By PLS
There were hearings, for a change. And before the bill with the Iraq pullout proviso was passed, there were debates, too. Now, if the President vetoes it, as he has pledged to do, he will have to justify his war policy publicly. Again. He will also have to negotiate a mutually acceptable replacement, also in the open. Good. Public discussion is what real democracy is all about. It’s also what this secretive administration has evaded as much as possible during its first six years in office, even as George W. Bush has adorned his speeches with genuflections to democracy—for others.
Whenever the White House is held by one party and Congress is controlled by the other, it’s likely that crafting legislation will be more laborious. It will take longer. Generally the presidentially out-of-power party attempts to block executive proposals considered obnoxious for good or sordid reasons. Cross-party negotiation and/or skillful compromise may end the logjam, but excessively partisan legislation tends to languish or drop by the wayside.
“Inefficient!” the critics cry, when the legislative process (or an uncongenial majority) slows, stalls or prevents passage of a bill the president wants. “Obstructive!”
In fact, Americans tend to overvalue efficiency in most walks of life, including politics. In the case of federal legislation the Founders wrote a Constitution chock full of these time-consuming checks and balances, and they had it right: divided government is safer. It promotes debate. It promotes accountability. It promotes transparency. It encourages broadly acceptable action and prevents extreme legislation by ideologues. It brings the nation together. (Well, not always, and that's not necessarily bad either.)
Now that the Democrats control Congress while the Republicans continue to hold the Executive, we're seeing more debate, more investigation, more insistence on accountability—and since the war is not going very well (for reasons I’m going to ignore here), a Democratic Congress has sent up a war-funding bill in grave danger of incurring a rare presidential veto. In the process of watching this bill being crafted, the public has learned far more about the roots, progress and prospects of the war than a Republican-led Congress ever wanted to reveal about this Republican-conducted war.
We have also now learned definitively what many have suspected all along: the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories were built on lies to create heroic figures for the populace to empathize with and rally around. Jessica Lynch, now that she has finally been asked to do so, has testified under oath that she did not so much as fire a shot during the ambush in which the poster-pretty soldier was wounded. Pat Tillman’s comrades-in-arms have testified that they were ordered not to divulge the friendly-fire truth that would put a hole in the fabric of lies was woven around the death of the football star. Hopefully the military and civilian manipulators will be identified and dealt with. Re Lynch, it’s recently been claimed that much of the elaboration surrounding her role during the ambush was not of the Army’s doing. If so, by letting those fabrications stand uncorrected, the Army allowed itself to be tainted by the business of misleading the public with a feel-good heroine to the advantage of an embattled Bush administration. Shall we call it lying at a one remove? So the Army is not off the hook here. Nor is the Administration, which might also have issued a correction. Jessica Lynch was used. The American public's credulity was abused.
Furthermore, if the Republicans were still in control of Congress, we would know nothing of the Bush administration’s criminal axing of U.S. attorneys who refused to warp the judicial system to boost Republican chances in the 2006 Congressional elections, and we would be in the dark about the way administration may also have massively violated the Hatch act in an effort to use federal employees to help secure a permanent Republican majority.
And on and on!
Thank goodness for divided government!