once De Lay’s chief of staff. The former chairman of the board said the organization operated to benefit Abramoff.
In May ABC reported that Speaker Dennis Hastert was a Justice Department target in the Abramoff scandal, but the Speaker denied it. Earlier, a major magazine hadrevealed that translator Sybil Edmonds had reported that Hastert had received $100,000 from the Turkish lobby, but a federal court subsequently gagged her. Hastert was also connected with a $207 million appropriation earmark to build a freeway west of Chicago, about five miles from some land he owned. He had a 67 acre farm in the name of his wife and a similar farm owned by him and two political associates. The highway made it possible for him to turn a $1.8 milli0on profit selling the land to a developer. This is what historians call “honest graft,” but he was infuriated when the Chicago press reported the story.
The Speaker had angered the Department of Justice when he criticized the FBI for raiding the office of Louisiana Democrat Bill Jefferson and carting off papers. The FBI refused to permit the Counsel of the House of Representatives or his attorney to witness the search. Jefferson had been stung in a sting operation accepting $100,000, (90,000 of which he deposited in his freezer). Jefferson had been deeply involved in assisting Americans do business in Nigeria and neighboring states. It has been speculated that he had files a huge bribe Halliburton paid in bribes to get a gas liquefaction contract. That was said to have occurred when Dick Cheney was chairman of the conglomerate. The FBI also searched the Pontiac, Maryland,home of the likely 2007 Nigerian presidential candidate Atiku Abubaker in an effort to scoop up and contain documents on the Halliburton bribe. The raid of a ranking foreign national was unprecedented.
Jack Abramoff received a light prison sentence, and several others have gone to jail.
The deeper meanings of the scandal have not been found and the Bush administration's firing of US attorneys derailed much of the investigation. The conviction and subsequent suicide of the DC Madam made it more difficult to probe the sex for Congressional votes part of the scandal.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Procedural Abuses and the Decline of Minority Party Rights Under Republican Rule in Congress
Procedural Abuses and the Decline of Minority Party Rights
Two respected observers--moderate Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and conservative Norman Ornstein, have observed that Democrats in their half-century period of dominance engaged in some abuses, “But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years.” Mann charged that the Republican majorities have damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. In the 1980s, Democrats occasionally bent the rules for partisan purposes, reducing the role of Republicans in the legislative process.
A few times they used closed rules to shut off all amendments to bills, and there were some instances of limiting the number of amendments that could be introduced in the last Democratic Congress before Newt Gingrich and his followers took over, 35% of the important bills came with closed rules, if one includes those that somehow or other limited the number of amendments. In 1985, the Democrats seated an Indiana representative, whom Republicans insisted had not won his election. From that time on, influential Democrats worked hard to see that the rights of the minority were preserved. According to Mann and Ornstein, the advent of Republican power in the House led to “practices that were more unsettling than those of the Democrats [and they became] the norm.”
The abuses of legislative procedures were sometimes motivated by determination to accomplish some ideological goal, but much more often they were for the intention of including “ earmarks” –special set-aside appropriations buried in legislation-- that would benefit contributors. Republicans have greatly expanded on exclusionary practices Democrats had sometimes employed in the past and effectively shut the Democrats out of deliberations on key measures. In the entire 109th Congress, only two significant bills were allowed on the floor with open rules. The three-hour open voting process in the House to pass the Medicare Reform Act demonstrated that the legislative process had been greatly restructured and perhaps damaged. Intense pressure, including serious threats, was brought to bear on the most conservative Republicans, who thought the bill authorized too much spending. Nick Smith, a retiring member from Michigan, was told that the part would prevent his son from succeeding him. Smith was also told that someone would invest $100,000 in his son’s business if Smith voted with the leadership. Another version of the story was that $100,000 would be invested in the son’s campaign if Smith submitted. He did not budge. Now roll calls frequently stretch to two and three hours as leaders prowled the chamber to twist arms and offer enticements for changing votes.
In 1987, Republicans chastised Speaker Jim Wright for keeping the voting open ten minutes more than the normal fifteen minutes. The Republican whip then was Dick Cheney, who branded this “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power in the ten years I have been here.” Such an extraordinary procedure was even labeled an abuse of power by the Republican commentators on the “Beltway Boys.“ Both Speakers Gingrich and Hastert had pledged to uphold the fifteen minute rule. As noted, Republicans held the vote open three hours to pass the Medicare Act, and they had many other votes that were open for an hour or more.
The move toward one party government was abetted by the inability of the Democratic leadership to deal with the situation. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope and still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these highhanded procedures became more frequent, some doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions.
Democrats often were not permitted to see key legislation until just before it was to be voted on, and more than 70% of legislation reached the floor with rules that prohibited amendments. Democrats also encountered great difficulty getting legislation they introduced to the floor. The operation of the House under the Republicans became far more centralized than it ever had been under the Democrats. Legislation was produced in leadership offices and simply put up for up or down votes. In November 2004, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced a new policy that prevented any legislation reaching the floor that did not have the support of the GOP caucus. The legislative role of the Democrats was reduced to” next to no role at all.” A Brookings Institution expert noted that the House restrictions on the minority had been taken to a new extreme.
Perhaps fearing even more restraints, the Democratic leadership refused to demand an investigation of Representative Mike Oakley’s demand that a Democratic lobbyist be fired in return for his Financial Services Committee’s dropping of an investigation of the mutual funds industry. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also declined to press for an investigation into Tom De Lay’s role in having the Department of Homeland Security track Texas legislature Democrats when they fled the state to avoid a vote. De Lay succeeded in getting the state redistricted, and Bush appointees trumped the objections of Justice Department lawyers that it violated the Voting Rights Act. Bush people at the top of the Department of Justice also scuttled the objection of those lawyers to what amounted to the reintroduction of the poll tax in Georgia.
Trent Lott, the Republican majority leader in 2001, fired the Senate parliamentarian when he ruled that the Bush tax cut package could not have the procedural protections afforded budgets. Moreover, the bipartisan Joint Taxation Committee was not given an opportunity to estimate the cost of the tax, perhaps because some suggest that the ultimate cost will be around $4 trillion. Such behavior reveals a troubling inclination to resort to authoritarian behavior. Some commentators believed the GOP numbers were simply manufactured from whole cloth. The numbers were not all that important to Republican ideologues because they adhered to a “market theology” that by definition was correct. Moreover, leaders of the Republican Congress and in the Bush White House had discovered “there are simply no limits to how much you can lie in American politics and get away with it.”
The Democrats were in no position to challenge Republican claims because they lacked common vision and were fearful that too many voters subscribed to market theology as it applied to tax cuts. They were simply too craven to advance effective criticism or even complain loudly and repeatedly about the tactics employed to pass the tax cuts. Since taking control of the Congress, the GOP in the House repeatedly ignored informal rules of conduct and had simply rolled over their opposition. They did not appear to value informed public discourse or consider the long-term consequences of their actions. Perhaps they had come to believe that their opponents were so weak and demoralized that they would never be in a position to retaliate. Alan Wolfe observed that the GOP, both in Congress and the Executive Branch, acted as if “[it] had no interest in the long-term effects of its slash and burn political methods.”
In 2002, the Republicans increased their majority in the House and seized control of the Senate. Apparently accepting Grover Norquist’s dictum that “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” they were able to successfully pursue a bi-partisan agenda. When Newt Gingrich was speaker, he very rarely met with minority leader Dick Gephart, and the same pattern prevailed after he stepped down. Communications between Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were strained and irregular, whereas Democratic Speakers like Tip O Neill and Tom Foley had routine meetings with Minority Leader Bob Michel to discuss scheduling of legislation and the operations of the House. In 2003 and 2004, the Republican Senate leadership threatened to stop Democratic filibusters against court nominees by having Vice President Cheney exercise the “nuclear option, ” a parliamentary maneuver that would permit the Vice President, as presiding officer, to rule that filibusters to block judicial nominations ere contrary to Senate rules. It was a scheme to allow a Senate rules change with fifty votes upon authorization of Vice President Dick Cheney. They were also able to continue eroding the traditional independence of Congress.
Once the most independent branch of government, it was transformed into a reliable instrument of party rule. In October 2003, the Republican leadership in the very closely divided Senate decided to exclude Democrats from conference committee that developed the Energy Act of 2003 and the Medicare Reform Act 2003. Democrats were locked out of conference committees that dealt with other matters. The Medicare Reform Act of 2003 was formulated in secret by Republicans from both houses, with some help from two Democratic senators. A number of House Democrats politely appeared at the office where the act was being developed to protest their exclusion from the law-making process. Capitol police were called to evict the Democrats from the meeting room, but the police did not use force, fearing litigation.
Perhaps the most remarkable abuse of a conference committee occurred in January 2006. No Democrats from either chamber were permitted to sit on a conference committee considering a bill to cut the budget. One would expect this was to prevent them from protesting many cuts in social services. More was involved. A month later, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the committee changed a funding formula so that HMOs would receive an additional $22 billion in federal funds.
A more frequent tactic to assure passage of conservative legislation was to have the Republican Senate accept as many compromise provisions as possible just to get a piece of legislation to a conference committee, where the will of the lockstep House Republicans will prevail. If Democrats were permitted to be members of the conference committees, they were of the most pliable sort, and they “become enablers of a game being played with a stacked deck.” Increasingly the House Republicans have relied upon “closed rules” which prevent Democrats from making any amendments to legislation. The Rules Committee frequently schedules legislation for votes with very little warning, making it very difficult for the opposition to organize and develop arguments.
In the Senate, the Democrats still had the right to offer amendments in most cases. However, the Republican majority has developed a pattern of accepting moderate amendments, which they know will be removed in conference committees. Frequently, the work of the conference committees is done in secret meetings of inner committees, comprised only of GOP members and perhaps some people from the Executive Branch. The moderate clauses are often stripped away, and the legislation is sent back to the two chambers for up or down votes. Moderate Republican Senators can point to their earlier support of moderate amendments and say they reluctantly voted for the final legislation. None of these techniques are without precedent, but what is unprecedented is the e3xtent to which they are employed now. When the Republicans barely lost control of the Senate in 2007, their leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky vowed that they would filibuster every “controversial measure” before the Senate, and the party kept that promise. In this way it blocked efforts to give accused terrorist detainees at least a few rights before the law as well as measures intended to give soldiers longer down time before being called back to Iraq. Voters seldom realize it requires 60 votes to end a filibuster and are prone t5o blame the majority party for accomplishing little. The GOP merrily used this tactic while complaining about a “Do Nothing Congress.” It is not illegal to abuse the Senate rules in this way, but it does not demonstrate a respect for majority rule or customary usages.
According to Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, Republicans had also damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope with the new situation. They still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these draconian procedures became more frequent, some wondered if they doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions. David Broder has noted that Democrats had sometimes abused power when they ran the House of Representatives for 40 years, “But the abuses were rarer before Republicans gained control in 1994....”
The high-handed procedures employed in fashioning the Energy Bill were justified by reference to the days when Wilbur Mills, supported by huge Democratic majorities, worked out tax policy by himself and then had his Ways and Means Committee dutifully pass it with little debate. But the fact was that this committee had a history of holding down partisanship and placing a premium on institutional integrity and good legislative workmanship. All that changed when Bill Thomas assumed control of the committee. He had said that when the GOP took control of the House, it would abandon “civilized” behavior, and he was as good as his word. The committee became the cockpit of partisan warfare where he frequently resorted to brute political force. The committee’s tradition of discussion and patient negotiation was abandoned and bridges between the two parties were burned.
On one occasion Thomas ordered the House Police to break up a meeting of the committee’s Democratic members in the Ways and Means Committee library because he did not want them to confer on strategy. On November 12, 2003, Republican leaders ordered staffers to remove an amendment that had passed the House from the Transportation Bill that was going to a conference committee. The point was to save President Bush from vetoing the bill, which included an amendment that forbade spending money to keep people from traveling to Cuba. Similarly, in 2006, the Republican leadership sent to the White House a measure that had not gone through both houses in the same form. It cut $40 billion over five years. Bush signed it because they had “certified” it. That version of the bill cut two billion more than the one that had passed both houses. The leadership pointed to an obscure 1890 Supreme Court ruling that seemed to validate this practice.
The House Rules Committee has taken to announcing at one and two o’clock in the morning that certain legislation will be on the floor at 10 AM, a tactic that prevents Democrats from preparing to deal with the measures to be brought up for a vote. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers refer to the Dracula Congress, because the decisions are made very late at night. All sorts of rules prohibiting amendments and debate have appeared in the House. The seventy-two hour rule is now violated with great frequency, and even omnibus bills running a thousand pages now appear on the floor with no notice at all. Until now, the Rules Committee was supposed to only slightly change the language of legislation committees submit to it. The committee now completely rewrites legislation and then forces votes on the measures before the bills can be read or opposition can organize. It has also become very difficult to debate or amend bills that are taken to the floor. Now the vast majority of such bills cannot be amended.
When the Democrats last controlled the House, the number of bills open to revision had gone down to 57%. By 2004, under the Republicans this number had fallen to 15%. Pork barrel provisions added to appropriations bills jumped from 47 in the last year of Democratic control to 3,407 this year. Even respected Republican leaders such as Jim Leach of Iowa have been shut out. He tried unsuccessfully to subject the banking operations of financial services firms to normal banking regulations. Passage of legislation in the House is so automatic that it now only meets two days a week. A significant but not mandatory part of the legislative process is meeting with lobbyists who represent groups that might have interests that diverge from yours. Lois Gibbs, a longtime consumer lobbyist complained “Anybody who’s an advocate for the environment or public health the other side of corporate interests is immediately dismissed.” Referring to both houses, respected nonpartisan reformer Fred Wertheimer said, “There is no legislative process anymore.”
Before the 2004 omnibus appropriations bill was passed, House Democrats were forbidden to speak in the debate on the rules under which the spending legislation would be handled. By 2003, there was also a great disparity between how much the federal government spent in Republican and Democratic districts. The majority party districts were receiving $612 million than the average Democratic district. In 1994, the average Democratic district received $35 million more than the average Republican one. In 2003, Conservative Democratic Representative Ralph Hall was told projects for his district could not be funded and “the only reason I was given was I was a Democrat.” Also facing the prospect of losing his seat through redistricting, Hall saw no choice but to become a Republican.
House Republicans regularly rode roughshod over the rights of the Democratic minority. Moreover, they used conference committees to ignore the wishes of their colleagues in the Senate. A pattern has developed where in the Republican Senate takes a more moderate line on social and tax legislation only to surrender entirely to the wishes of House Republicans in conference committee. At the end of the 2005 session, the Senate caved in to the wishes of the House in accepting drastic cuts in Medicaid, and it gave up its demand that required greater savings at the expense of Preferred Provider organizations. Of course, the appearance of a measure of moderation and compassion may be a necessary posture to disarm Senate Democrats who still have some legislative rights and could deploy them to delay legislation.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Two respected observers--moderate Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and conservative Norman Ornstein, have observed that Democrats in their half-century period of dominance engaged in some abuses, “But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years.” Mann charged that the Republican majorities have damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. In the 1980s, Democrats occasionally bent the rules for partisan purposes, reducing the role of Republicans in the legislative process.
A few times they used closed rules to shut off all amendments to bills, and there were some instances of limiting the number of amendments that could be introduced in the last Democratic Congress before Newt Gingrich and his followers took over, 35% of the important bills came with closed rules, if one includes those that somehow or other limited the number of amendments. In 1985, the Democrats seated an Indiana representative, whom Republicans insisted had not won his election. From that time on, influential Democrats worked hard to see that the rights of the minority were preserved. According to Mann and Ornstein, the advent of Republican power in the House led to “practices that were more unsettling than those of the Democrats [and they became] the norm.”
The abuses of legislative procedures were sometimes motivated by determination to accomplish some ideological goal, but much more often they were for the intention of including “ earmarks” –special set-aside appropriations buried in legislation-- that would benefit contributors. Republicans have greatly expanded on exclusionary practices Democrats had sometimes employed in the past and effectively shut the Democrats out of deliberations on key measures. In the entire 109th Congress, only two significant bills were allowed on the floor with open rules. The three-hour open voting process in the House to pass the Medicare Reform Act demonstrated that the legislative process had been greatly restructured and perhaps damaged. Intense pressure, including serious threats, was brought to bear on the most conservative Republicans, who thought the bill authorized too much spending. Nick Smith, a retiring member from Michigan, was told that the part would prevent his son from succeeding him. Smith was also told that someone would invest $100,000 in his son’s business if Smith voted with the leadership. Another version of the story was that $100,000 would be invested in the son’s campaign if Smith submitted. He did not budge. Now roll calls frequently stretch to two and three hours as leaders prowled the chamber to twist arms and offer enticements for changing votes.
In 1987, Republicans chastised Speaker Jim Wright for keeping the voting open ten minutes more than the normal fifteen minutes. The Republican whip then was Dick Cheney, who branded this “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power in the ten years I have been here.” Such an extraordinary procedure was even labeled an abuse of power by the Republican commentators on the “Beltway Boys.“ Both Speakers Gingrich and Hastert had pledged to uphold the fifteen minute rule. As noted, Republicans held the vote open three hours to pass the Medicare Act, and they had many other votes that were open for an hour or more.
The move toward one party government was abetted by the inability of the Democratic leadership to deal with the situation. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope and still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these highhanded procedures became more frequent, some doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions.
Democrats often were not permitted to see key legislation until just before it was to be voted on, and more than 70% of legislation reached the floor with rules that prohibited amendments. Democrats also encountered great difficulty getting legislation they introduced to the floor. The operation of the House under the Republicans became far more centralized than it ever had been under the Democrats. Legislation was produced in leadership offices and simply put up for up or down votes. In November 2004, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced a new policy that prevented any legislation reaching the floor that did not have the support of the GOP caucus. The legislative role of the Democrats was reduced to” next to no role at all.” A Brookings Institution expert noted that the House restrictions on the minority had been taken to a new extreme.
Perhaps fearing even more restraints, the Democratic leadership refused to demand an investigation of Representative Mike Oakley’s demand that a Democratic lobbyist be fired in return for his Financial Services Committee’s dropping of an investigation of the mutual funds industry. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also declined to press for an investigation into Tom De Lay’s role in having the Department of Homeland Security track Texas legislature Democrats when they fled the state to avoid a vote. De Lay succeeded in getting the state redistricted, and Bush appointees trumped the objections of Justice Department lawyers that it violated the Voting Rights Act. Bush people at the top of the Department of Justice also scuttled the objection of those lawyers to what amounted to the reintroduction of the poll tax in Georgia.
Trent Lott, the Republican majority leader in 2001, fired the Senate parliamentarian when he ruled that the Bush tax cut package could not have the procedural protections afforded budgets. Moreover, the bipartisan Joint Taxation Committee was not given an opportunity to estimate the cost of the tax, perhaps because some suggest that the ultimate cost will be around $4 trillion. Such behavior reveals a troubling inclination to resort to authoritarian behavior. Some commentators believed the GOP numbers were simply manufactured from whole cloth. The numbers were not all that important to Republican ideologues because they adhered to a “market theology” that by definition was correct. Moreover, leaders of the Republican Congress and in the Bush White House had discovered “there are simply no limits to how much you can lie in American politics and get away with it.”
The Democrats were in no position to challenge Republican claims because they lacked common vision and were fearful that too many voters subscribed to market theology as it applied to tax cuts. They were simply too craven to advance effective criticism or even complain loudly and repeatedly about the tactics employed to pass the tax cuts. Since taking control of the Congress, the GOP in the House repeatedly ignored informal rules of conduct and had simply rolled over their opposition. They did not appear to value informed public discourse or consider the long-term consequences of their actions. Perhaps they had come to believe that their opponents were so weak and demoralized that they would never be in a position to retaliate. Alan Wolfe observed that the GOP, both in Congress and the Executive Branch, acted as if “[it] had no interest in the long-term effects of its slash and burn political methods.”
In 2002, the Republicans increased their majority in the House and seized control of the Senate. Apparently accepting Grover Norquist’s dictum that “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” they were able to successfully pursue a bi-partisan agenda. When Newt Gingrich was speaker, he very rarely met with minority leader Dick Gephart, and the same pattern prevailed after he stepped down. Communications between Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were strained and irregular, whereas Democratic Speakers like Tip O Neill and Tom Foley had routine meetings with Minority Leader Bob Michel to discuss scheduling of legislation and the operations of the House. In 2003 and 2004, the Republican Senate leadership threatened to stop Democratic filibusters against court nominees by having Vice President Cheney exercise the “nuclear option, ” a parliamentary maneuver that would permit the Vice President, as presiding officer, to rule that filibusters to block judicial nominations ere contrary to Senate rules. It was a scheme to allow a Senate rules change with fifty votes upon authorization of Vice President Dick Cheney. They were also able to continue eroding the traditional independence of Congress.
Once the most independent branch of government, it was transformed into a reliable instrument of party rule. In October 2003, the Republican leadership in the very closely divided Senate decided to exclude Democrats from conference committee that developed the Energy Act of 2003 and the Medicare Reform Act 2003. Democrats were locked out of conference committees that dealt with other matters. The Medicare Reform Act of 2003 was formulated in secret by Republicans from both houses, with some help from two Democratic senators. A number of House Democrats politely appeared at the office where the act was being developed to protest their exclusion from the law-making process. Capitol police were called to evict the Democrats from the meeting room, but the police did not use force, fearing litigation.
Perhaps the most remarkable abuse of a conference committee occurred in January 2006. No Democrats from either chamber were permitted to sit on a conference committee considering a bill to cut the budget. One would expect this was to prevent them from protesting many cuts in social services. More was involved. A month later, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the committee changed a funding formula so that HMOs would receive an additional $22 billion in federal funds.
A more frequent tactic to assure passage of conservative legislation was to have the Republican Senate accept as many compromise provisions as possible just to get a piece of legislation to a conference committee, where the will of the lockstep House Republicans will prevail. If Democrats were permitted to be members of the conference committees, they were of the most pliable sort, and they “become enablers of a game being played with a stacked deck.” Increasingly the House Republicans have relied upon “closed rules” which prevent Democrats from making any amendments to legislation. The Rules Committee frequently schedules legislation for votes with very little warning, making it very difficult for the opposition to organize and develop arguments.
In the Senate, the Democrats still had the right to offer amendments in most cases. However, the Republican majority has developed a pattern of accepting moderate amendments, which they know will be removed in conference committees. Frequently, the work of the conference committees is done in secret meetings of inner committees, comprised only of GOP members and perhaps some people from the Executive Branch. The moderate clauses are often stripped away, and the legislation is sent back to the two chambers for up or down votes. Moderate Republican Senators can point to their earlier support of moderate amendments and say they reluctantly voted for the final legislation. None of these techniques are without precedent, but what is unprecedented is the e3xtent to which they are employed now. When the Republicans barely lost control of the Senate in 2007, their leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky vowed that they would filibuster every “controversial measure” before the Senate, and the party kept that promise. In this way it blocked efforts to give accused terrorist detainees at least a few rights before the law as well as measures intended to give soldiers longer down time before being called back to Iraq. Voters seldom realize it requires 60 votes to end a filibuster and are prone t5o blame the majority party for accomplishing little. The GOP merrily used this tactic while complaining about a “Do Nothing Congress.” It is not illegal to abuse the Senate rules in this way, but it does not demonstrate a respect for majority rule or customary usages.
According to Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, Republicans had also damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope with the new situation. They still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these draconian procedures became more frequent, some wondered if they doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions. David Broder has noted that Democrats had sometimes abused power when they ran the House of Representatives for 40 years, “But the abuses were rarer before Republicans gained control in 1994....”
The high-handed procedures employed in fashioning the Energy Bill were justified by reference to the days when Wilbur Mills, supported by huge Democratic majorities, worked out tax policy by himself and then had his Ways and Means Committee dutifully pass it with little debate. But the fact was that this committee had a history of holding down partisanship and placing a premium on institutional integrity and good legislative workmanship. All that changed when Bill Thomas assumed control of the committee. He had said that when the GOP took control of the House, it would abandon “civilized” behavior, and he was as good as his word. The committee became the cockpit of partisan warfare where he frequently resorted to brute political force. The committee’s tradition of discussion and patient negotiation was abandoned and bridges between the two parties were burned.
On one occasion Thomas ordered the House Police to break up a meeting of the committee’s Democratic members in the Ways and Means Committee library because he did not want them to confer on strategy. On November 12, 2003, Republican leaders ordered staffers to remove an amendment that had passed the House from the Transportation Bill that was going to a conference committee. The point was to save President Bush from vetoing the bill, which included an amendment that forbade spending money to keep people from traveling to Cuba. Similarly, in 2006, the Republican leadership sent to the White House a measure that had not gone through both houses in the same form. It cut $40 billion over five years. Bush signed it because they had “certified” it. That version of the bill cut two billion more than the one that had passed both houses. The leadership pointed to an obscure 1890 Supreme Court ruling that seemed to validate this practice.
The House Rules Committee has taken to announcing at one and two o’clock in the morning that certain legislation will be on the floor at 10 AM, a tactic that prevents Democrats from preparing to deal with the measures to be brought up for a vote. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers refer to the Dracula Congress, because the decisions are made very late at night. All sorts of rules prohibiting amendments and debate have appeared in the House. The seventy-two hour rule is now violated with great frequency, and even omnibus bills running a thousand pages now appear on the floor with no notice at all. Until now, the Rules Committee was supposed to only slightly change the language of legislation committees submit to it. The committee now completely rewrites legislation and then forces votes on the measures before the bills can be read or opposition can organize. It has also become very difficult to debate or amend bills that are taken to the floor. Now the vast majority of such bills cannot be amended.
When the Democrats last controlled the House, the number of bills open to revision had gone down to 57%. By 2004, under the Republicans this number had fallen to 15%. Pork barrel provisions added to appropriations bills jumped from 47 in the last year of Democratic control to 3,407 this year. Even respected Republican leaders such as Jim Leach of Iowa have been shut out. He tried unsuccessfully to subject the banking operations of financial services firms to normal banking regulations. Passage of legislation in the House is so automatic that it now only meets two days a week. A significant but not mandatory part of the legislative process is meeting with lobbyists who represent groups that might have interests that diverge from yours. Lois Gibbs, a longtime consumer lobbyist complained “Anybody who’s an advocate for the environment or public health the other side of corporate interests is immediately dismissed.” Referring to both houses, respected nonpartisan reformer Fred Wertheimer said, “There is no legislative process anymore.”
Before the 2004 omnibus appropriations bill was passed, House Democrats were forbidden to speak in the debate on the rules under which the spending legislation would be handled. By 2003, there was also a great disparity between how much the federal government spent in Republican and Democratic districts. The majority party districts were receiving $612 million than the average Democratic district. In 1994, the average Democratic district received $35 million more than the average Republican one. In 2003, Conservative Democratic Representative Ralph Hall was told projects for his district could not be funded and “the only reason I was given was I was a Democrat.” Also facing the prospect of losing his seat through redistricting, Hall saw no choice but to become a Republican.
House Republicans regularly rode roughshod over the rights of the Democratic minority. Moreover, they used conference committees to ignore the wishes of their colleagues in the Senate. A pattern has developed where in the Republican Senate takes a more moderate line on social and tax legislation only to surrender entirely to the wishes of House Republicans in conference committee. At the end of the 2005 session, the Senate caved in to the wishes of the House in accepting drastic cuts in Medicaid, and it gave up its demand that required greater savings at the expense of Preferred Provider organizations. Of course, the appearance of a measure of moderation and compassion may be a necessary posture to disarm Senate Democrats who still have some legislative rights and could deploy them to delay legislation.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
One Party Government and the Absence of Congressional Oversight
Historian Lewis L. Gould has noted that Republicans have become so arrogant and high-handed in the exercise of power that they have raised doubts about whether the G.O.P. “really believe[s] in the two-party system as a core principle of politics.”
Since 1996, the GOP has transformed itself into a European-style parliamentary party in which members were epected to walk in lockstep. They came to show great disdain for the old American legislative process which entailed give and take between the two parties.
The Republicans lost a number of House seats in the election of 2000, but they still had a majority and compensated for their loss by reducing Democratic representation on House committees. This high-handed behavior was only briefly noted in a few of the nation’s better newspapers. The Democrats’ previous abuses of power pale by comparison with those of the New Right’s abuses of power pale by comparison those of Democrats, who sometimes ran roughshod over Republicans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were clearly losing their grip on the House of Representatives. The right-wing tendency to abuse power became even more apparent in 2001, when Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. The House Republicans slashed Democratic representation on some committees even though they had narrowed the margin between parties in the election of 2000.
Even though Republicans had increased their margin in the House in the election of 2002, they enacted new restrictions, which would make it even more difficult for the Democratic minority to get their legislative proposals to the floor for consideration. From 1995 to 2006, very few important Democratic proposals were to reach the house floor. By 2002, House Democrats had been driven out of the caucus room they had used for seven years and sent to a basement room. They were sometimes not even permitted there or anywhere else in the Capitol, which made planning difficult. Democrats on committees were frequently not permitted to caucus in committee rooms and not infrequently were not invited to Committee meetings. When they did attend committee meetings, they often were not permitted to attempt to amend legislation that was being marked up.
Before Congress renewed and extended the Patriot Act, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings in the summer of 2005. Hearings cannot be ended except by unanimous consent, but chairman James Sensenbrenner, Jr. became so exasperated with criticisms of the measure that he graveled the meeting at an end, saying the proceedings were “irrelevant.” His staff quickly shut down the microphones and left the room. When John Conyers requested space to hold hearings on the Downing Street Memos, he was given space-- hardly a foregone conclusion these days. But the area was no larger than a “large closet,” and Speaker Hastert scheduled eleven major votes during the hearing to dissuade representatives from attending.
The first step toward one party government was to enforce tight discipline within the Republican Party. Beginning in the 1980s, the GOP began tightening party discipline, and, once in power, sought ways to limit Democratic participation in the legislative process. Senator Philip Gramm said in the mid-1990s that the objective of these steps was to show voters that Republicans could get results Another tool, that Graham did not mention, was the use of “earmarks” to reward compliant Republican Congressmen. They in turn used them to persuade lobbyists to maximize contributions to the GOP. In the ten years since Republicans took control of the House, earmarked pork barrel legislation increased by 873%. By the turn of the century, House Re publicans were very well disciplined and certain to vote as Tom DeLay, the new majority leader, directed. In 2003, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay took more steps to end the seniority system. The Speaker ruled that a panel dominated by the leadership would select committee chairmen, and he ignored seniority in selecting chairmen who were report directly to DeLay. It was made clear that they were expected to be good team players.
This put an end to the idea that chairmen under the Republicans were to enjoy autonomy. Richard W. Pombo, an opponent of environmental legislation was elevated over several senior members to head the Resources Committee, and moderate Christopher Shays, despite his seniority, was denied chairmanship of the Government Reform Committee in part because he backed campaign finance legislation. Hastert called in Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey to chastise him for not supporting the leadership on bankruptcy legislation and other legislation. Marge Roukema of New Jersey was one of the first moderates whom the leadership blocked from becoming a committee chairman. She decided to leave Congress in 2002.
These steps were also driven by intense ideological fervor and probably the belief that their opponents, who represented error, deserved no legislative rights. By 2003, the GOP had become the most disciplined legislative party in the Western world. It had also greatly reduced Democratic involvement in the process in both Houses. Bending and ignoring the formal rules and long-standing procedural usages in both chambers called “the regular order” accomplished this. By far the worst abuses occurred in the House of Representatives, but there were many infractions in the Senate as well, and it can be expected that the Senate will continue on this path as zealots from the House move into the other chamber.
Senate Republicans exhibited considerably more discipline than they had before the party’s transformation. . Even though there are several moderate Republican senators, they had a history of voting as they were told once pressure was exerted. Maine’s Senator Olimpia Snowe, a respected moderate, played an important role in preventing an investigation of the Bush administration’s domestic spying. Another respected moderate, Arlen Specter, also had a “ sad habit of bowing to the right wing when the chips are down.” The fact was that the moderates were really not very moderate in their votes. Senate Democrats had the ability to employ a filibuster, but there are so many New Democratic senators that this was not likely to occur very often. There were filibusters that prevented votes on four extremely conservative Republican judicial nominees, but almost all other Bush nominees were confirmed.
In 2003, at least one Republican staffer on the Judiciary committee was able to access Democratic computers because of a technician’s carelessness. From the spring of 2002 until April 2003, they accessed information on meetings, correspondence, and Democratic strategy in the Judiciary committee. Sometimes they provided it to the right wing press, including Robert Novak. One staffer was taken off the job temporarily on a paternity leave. He was punished with a brief administrative leave. The others were not identified, and the matter attracted very little attention.
On the PBS television program Now, Bill Moyers said, “For the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government--the Congress, the executive, and the judiciary--is united behind a right-wing agenda for what George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.” One party government has also meant “Americans have not been exposed to serious Congressional debate on any major issue....” Moreover, legislative scrutiny of the executive branch has been almost non-existent or consisted of crude-cover-ups. Congressman Henry Waxman noted that the GOP House invested 120 hours of hearings looking into whether Bill Clinton abused the White House Christmas list for political gain, but it spent only 12 hours looking into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The two exceptions were oversight of handling of the Katrina disaster and Senator Arlen Specter’s brief investigation of warrantless spying on the international communications of American citizens. But in that case, the hearings only involved legal theories about whether warrantless eavesdropping was legal. The two intelligence committees refused to look into the nature of the spying, confining themselves to crafting legislation to legalize what the administration was doing.
Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at first refused to permit the committee to vote on whether to have any kind of hearings whatsoever. Later the Republican majority on the committee agreed to block hearings. Instead, they agreed to back legislation legalizing warrantless taps of conversations with suspicious foreigners for forty-five days. After that time,. The Bush administration would have to report to subcommittees of Congress if it still did not want to seek warrants. The committee majority essentially upheld the legality of a program they knew little about and agreed to help codify presidential claims of extraordinary authority. The New York Times’ “The Death of the Intelligence Panel” described this craven surrender to the executive. Of course the panel continued to meet, but its majority were merely willing pawns of the White House. Its majority has consistently stonewalled on carrying out a fair investigation of whether the administration had misrepresented intelligence in order to lead the nation to war in Iraq.
The most shocking case of failed oversight involved the refusal of the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee to look into claims that three telephone companies were feeding various communications they processed to the NSA. Senator Specter said he wanted to subpoena the telephone executives, but Vice President Richard Cheney went behind Specter’s back to persuade the other Republicans to undercut the chairman. This matter also demonstrated the administration’s contempt for Congress and the separation of powers. The most bizarre case of Right wing Republicans refusing to exercise oversight involved the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Pete Hoekstra refused to interview former NSA employee Russell Trice because some committee members lacked sufficiently high security clearances.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Since 1996, the GOP has transformed itself into a European-style parliamentary party in which members were epected to walk in lockstep. They came to show great disdain for the old American legislative process which entailed give and take between the two parties.
The Republicans lost a number of House seats in the election of 2000, but they still had a majority and compensated for their loss by reducing Democratic representation on House committees. This high-handed behavior was only briefly noted in a few of the nation’s better newspapers. The Democrats’ previous abuses of power pale by comparison with those of the New Right’s abuses of power pale by comparison those of Democrats, who sometimes ran roughshod over Republicans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were clearly losing their grip on the House of Representatives. The right-wing tendency to abuse power became even more apparent in 2001, when Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. The House Republicans slashed Democratic representation on some committees even though they had narrowed the margin between parties in the election of 2000.
Even though Republicans had increased their margin in the House in the election of 2002, they enacted new restrictions, which would make it even more difficult for the Democratic minority to get their legislative proposals to the floor for consideration. From 1995 to 2006, very few important Democratic proposals were to reach the house floor. By 2002, House Democrats had been driven out of the caucus room they had used for seven years and sent to a basement room. They were sometimes not even permitted there or anywhere else in the Capitol, which made planning difficult. Democrats on committees were frequently not permitted to caucus in committee rooms and not infrequently were not invited to Committee meetings. When they did attend committee meetings, they often were not permitted to attempt to amend legislation that was being marked up.
Before Congress renewed and extended the Patriot Act, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings in the summer of 2005. Hearings cannot be ended except by unanimous consent, but chairman James Sensenbrenner, Jr. became so exasperated with criticisms of the measure that he graveled the meeting at an end, saying the proceedings were “irrelevant.” His staff quickly shut down the microphones and left the room. When John Conyers requested space to hold hearings on the Downing Street Memos, he was given space-- hardly a foregone conclusion these days. But the area was no larger than a “large closet,” and Speaker Hastert scheduled eleven major votes during the hearing to dissuade representatives from attending.
The first step toward one party government was to enforce tight discipline within the Republican Party. Beginning in the 1980s, the GOP began tightening party discipline, and, once in power, sought ways to limit Democratic participation in the legislative process. Senator Philip Gramm said in the mid-1990s that the objective of these steps was to show voters that Republicans could get results Another tool, that Graham did not mention, was the use of “earmarks” to reward compliant Republican Congressmen. They in turn used them to persuade lobbyists to maximize contributions to the GOP. In the ten years since Republicans took control of the House, earmarked pork barrel legislation increased by 873%. By the turn of the century, House Re publicans were very well disciplined and certain to vote as Tom DeLay, the new majority leader, directed. In 2003, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay took more steps to end the seniority system. The Speaker ruled that a panel dominated by the leadership would select committee chairmen, and he ignored seniority in selecting chairmen who were report directly to DeLay. It was made clear that they were expected to be good team players.
This put an end to the idea that chairmen under the Republicans were to enjoy autonomy. Richard W. Pombo, an opponent of environmental legislation was elevated over several senior members to head the Resources Committee, and moderate Christopher Shays, despite his seniority, was denied chairmanship of the Government Reform Committee in part because he backed campaign finance legislation. Hastert called in Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey to chastise him for not supporting the leadership on bankruptcy legislation and other legislation. Marge Roukema of New Jersey was one of the first moderates whom the leadership blocked from becoming a committee chairman. She decided to leave Congress in 2002.
These steps were also driven by intense ideological fervor and probably the belief that their opponents, who represented error, deserved no legislative rights. By 2003, the GOP had become the most disciplined legislative party in the Western world. It had also greatly reduced Democratic involvement in the process in both Houses. Bending and ignoring the formal rules and long-standing procedural usages in both chambers called “the regular order” accomplished this. By far the worst abuses occurred in the House of Representatives, but there were many infractions in the Senate as well, and it can be expected that the Senate will continue on this path as zealots from the House move into the other chamber.
Senate Republicans exhibited considerably more discipline than they had before the party’s transformation. . Even though there are several moderate Republican senators, they had a history of voting as they were told once pressure was exerted. Maine’s Senator Olimpia Snowe, a respected moderate, played an important role in preventing an investigation of the Bush administration’s domestic spying. Another respected moderate, Arlen Specter, also had a “ sad habit of bowing to the right wing when the chips are down.” The fact was that the moderates were really not very moderate in their votes. Senate Democrats had the ability to employ a filibuster, but there are so many New Democratic senators that this was not likely to occur very often. There were filibusters that prevented votes on four extremely conservative Republican judicial nominees, but almost all other Bush nominees were confirmed.
In 2003, at least one Republican staffer on the Judiciary committee was able to access Democratic computers because of a technician’s carelessness. From the spring of 2002 until April 2003, they accessed information on meetings, correspondence, and Democratic strategy in the Judiciary committee. Sometimes they provided it to the right wing press, including Robert Novak. One staffer was taken off the job temporarily on a paternity leave. He was punished with a brief administrative leave. The others were not identified, and the matter attracted very little attention.
On the PBS television program Now, Bill Moyers said, “For the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government--the Congress, the executive, and the judiciary--is united behind a right-wing agenda for what George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.” One party government has also meant “Americans have not been exposed to serious Congressional debate on any major issue....” Moreover, legislative scrutiny of the executive branch has been almost non-existent or consisted of crude-cover-ups. Congressman Henry Waxman noted that the GOP House invested 120 hours of hearings looking into whether Bill Clinton abused the White House Christmas list for political gain, but it spent only 12 hours looking into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The two exceptions were oversight of handling of the Katrina disaster and Senator Arlen Specter’s brief investigation of warrantless spying on the international communications of American citizens. But in that case, the hearings only involved legal theories about whether warrantless eavesdropping was legal. The two intelligence committees refused to look into the nature of the spying, confining themselves to crafting legislation to legalize what the administration was doing.
Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at first refused to permit the committee to vote on whether to have any kind of hearings whatsoever. Later the Republican majority on the committee agreed to block hearings. Instead, they agreed to back legislation legalizing warrantless taps of conversations with suspicious foreigners for forty-five days. After that time,. The Bush administration would have to report to subcommittees of Congress if it still did not want to seek warrants. The committee majority essentially upheld the legality of a program they knew little about and agreed to help codify presidential claims of extraordinary authority. The New York Times’ “The Death of the Intelligence Panel” described this craven surrender to the executive. Of course the panel continued to meet, but its majority were merely willing pawns of the White House. Its majority has consistently stonewalled on carrying out a fair investigation of whether the administration had misrepresented intelligence in order to lead the nation to war in Iraq.
The most shocking case of failed oversight involved the refusal of the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee to look into claims that three telephone companies were feeding various communications they processed to the NSA. Senator Specter said he wanted to subpoena the telephone executives, but Vice President Richard Cheney went behind Specter’s back to persuade the other Republicans to undercut the chairman. This matter also demonstrated the administration’s contempt for Congress and the separation of powers. The most bizarre case of Right wing Republicans refusing to exercise oversight involved the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Pete Hoekstra refused to interview former NSA employee Russell Trice because some committee members lacked sufficiently high security clearances.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Newt’s Followers and the Courts
The Right was to demonstrate demonstrated impatience with the courts when they took positions contrary to what conservatives expected. When the judiciary failed to support indefinitely prolonging the life of brain-damaged Terry Schiavo Texans Representative Tom De Lay and Senator John Cornyn made statements that seemed to justify violence against judges. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor both received death threats because they cited foreign law in footnotes. They were not advocating adoption of those laws, but simply noting how others defined and approached common problems. The Right has made this a significant issue and has proposed legislation forbidding judges from citing foreign law and courts. In these contexts, O’Connor as a retired justice felt compelled to speak out against interference with the judiciary noting that such steps could the beginning of degeneration into dictatorship. Reverend Dr. James Dobson, a psychologist, noted that Congress had the power to abolish the liberal Ninth Circuit Court, and DeLay added, “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.” The New York Times editors suggested she also had in mind legislation sharply limiting review of military commission actions regarding detainees. When this legislation passed, the Bush administration immediately announced it would apply it to 160 pending cases, even though the law did not refer to pending cases.
Hostile to judicial restraints, Congressional Republicans stood by while George W. Bush set up an unauthorized wiretap program. The cooperated in Dick Cheney's effort to eviscerate the FISA Court, which had been set up to police electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence operatives within the United States. They have come close to achieving this goal when Congress was under Democratic control in 2007-2008, as fefw Democrats are willing to stand up and be counted. The Dems fear being called weak on defense. At the same time, the Republicans, with Democratic help, nullified a court decision on the rights of detainees and established passed the Military Commissions ACt, which even makes testimony acquired from torture admissible.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Hostile to judicial restraints, Congressional Republicans stood by while George W. Bush set up an unauthorized wiretap program. The cooperated in Dick Cheney's effort to eviscerate the FISA Court, which had been set up to police electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence operatives within the United States. They have come close to achieving this goal when Congress was under Democratic control in 2007-2008, as fefw Democrats are willing to stand up and be counted. The Dems fear being called weak on defense. At the same time, the Republicans, with Democratic help, nullified a court decision on the rights of detainees and established passed the Military Commissions ACt, which even makes testimony acquired from torture admissible.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
The Transformation of Congressional Republicans
The Republican who engineered the Republican triumph of 1994 was neither a NeoCon nor a Christian Restorationist. He had contempt for the gentlemanly Republican leadership he encountered. Newt Gingrich more than anyone else taught his party that ruthlessness had to be their long-term strategy. His tactics yielded great success for the party, but it is becoming clear that they have done grave damage to the legislative process.
Next to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Congressman Newt Gingrich made the greatest contribution to making the GOP the nation’s dominant party. After two unsuccessful attempts to win a seat in Congress, the young history professor was elected in 1978 to represent a suburban Atlanta district. He predicted that he would become Speaker, and with Robert Walker of Pennsylvania and Vin Weber of Minnesota, organized the Conservative Opportunity Society. They set out to organize the Young Turks in the Republican caucus and work to replace what they thought was the tired and too gentlemanly leadership of their party in the House. As Dick Armey, a Young Turk explained, the more traditional members of the caucus were “Establishment Republicans” who were too committed to civility, moderation, bipartisanship, and above all avoiding gridlock. Gingrich complained, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” In 1988, Gingrich told a Heritage Foundation audience that “This war [between liberals and conservatives] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Gingrich and his associates realized that the televised House proceedings on C-SPAN presented them with a great opportunity and they came to monopolize television time when no one else was in the House, particularly after the end of regular business. Because the rule was that the TV cameras focus tightly on the person speaking, most viewers would not realized the chamber was almost empty. Gingrich and his collaborators also set up situations that forced the Democratic leadership to strong arm the “Confederates” or “ boll weevils,” which eventually led some of them to become Republicans.
The Democrats, then laboring with a smaller majority, were tightening procedural rules to make it easier for them to rule. All this played into the hands of Gingrich, who claimed that the Democrats were tyrants who needed to be replaced. Of course, Newt claimed that the House Democrats had long used high-handed tactics to rule. While Gingrich’s greatly exaggerated claims did not win him many supporters in the House, he did acquire a large following among C-SPAN viewers.
When COS speakers began claiming that many Democrats had been apologists for Communist regimes, Speaker O’Neill became enraged and ordered the cameras to show that they were speaking to a nearly empty chamber. A trailer on the screen indicated that the regular business of the House had been concluded. It was within the Speaker’s power to make these changes, but he should have at least notified the Republican leadership about what he was doing. Gingrich dubbed the affair “Camscam” and insisted it showed how dictatorial the Democratic leadership had become. The Republican House leaders were forced to come to his support, and Gingrich became an instant celebrity and leading Republican spokesman in May 1984. With Gingrich setting the tone for Republican rhetoric, civility deteriorated badly. O’Neill was demonized by the Far Right and the Speaker was physically attacked in a Chicago airport by an angry citizen. O’Neill also began to receive death threats.
The angry and frustrated Democratic leadership sought revenge by declaring Representative Frank McCloskey the winner in an Indiana race he had probably lost by four votes. Nineteen Democrats, including ultra-liberal Barney Frank, refused to agree to this abuse of power. Both parties had done this sort of thing in the past, but the Democrats occasionally used procedural tricks to accomplish it and gave Gingrich more ammunition. These Democratic missteps would cost their successors dearly as they would justify far worse abuses of majority power when the Democrats became a minority in 1995. Until Gingrich was within sight of taking over Congress, a substantial number of Republicans actively opposed his tactics, while sharing his desire to win control.
The Georgian had his own political action group called GOPAC and operated the American Campaign Academy to train Republican activists. Two other tax-exempt foundations funded it. Gingrich’s key allies were Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey. Senate Republican leader Robert Dole called them the “young hypocrites.” Similarly, Barry Goldwater disowned the new conservatives, telling them, “Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have.” Newt convinced his House Republican colleagues that they would never regain the majority unless they were constantly on the attack. His first great success was the scalp of Speaker Jim Wright, who was forced to resign in 1989 because he pressured lobbyists to purchase about $40,000 worth of Wright’s book, Reflections of a Public Man. In retrospect, it was a relatively minor matter, particularly in comparison to Gingrich’s own acknowledged ethics violations. Wright was eventually fined $300,000 and found guilty of abusing tax-exempt foundations and misleading the house Ethics Committee in sworn testimony.
In 1986, Gingrich took over a conservative activist organization called GOPAC, which he thought was insufficiently nasty. He proved to be a first-rate fundraiser and used some of the money to recruit right wing candidates for Congress. Richard Mellon Scaife was a significant contributor. He told young Republicans it was acceptable to do things considered wrong if it was for the conservative cause. GOPAC materials for GOP candidates urged them to demonize Democrats and urged them to speak like Newt, calling Democrats advocates of criminal rights, traitors, “bizarre,” “sick,” “pathetic,” and “corrupt.” As late as 1995, Gingrich was supporting the proposition that Vincent Foster was murdered.
The Georgia Congressman characterizing liberals and Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans.” He claimed, “left wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness.” He was certain that Susan Smith’s 1994 drowning of her two children in South Carolina could be traced back to the hedonism of the 1960s and the “counterculture and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” It turned out that Smith’s stepfather was an official in the Christian Coalition and a backer of Pat Robertson for president.
Many had noted that the process had become much more partisan. Some Democrats, like the former Speaker Jim Wright, bear more than a little responsibility for this, but young Republicans under the guidance of Newt Gingrich bear most of the responsibility for the breakdown of the traditional system of governance. “The System,” valued reasonable debate, comity, and willingness to compromise. Within the Republican Party, especially in the Senate, there were still some moderates who were deeply committed to The System. The most important of them was John Chaffee of Rhode Island, who observed, “There’s a new breed of pit terrier around here. What they want to do is get a hold of the calf of somebody’s leg and hang on. There is a spirit of meanness out there.” Some of the change in attitude may be attributed to the rising dominance of the West and South in the Republican Party. Senator David Durenberger noted, “Those of us from the Midwest and Northeast are not familiar with that particular style.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Next to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Congressman Newt Gingrich made the greatest contribution to making the GOP the nation’s dominant party. After two unsuccessful attempts to win a seat in Congress, the young history professor was elected in 1978 to represent a suburban Atlanta district. He predicted that he would become Speaker, and with Robert Walker of Pennsylvania and Vin Weber of Minnesota, organized the Conservative Opportunity Society. They set out to organize the Young Turks in the Republican caucus and work to replace what they thought was the tired and too gentlemanly leadership of their party in the House. As Dick Armey, a Young Turk explained, the more traditional members of the caucus were “Establishment Republicans” who were too committed to civility, moderation, bipartisanship, and above all avoiding gridlock. Gingrich complained, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” In 1988, Gingrich told a Heritage Foundation audience that “This war [between liberals and conservatives] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Gingrich and his associates realized that the televised House proceedings on C-SPAN presented them with a great opportunity and they came to monopolize television time when no one else was in the House, particularly after the end of regular business. Because the rule was that the TV cameras focus tightly on the person speaking, most viewers would not realized the chamber was almost empty. Gingrich and his collaborators also set up situations that forced the Democratic leadership to strong arm the “Confederates” or “ boll weevils,” which eventually led some of them to become Republicans.
The Democrats, then laboring with a smaller majority, were tightening procedural rules to make it easier for them to rule. All this played into the hands of Gingrich, who claimed that the Democrats were tyrants who needed to be replaced. Of course, Newt claimed that the House Democrats had long used high-handed tactics to rule. While Gingrich’s greatly exaggerated claims did not win him many supporters in the House, he did acquire a large following among C-SPAN viewers.
When COS speakers began claiming that many Democrats had been apologists for Communist regimes, Speaker O’Neill became enraged and ordered the cameras to show that they were speaking to a nearly empty chamber. A trailer on the screen indicated that the regular business of the House had been concluded. It was within the Speaker’s power to make these changes, but he should have at least notified the Republican leadership about what he was doing. Gingrich dubbed the affair “Camscam” and insisted it showed how dictatorial the Democratic leadership had become. The Republican House leaders were forced to come to his support, and Gingrich became an instant celebrity and leading Republican spokesman in May 1984. With Gingrich setting the tone for Republican rhetoric, civility deteriorated badly. O’Neill was demonized by the Far Right and the Speaker was physically attacked in a Chicago airport by an angry citizen. O’Neill also began to receive death threats.
The angry and frustrated Democratic leadership sought revenge by declaring Representative Frank McCloskey the winner in an Indiana race he had probably lost by four votes. Nineteen Democrats, including ultra-liberal Barney Frank, refused to agree to this abuse of power. Both parties had done this sort of thing in the past, but the Democrats occasionally used procedural tricks to accomplish it and gave Gingrich more ammunition. These Democratic missteps would cost their successors dearly as they would justify far worse abuses of majority power when the Democrats became a minority in 1995. Until Gingrich was within sight of taking over Congress, a substantial number of Republicans actively opposed his tactics, while sharing his desire to win control.
The Georgian had his own political action group called GOPAC and operated the American Campaign Academy to train Republican activists. Two other tax-exempt foundations funded it. Gingrich’s key allies were Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey. Senate Republican leader Robert Dole called them the “young hypocrites.” Similarly, Barry Goldwater disowned the new conservatives, telling them, “Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have.” Newt convinced his House Republican colleagues that they would never regain the majority unless they were constantly on the attack. His first great success was the scalp of Speaker Jim Wright, who was forced to resign in 1989 because he pressured lobbyists to purchase about $40,000 worth of Wright’s book, Reflections of a Public Man. In retrospect, it was a relatively minor matter, particularly in comparison to Gingrich’s own acknowledged ethics violations. Wright was eventually fined $300,000 and found guilty of abusing tax-exempt foundations and misleading the house Ethics Committee in sworn testimony.
In 1986, Gingrich took over a conservative activist organization called GOPAC, which he thought was insufficiently nasty. He proved to be a first-rate fundraiser and used some of the money to recruit right wing candidates for Congress. Richard Mellon Scaife was a significant contributor. He told young Republicans it was acceptable to do things considered wrong if it was for the conservative cause. GOPAC materials for GOP candidates urged them to demonize Democrats and urged them to speak like Newt, calling Democrats advocates of criminal rights, traitors, “bizarre,” “sick,” “pathetic,” and “corrupt.” As late as 1995, Gingrich was supporting the proposition that Vincent Foster was murdered.
The Georgia Congressman characterizing liberals and Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans.” He claimed, “left wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness.” He was certain that Susan Smith’s 1994 drowning of her two children in South Carolina could be traced back to the hedonism of the 1960s and the “counterculture and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” It turned out that Smith’s stepfather was an official in the Christian Coalition and a backer of Pat Robertson for president.
Many had noted that the process had become much more partisan. Some Democrats, like the former Speaker Jim Wright, bear more than a little responsibility for this, but young Republicans under the guidance of Newt Gingrich bear most of the responsibility for the breakdown of the traditional system of governance. “The System,” valued reasonable debate, comity, and willingness to compromise. Within the Republican Party, especially in the Senate, there were still some moderates who were deeply committed to The System. The most important of them was John Chaffee of Rhode Island, who observed, “There’s a new breed of pit terrier around here. What they want to do is get a hold of the calf of somebody’s leg and hang on. There is a spirit of meanness out there.” Some of the change in attitude may be attributed to the rising dominance of the West and South in the Republican Party. Senator David Durenberger noted, “Those of us from the Midwest and Northeast are not familiar with that particular style.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Monday, April 21, 2008
Constraints Effecting Journalism
Explaining why President George W. Bush was getting an easy ride, Harris wrote,” There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president.” This explanation leaves aside some serious questions. To what extent have liberal journalists been intimidated by the constant refrain that the media has a liberal bias? Has the fact that the three major networks are now in conservative hands anything to do with their increasingly cautious approach to the way they report on conservative politicians and conservative administrations?. Neal Gabler of the Annenberg School of Communications has suggested that the secret of understanding the media is not that it has a liberal bias. Rather, ”it is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible.”
Don Hewitt, producer of “Sixty Minutes”-- a television program that has set a reasonably high standard for integrity, lamented “The 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists.” Jim Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune has even referred to the “death of journalism.” Speaking to trade and corporate seminars can be very lucrative, and there is no way of knowing whether people might modify their reporting patter somewhat to make themselves attractive to these employers. Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, who were on the most influential Sunday commentary program, were talking to insurance and hospital lobbying groups at about $30,000 a speech during the health care debate. Roberts also earned money speaking to Phillip Morris executives. Both of these allegedly liberal commentators had little good to say about Bill Clinton in his second term. Roberts appeared to uncritically accept every charge made about Clinton’s sexual adventures and has been called a “font of Beltway conventional wisdom.” Later, she was inclined to treat President George W. Bush gently, claiming the SEC had exonerated him in a potential inside-trading case when the agency’s letter specifically said it was not exonerating him.’
The decline of journalistic standards that became obvious in the 1990s has often been blamed on the need to compete with around the clock cable television news. Dusko Doder confessed, “Reporters like myself, who have been in the business for a while, talk frequently these days about avoiding certain topics that would clash with the financial interests of their organizations.”
In 2002-2003, the US newspaper industry was netting an average profit margin of 21%, a yield far in excess of what the European press was realizing. Analyst Curtis Gans worried that the media was sacrificing accuracy and balance n order to wreap these gains and noted that the press should provide information and opinions that ignite the fires of a citizens’ democracy. Media outlets are businesses, and they cannot afford to alienate advertisers or people who are likely sources of news. In the mid-1970s, the New York Times moved too far left in its reporting and promptly suffered declining revenues. Articles on problems in health care alone cost it $500,000 in advertising from one former client. A Wall Street analyst then commented that the paper’s support of a tax increase “could put the Times right out of business." The paper had no choice but to reverse course and made Max Frankell managing editor in January 1977. In addition, the increasing concentration of media outlets in fewer hands has increasingly tended to make the press more cautious and conservative. Although large corporate interests tend to hold large numbers of newspapers and electronic media outlets, this is not always the case. By 2002, the Retirement System of Alabama held 36 television stations and 118 daily newspapers. Among its holdings were the NBC station in Memphis and the CBS station in Cleveland. RSA also holds 118 newspapers.
The manner in which the media treats political matters is closely tied to the ownership of the press and media and to the necessity of not alienating advertisers. . Newspapers, magazines, and television stations exist to make money. Wealthy advertisers can influence what a radio station chooses to broadcast. Television was deregulated in the 1980s, and this increased the profit potential of the networks. Public service was no longer mandated, and the industry no longer considered it a goal. Great corporations acquired the Networks. GE bought and continues to hold NBC. Capital Cities acquired ABC, and it later passed to Disney. Lowes purchased CBS, and that was later bought by Viacom. News department staffs were cut to increase profits, and their broadcasts were oriented more toward entertainment than hard news.
The vast majority of newspapers are owned by conservative interests, as are the three major television networks and FOX. The interests of the corporations that own media outlets are affected by how the news is handled. Westinghouse, owner of CBS, and General Electric, owner of NBC, are involved in both the nuclear power industry and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Few negative stories appear about the World Trade Organization which has a record of being anti-labor, anti-human rights, and pro-business. Between January 1, 1998 and February 1, 1999, the three major television networks interviewed 132 people about the desirability of “privatizing” Social Security. That is, permitting people to invest a third of their contribution in mutual funds. Only three of those interviewed were critical of the plan. Investment houses and mutual fund providers are major advertisers. This may have something to do with the skewed coverage of a very important issue.
PBS, which is denounced by conservatives as being too liberal, frequently covers Latin American stories by interviewing current or past US officials or those of governments allied with the United States. Viewers are not likely to learn much about why dissidents there are unhappy with US corporations and US policy. As federal subsidies to public television have decreased, PBS has become more dependent upon corporate underwriting and has found it necessary to become careful about not offending corporate benefactors. In 2002, PBS abruptly cancelled showing a British documentary entitled “Counting On Democracy,” which argued that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had illegally deprived 57,000 people of the right to vote in the presidential election of 2000. A handful of local affiliates obtained the program and showed it, but the PBS decision deprived most viewers of an opportunity to consider an alternative explanation of what happened in the Florida election.
There is a very natural tendency for the press to go easy on those who wield great economic power. In the 1980s and 1990s, the American media was concentrated more in more in the hands of a few vast corporations. It was unable or unwilling to provide sufficient information to the electorate on economic polarization or the growing power of a small economic elite. Republican theorist Kevin Phillips wrote: “For want of insights and data often unobtainable from the corporate media, the public opinion vital to US democracy has trouble remaining vigorous and informed.”
Structural factors help explain the media’s tilt to the right. In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission repealed the time-honored fairness doctrine. This removed any barrier to the partisan use of the media, and talk radio soon became almost completely right-wing. Cable television soon took a decidedly conservative bent, although there are some moderate commentators on the cable and even one outspoken liberal. Under Bill Clinton, Congress opened the door somewhat to media consolidation, which made it easier for most mainstream media to be owned by 6 corporations. George W. Bush’s FCC removed so many more limitations, that the Republican Congress in 2004 actually put aside one sweeping grant of powers to private interests.
Some feared that the internet was the last venue where progressive views could be presented, and it was clear that the time would come when internet access would be almost entirely via broadband access offered by a few providers. For that reason, there was much concern in 2006, when A.T.&.T. offered to purchase Bell South for $67 billion dollars. Progressives sought to block the deal until Net Neutrality or “Equal Access” was guaranteed. The Justice Department approved the merger with no conditions in October but a hitch turned up when one member of the FCC recused himself, leaving a 2-2 tie. To obtain approval AT&T guaranteed Net Neutrality and reasonable rates for the next thirty months.
The media’s tilt to the right was partly due to the influence of advertisers, the fact that most outlets are in conservative hands, and to the “vast success of the long rightist propaganda drive against ‘the liberal media.’” The ceaseless complaints about a liberal media had enabled conservative writers and electronic journalists to stray far beyond any acceptable standard of fairness. Their cover is that they are just redressing long-standing grievances. When Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham died, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran an editorial insinuating that she murdered her husband in order to gain control of the company. Conservatives had long painted Mrs. Graham as an unprincipled liberal because her paper exposed the Watergate story and sometimes disclosed information injurious to the conservative cause. In point of fact he had committed suicide, and there was not a shred of evidence to support the paper’s outrageous hypothesis. The paper’s owner is Richard Mellon Scaife, who had financed the Arkansas Project, which was a massive investigation of the Clintons, and the American Spectator, when it printed reams of unsupported material on the Clintons’ business dealings and sexual activities. That most of the press neither took notice of nor rebuked Scaife’s Tribune-Review indicates, at best, that many simply expected wild and irresponsible attacks from the conservative press.
As late as the 1970s, reporters sometimes did courageous things. Today, however, Russell Baker wrote, “They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition--or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable--but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report to comfort the comfortable.” Kate Graham risked loss of her paper and broadcast empire when she continually supported the investigative work of Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward Arthur Ochs Sulzberger risked federal prosecution when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers for days in an ad-free section, which must also have been a costly proposition. Seymour Hersh has made a career of straight, honest, non-partisan reporting. His penchant for raising questions that challenged those in power have cost him prestigious jobs and a great deal of income. Hirsh’s careful, analytical, investigative journalism has prompted George W. Bush to say, “Seymour Hersh is a liar.” A seasoned journalist has noted that his stories “sting, but there’s no real lasting effect.” This may be because most of the press is marching along safer paths.
There are very few investigative reporters like Seymour Hersh today, in part because investigative reporting is expensive both in terms of paying personnel and in terms of the retribution it can bring. Reporters with deadlines to meet find it easier to draw readily available information from conservative think tanks, or even from Matt Drudge. He carried an untrue and unsourced story that Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln bedroom when Clinton was president, and moderate journalists picked it up and printed it. On an earlier occasion Drudge false accusation that a Clinton aide was beating his wife was quickly picked up and circulated by the mainstream press. These were examples of the mainstream press becoming a vast echo chamber for stories mounted in the aggressive conservative press.
Appearing on BBC’s “Hardtalk” Carl Bernstein noted that there had been a “massive pullback” on tough and investigative reporting. Some of this was due to financial considerations, but much was due to a “horrible political atmosphere” in which a very large part of the population does not want anything approaching full or honest reporting.” Courageous reporting that challenges powerful interests is very infrequent today as demands for higher profits make it impossible for publishers and media managers to show such courage or take such chances. Newspaper CEOs are far less frequently journalists; rather they are business school graduates who eyes are fixed on the bottom line as well as the possibility for acquisition or merger. Local television news programs in big markets enjoy profit margins of 60-70%, and those in smaller markets are not willing to settle for the 10% that would please many small businesses.
CBS’s Dan Rather, the contemporary anchor who seems most committed to honest journalism, admits that “delivering the profit” has become the news media’s “driving force” and admits that this has led to “the decline in quality.” This means that there are fewer people to cover stories but also that there is greater pressure to do less with stories that could antagonize advertisers or viewers. The pursuit of profits has led the press to do more with brain-softening entertainment items and inconsequential material. There is evidence that many patrons like things this way. Even the Sunday talk shows slowly have drifted to the Right. In Bill Clinton’s second term, the guests were reasonably balanced with a slight edge going to the Republicans. During the George W. Bush presidency, conservative guests significantly outnumbered liberals, and the panels were strongly tilted to the right. Outspoken liberals like Paul Krugman rarely appeared. The one exception was Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Don Hewitt, producer of “Sixty Minutes”-- a television program that has set a reasonably high standard for integrity, lamented “The 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists.” Jim Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune has even referred to the “death of journalism.” Speaking to trade and corporate seminars can be very lucrative, and there is no way of knowing whether people might modify their reporting patter somewhat to make themselves attractive to these employers. Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, who were on the most influential Sunday commentary program, were talking to insurance and hospital lobbying groups at about $30,000 a speech during the health care debate. Roberts also earned money speaking to Phillip Morris executives. Both of these allegedly liberal commentators had little good to say about Bill Clinton in his second term. Roberts appeared to uncritically accept every charge made about Clinton’s sexual adventures and has been called a “font of Beltway conventional wisdom.” Later, she was inclined to treat President George W. Bush gently, claiming the SEC had exonerated him in a potential inside-trading case when the agency’s letter specifically said it was not exonerating him.’
The decline of journalistic standards that became obvious in the 1990s has often been blamed on the need to compete with around the clock cable television news. Dusko Doder confessed, “Reporters like myself, who have been in the business for a while, talk frequently these days about avoiding certain topics that would clash with the financial interests of their organizations.”
In 2002-2003, the US newspaper industry was netting an average profit margin of 21%, a yield far in excess of what the European press was realizing. Analyst Curtis Gans worried that the media was sacrificing accuracy and balance n order to wreap these gains and noted that the press should provide information and opinions that ignite the fires of a citizens’ democracy. Media outlets are businesses, and they cannot afford to alienate advertisers or people who are likely sources of news. In the mid-1970s, the New York Times moved too far left in its reporting and promptly suffered declining revenues. Articles on problems in health care alone cost it $500,000 in advertising from one former client. A Wall Street analyst then commented that the paper’s support of a tax increase “could put the Times right out of business." The paper had no choice but to reverse course and made Max Frankell managing editor in January 1977. In addition, the increasing concentration of media outlets in fewer hands has increasingly tended to make the press more cautious and conservative. Although large corporate interests tend to hold large numbers of newspapers and electronic media outlets, this is not always the case. By 2002, the Retirement System of Alabama held 36 television stations and 118 daily newspapers. Among its holdings were the NBC station in Memphis and the CBS station in Cleveland. RSA also holds 118 newspapers.
The manner in which the media treats political matters is closely tied to the ownership of the press and media and to the necessity of not alienating advertisers. . Newspapers, magazines, and television stations exist to make money. Wealthy advertisers can influence what a radio station chooses to broadcast. Television was deregulated in the 1980s, and this increased the profit potential of the networks. Public service was no longer mandated, and the industry no longer considered it a goal. Great corporations acquired the Networks. GE bought and continues to hold NBC. Capital Cities acquired ABC, and it later passed to Disney. Lowes purchased CBS, and that was later bought by Viacom. News department staffs were cut to increase profits, and their broadcasts were oriented more toward entertainment than hard news.
The vast majority of newspapers are owned by conservative interests, as are the three major television networks and FOX. The interests of the corporations that own media outlets are affected by how the news is handled. Westinghouse, owner of CBS, and General Electric, owner of NBC, are involved in both the nuclear power industry and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Few negative stories appear about the World Trade Organization which has a record of being anti-labor, anti-human rights, and pro-business. Between January 1, 1998 and February 1, 1999, the three major television networks interviewed 132 people about the desirability of “privatizing” Social Security. That is, permitting people to invest a third of their contribution in mutual funds. Only three of those interviewed were critical of the plan. Investment houses and mutual fund providers are major advertisers. This may have something to do with the skewed coverage of a very important issue.
PBS, which is denounced by conservatives as being too liberal, frequently covers Latin American stories by interviewing current or past US officials or those of governments allied with the United States. Viewers are not likely to learn much about why dissidents there are unhappy with US corporations and US policy. As federal subsidies to public television have decreased, PBS has become more dependent upon corporate underwriting and has found it necessary to become careful about not offending corporate benefactors. In 2002, PBS abruptly cancelled showing a British documentary entitled “Counting On Democracy,” which argued that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had illegally deprived 57,000 people of the right to vote in the presidential election of 2000. A handful of local affiliates obtained the program and showed it, but the PBS decision deprived most viewers of an opportunity to consider an alternative explanation of what happened in the Florida election.
There is a very natural tendency for the press to go easy on those who wield great economic power. In the 1980s and 1990s, the American media was concentrated more in more in the hands of a few vast corporations. It was unable or unwilling to provide sufficient information to the electorate on economic polarization or the growing power of a small economic elite. Republican theorist Kevin Phillips wrote: “For want of insights and data often unobtainable from the corporate media, the public opinion vital to US democracy has trouble remaining vigorous and informed.”
Structural factors help explain the media’s tilt to the right. In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission repealed the time-honored fairness doctrine. This removed any barrier to the partisan use of the media, and talk radio soon became almost completely right-wing. Cable television soon took a decidedly conservative bent, although there are some moderate commentators on the cable and even one outspoken liberal. Under Bill Clinton, Congress opened the door somewhat to media consolidation, which made it easier for most mainstream media to be owned by 6 corporations. George W. Bush’s FCC removed so many more limitations, that the Republican Congress in 2004 actually put aside one sweeping grant of powers to private interests.
Some feared that the internet was the last venue where progressive views could be presented, and it was clear that the time would come when internet access would be almost entirely via broadband access offered by a few providers. For that reason, there was much concern in 2006, when A.T.&.T. offered to purchase Bell South for $67 billion dollars. Progressives sought to block the deal until Net Neutrality or “Equal Access” was guaranteed. The Justice Department approved the merger with no conditions in October but a hitch turned up when one member of the FCC recused himself, leaving a 2-2 tie. To obtain approval AT&T guaranteed Net Neutrality and reasonable rates for the next thirty months.
The media’s tilt to the right was partly due to the influence of advertisers, the fact that most outlets are in conservative hands, and to the “vast success of the long rightist propaganda drive against ‘the liberal media.’” The ceaseless complaints about a liberal media had enabled conservative writers and electronic journalists to stray far beyond any acceptable standard of fairness. Their cover is that they are just redressing long-standing grievances. When Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham died, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran an editorial insinuating that she murdered her husband in order to gain control of the company. Conservatives had long painted Mrs. Graham as an unprincipled liberal because her paper exposed the Watergate story and sometimes disclosed information injurious to the conservative cause. In point of fact he had committed suicide, and there was not a shred of evidence to support the paper’s outrageous hypothesis. The paper’s owner is Richard Mellon Scaife, who had financed the Arkansas Project, which was a massive investigation of the Clintons, and the American Spectator, when it printed reams of unsupported material on the Clintons’ business dealings and sexual activities. That most of the press neither took notice of nor rebuked Scaife’s Tribune-Review indicates, at best, that many simply expected wild and irresponsible attacks from the conservative press.
As late as the 1970s, reporters sometimes did courageous things. Today, however, Russell Baker wrote, “They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition--or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable--but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report to comfort the comfortable.” Kate Graham risked loss of her paper and broadcast empire when she continually supported the investigative work of Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward Arthur Ochs Sulzberger risked federal prosecution when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers for days in an ad-free section, which must also have been a costly proposition. Seymour Hersh has made a career of straight, honest, non-partisan reporting. His penchant for raising questions that challenged those in power have cost him prestigious jobs and a great deal of income. Hirsh’s careful, analytical, investigative journalism has prompted George W. Bush to say, “Seymour Hersh is a liar.” A seasoned journalist has noted that his stories “sting, but there’s no real lasting effect.” This may be because most of the press is marching along safer paths.
There are very few investigative reporters like Seymour Hersh today, in part because investigative reporting is expensive both in terms of paying personnel and in terms of the retribution it can bring. Reporters with deadlines to meet find it easier to draw readily available information from conservative think tanks, or even from Matt Drudge. He carried an untrue and unsourced story that Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln bedroom when Clinton was president, and moderate journalists picked it up and printed it. On an earlier occasion Drudge false accusation that a Clinton aide was beating his wife was quickly picked up and circulated by the mainstream press. These were examples of the mainstream press becoming a vast echo chamber for stories mounted in the aggressive conservative press.
Appearing on BBC’s “Hardtalk” Carl Bernstein noted that there had been a “massive pullback” on tough and investigative reporting. Some of this was due to financial considerations, but much was due to a “horrible political atmosphere” in which a very large part of the population does not want anything approaching full or honest reporting.” Courageous reporting that challenges powerful interests is very infrequent today as demands for higher profits make it impossible for publishers and media managers to show such courage or take such chances. Newspaper CEOs are far less frequently journalists; rather they are business school graduates who eyes are fixed on the bottom line as well as the possibility for acquisition or merger. Local television news programs in big markets enjoy profit margins of 60-70%, and those in smaller markets are not willing to settle for the 10% that would please many small businesses.
CBS’s Dan Rather, the contemporary anchor who seems most committed to honest journalism, admits that “delivering the profit” has become the news media’s “driving force” and admits that this has led to “the decline in quality.” This means that there are fewer people to cover stories but also that there is greater pressure to do less with stories that could antagonize advertisers or viewers. The pursuit of profits has led the press to do more with brain-softening entertainment items and inconsequential material. There is evidence that many patrons like things this way. Even the Sunday talk shows slowly have drifted to the Right. In Bill Clinton’s second term, the guests were reasonably balanced with a slight edge going to the Republicans. During the George W. Bush presidency, conservative guests significantly outnumbered liberals, and the panels were strongly tilted to the right. Outspoken liberals like Paul Krugman rarely appeared. The one exception was Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
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