House Democratic Leadership: Not Just Complicit but Also Self-Destructive
by Glenn Greenwald
The signs are unmistakably clear that what was always inevitable — full compliance by the House Democratic leadership with Bush’s demands on warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty — is now imminent. House leaders spent the week floating their specific proposals for how they intend to comply in full, and yesterday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, refused to criticize the President or the Senate FISA bill, and repeatedly and meekly expressed his willingness “this week” to give what he called full “blanket immunity” to telecoms (C&L has the video of Reyes’ astoundingly weak and incoherent answers in response to Blitzer’s Bush-mimicking questions).
This is, of course, everything except surprising. No rational person who has watched Congressional Democrats since they took over Congress could possibly have expected them to do anything but what they always do: namely, whatever they’re told to do by the White House. The last thing they were ever going to do was stand their ground over Americans’ basic liberties and the rule of law, concepts about which they couldn’t possibly care less.
The whole drama they started when they refused to pass the Senate bill by the deadline was never about anything substantive. They were just throwing a little petulant tantrum because they felt they were being treated unfairly again because they were given only a few days to comply with the President’s orders, when they wanted a couple of weeks to comply.
And their irritation wasn’t even directed at the President as much as it was at the Senate for being so unfair in waiting until the deadline to pass a FISA bill, thus giving the House only a small amount of time to capitulate in full (on CNN, Chairman Reyes refrained almost completely from criticizing the White House, instead reserving his criticism for the Senate over this procedural insult). The only “principle” the bulk of Congress believes in is the preservation of their own ceremonial customs. That’s all this drama was ever about.
There’s very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don’t actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don’t actually care about any of it. That’s all a given.
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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/03/7434/
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