More than 100 days into this congressional session, and into George W. Bush's second term, a federal government controlled entirely by Republicans is wandering off into a wilderness of political extremism and policy negligence that's becoming alarming to anyone worried about the future of the country.
The House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans as though it were a private country club, is focused on ramming through interest-group favored legislation remote from the real challenges facing America. House GOPers are openly bickering over strategy and tactics with their Senate colleagues and with the White House. Meanwhile, the Senate is on the brink of a nasty and pointless fight over the alleged "right" of the president to get every federal judge he wants, which is likely to paralyze Senate action on its real business for much of the session. And the president himself remains obsessed with barnstorming around the country to promote an ill-defined but fundamentally irresponsible Social Security privatization scheme that is steadily losing support every day he talks about it.
With all due respect to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Republicans are now publicly identified to an irreversible degree with the man who has actually led them from the day Newt Gingrich stepped down, Tom DeLay of Texas. DeLay's ethics recidivism and blunt advocacy of the crudest sort of alliances between legislators and lobbyists is bad enough. But his chronic habit of treating any and all criticism as just another front in an apocalyptic partisan, ideological, cultural, and religious war is damaging to our entire political system.
Senate Republicans have traditionally exercised a restraining hand on the ideological excesses of their House colleagues, but not in this Congress. Under the leadership of Bill Frist (Tenn.), who is reportedly planning to run for president in 2008, Senate GOPers are creating their very own firestorm of divisiveness, in the impending battle over judicial nominations and the "nuclear option."
In the guise of manufactured outrage over a handful of lower-court nominees whose confirmation is being blocked by Senate Democrats, Republicans are seeking to fundamentally change Senate rules to outlaw filibusters and require an up-or-down vote on judicial nominations generally, in anticipation of highly controversial Supreme Court appointments by Bush during the balance of his presidency. All the talk of fairness aside, Bill Frist himself has made the underlying issue of whipping up the GOP's social conservative "base" over issues like abortion pretty clear, most recently by attending a conference aimed at promoting the bizarre and disreputable view that Democrats are disqualifying judicial nominees because they are Christians. Moreover, in response to an offer by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to make it possible for Bush to get some of his lower-court judges confirmed if the GOP backs off the "nuclear option," Frist made it clear he is not interested in any compromise at all.
As Frist leads Republicans off the deep end, where DeLay has taken up permanent residence, you'd think the GOP's maximum leader, President George W. Bush, would try to fill the vacuum. It's important to understand that Bush is hardly soaring above the fray, and is indeed down there in the trenches leading the charge to the right. The "nuclear option" gambit would go away in a nanosecond with one word from the White House. And Bush has every opportunity to send signals that DeLay's leadership style is not exactly emblematic of "compassionate conservatism." But just this week the president went out of his way to embrace DeLay. And he is adding to the bad atmosphere in Washington with his unending crusade for a phony "reform" of Social Security, while also insisting on Senate confirmation of the most controversial person available as ambassador to the United Nations.
We don't know exactly why the Republican Party and its leaders have decided to go on an ideological bender this year, but their pattern of behavior is becoming clear and consistent. Democrats in Congress and elsewhere have two obligations: to keep the party controlling Washington from dragging the whole country off into the wilderness, and then, to begin offering a constructive alternative agenda for a country badly in need of leadership.
