Red, White and Liberal
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As for Bush 41, he told the FBI on December 12, 1986, and testified to the Office of Independent Council on January 11, 1988, that he received regular information about arms sales to Iran and knew about 1985 Israeli arms shipments. But in an August 5, 1987, interview with David Broder at the Washington Post, Bush 41 said he didn't oppose the sale of arms to Iran because he never heard the objections of Secretary of State George Shultz or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger: "Maybe I would have had a stronger view, but when you don't know something, it's hard to react. . . . We were not in the loop." And the September 8, 1992, Broder column states:
According to a memo dictated by Shultz on August 7, Weinberger referred to Bush's statement in the interview and said it was "terrible. He was on the other side. It's on the Record. Why did he say that?" According to the executive summary of the Independent Counsel's report, "The Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, and national security advisors Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter; of these officials, only Weinberger and Shultz dissented from the policy decision.
The Iran-Contra scandal had a very happy ending for the principals because Bush 41 gave very nice holiday gifts to his buddies as he was headed out the White House door. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh indicted Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, CIA clandestine services chief Clair George, and Dewey Clarridge, the CIA's European Division chief, for taking part in a cover-up, but all received last-minute pardons from the outgoing president. Merry Christmas.
Good for Thou but Not for Thee
One of the issues that the Republicans rode to victory in 1994 was term limits. The issue was so hot that even the Speaker of the House, Democrat Tom Foley, was scorched. Republican George Nethercutt knocked Foley off after thirty years of service, largely by pledging to serve no more than six years. But when his six years were up, guess what? The poster boy for term limits ran again. And again. Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal compiled Nethercutt's arguments for breaking his promise:
Some of them are pathetic, as when he said (to the Washington Post) that he had "blurted out" his promise in 1994. Others are irrelevant, as when he told The American Spectator, "I feel I have to finish the work I started." (He did not promise, in 1994, to stay until he felt he was finished.) Some are crass, as when he told The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer that in 1994, "I didn't realize I'd be in the majority. I didn't realize I'd be on die Appropriations Committee. That means something for our district—not for me, but for our district." . .. Still others are simply weird. "I'm less enamored with the idea of term limitations, and I'm the perfect example of why we don't need them," he told The Post.
This is the same man who said about Bill Clinton: "Your word is your bond, whether it's your public life or your private life. The honorable thing for him to do is to resign."
It's ironic that conservatives, who claim to dislike government so much, spend their lives and fortunes trying to be a part of it. And once they get there, they find out that the perks are so good, they don't want to leave. The antigovernment conservatives began to blossom during the Reagan era. These are the politicians who ran for office telling us they hated the government and that we were being overtaxed, and then were all too happy to get government paychecks funded by taxpayer dollars. Before Spencer Abraham lost reelection as a senator from Michigan, he sponsored Senate bill S. 896. This was the Department of Energy Abolishment Act, calling for the "complete abolishment of the Department of Energy." But on January 18, 2001, Abraham testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the department was now necessary: "... a number of new developments have occurred that either significantly addressed these concerns or put them in a new light." And why was Senator Abraham testifying before his former colleagues? Why, to become secretary of the Department of Energy. While we're on the subject of staying intellectually consistent, how about applying it to adulterers? When allegations of adultery against former Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston were raised just as he was about to become Speaker of the House, he resigned. He was then widely praised by conservatives for being a man of great integrity. I suppose this means that if Clinton stepped down at that moment he would have been crowned the Heritage Foundation Man of the Year. Personally, I want a president who is sexually satisfied. Besides, if a president can't get some, who can? Eventually, it came out that not only did Clinton have sex in the Oval Office, but he did so while talking on the phone with congressmen! First they whined that he was having sex on taxpayer time and the taxpayer dime, and then they complained that he was working at the same time he was being pleasured. I, for one, am glad to know that a president can be good at multitasking.
Size Does Count
Conservatives are always claiming that they want smaller government. Ronald Reagan, who began the modern-day conservative movement, ran on the issues of less government and tax simplification. But tell me, did it get easier to do your taxes under Ronald Reagan? I've yet to hear one person praise how much kinder and gentler the IRS is. And Reagan actually expanded the federal payroll by 61,000, while that big-spending, government-loving liberal, Bill Clinton, reduced it by 373,000.
But here's the way it really is, as reported by the Financial Times on September 13, 2002: "Since the 1960s, the Republican and Democrat administrations have switched places on economic policy. The pattern is so well established that the generalization can no longer be denied: the Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility, trade restriction, big government and bad microeconomics." The Financial Times went on to compare the records of Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43, reminding us that deficits tend to rise during Republican administrations, and that Bush's policies could leave us in the same budget hole that Reagan's did.
As for free trade, it was Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton who advanced it as policy, not the Republicans who served in between: "Highlights include George W. Bush's tariffs on steel and lumber and Ronald Reagan's voluntary export restraints on autos. And the trend toward deregulation that most imagine began in the Reagan administration? It began under Jimmy Carter in airlines, trucking, natural gas and banking. Mr. Reagan continued the trend."
Here's another switcheroo. When he was running for Congress, Senator Lindsay Graham called for the abolition of the Department of Education, but once his own party controlled the executive branch, he changed his tune. As the Greenville News reported on January 31, 2003, "Graham and other Republicans who in 1994 promised to eliminate the Education Department last year supported Bush's multi-billion-dollar expansion of the department."
Well into the Bush 43 administration, Fortune magazine declared, "The era of big government has returned," and reported spending was up 13.9 percent for the fiscal 2002 fiscal year. And it wasn't the reaction to the September 11 atrocities that accounted for profligate spending. While $30 billion in spending was related to the attacks on America, $91 billion went for other goodies, like highway construction and medical research. And rhetoric doesn't always match reality. After proposing a 4 percent reduction in agriculture subsidies in 2001, Bush 43 signed the most expensive farm subsidy bill in history, calling for $190 billion in spending over a decade.
Listening to Bush 43's 2003 State of the Union address, you would have thought he was a liberal. In all, twenty new federal programs were proposed in this speech, but small-government advocates can take heart. That's down from thirty-nine proposed new initiatives the year before.
Bush 43's big government got even bigger in the wake of September 11, 2001. The Department of Homeland Security combined twenty-two agencies and a hundred seventy thousand workers into one huge bureaucracy. And I've already detailed how efforts to encroach our civil liberties by our government's executive branch make George Orwell's 1984 seem as prescient as Nostradamus.
Here Comes the Judge
Republicans have consistently whined when Democrat-controlled Senates haven't approved judges in an expeditious manner. Judges Priscilla Owen and Charles Pickering, in particular, were opposed by liberals, and became right-wing causes celebres. But the facts don't support the level of anger Republicans have toward Democrats on this score. The Senate ended its 2002 session having confirmed 72 new judges appointed by President Bush, the best one-year record for confirmations since 1994. This 107th Congress approved 100 judges, compared to the 73 confirmations President Clinton won in the 104th Congress, 98 in the 105th, and 72 in the 106th.
A 1999 study showed that hostility toward President Clinton by the Republican-controlled Senate was a major factor in slowing the confirmation rate of judges to historic lows. The study, coauthored by political science professors Elliot Slotnick of Ohio State University and Sheldon Goldman of the University of Massachusetts, showed that the 1992 Democrat-controlled Senate took 92 days on average to hold hearings on Bush 41's nominees for district judges, but that the Republican-controlled Senate of 1998 took an average of 160 days to act on President Clinton's nominations. And the study found that it wasn't the judges' ideology that held up the process here; Clinton's nominees, especially in his second term, tended to be moderate, not liberal. Goldman shows that Clinton faced "unprecedented delay . . . and acrimony" over his appointees. So why did Republicans hold up needed judgeships? Clearly, it was because they didn't like the tie Clinton was wearing, especially when it was the Zegna tie allegedly given to him by Monica Lewinsky.
Justice Owen was so extreme on abortion that even many Republicans, like those on the all-Republican Texas court, didn't concur with her. Texas law makes exceptions for underage girls seeking abortions who don't feel they can inform their parents, but that wasn't good enough for Justice Owen. Justice Owen voted to deny an abortion to a girl, claiming she didn't understand the seriousness of it. Alberto Gonzales, who served with Justice Owen on the Texas court and, ironically became Bush 43 's White House counsel, wrote that to construe the Texas statute narrowly "would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism." Texas is one of nine states where judges run partisan political campaigns to get their jobs, and Justice Owen had the distinction of taking a political contribution of $8,600 from Enron; and then later writing a decision reversing a lower court order that saved that fine company $225,000 in taxes.
Other golden oldies from the Owen file include a ruling in favor of an insurance company that denied a benefit for a poor family after it informed the family it would pay the bill. She took a year and a half to issue an opinion that involved a young man injured in a truck accident. In the interim, the man died because his family couldn't afford nursing care because the appeal delayed the multimillion-dollar verdict. This, from the state of Texas, home of compassionate conservatism.
Judge Pickering was also opposed by Democrats, not for being a conservative, but for being outside the conservative mainstream. In 1994, Judge Pickering worked to reduce the sentence required by law and given to a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of a home of an interracial couple. He once referred to the "one-person-one-vote" law as "obtrusive." I have to agree with him here. If the person voting is a right-wing reactionary, it is obtrusive, indeed. According to independentjudiciary.com, Pickering, as a law student, "wrote a law review article suggesting ways the state could amend its miscegenation statute to ensure it would be found constitutional and enforceable. . . . When asked in 1990 about the article, he stated that he had no opinion at the time about whether interracial marriage should be illegal. He now says he does not think it should be, but he has never disavowed the content of the article."
Should we believe that Pickering had "no opinion" on whether a white could be able to marry a black? That's safe, isn't it? Imagine having "no opinion" about whether people should be allowed to marry whomever they want.
Sounds just like Clarence Thomas who, during his confirmation hearings, swore under oath that he had no opinion on abortion. Thomas claimed that when the case was decided in 1973, he was a married law student with a job. He claimed, "I did not spend a lot of time around the law school doing what all the students enjoyed so much, and that is debating all the current cases and all of the slip opinions." Okay, Justice Thomas, did you even think about current issues and have views on them? Thomas added, in an exchange with Senator Patrick Leahy, that he never mixed it up on the issue of Roe v. Wade. "If you are asking me whether or not I have ever debated the contents of it, the answer to that is no, Senator."
Exasperated, Leahy pointed out that Thomas had participated in a working group that criticized the Roe decision, and he had cited the abortion issue in more than one article. But Thomas steadfastly refused to comment, saying, "Senator, your question to me was, did I debate the contents of Roe v. Wade, do I have this day an opinion, a personal opinion, on the outcome in Roe v. Wade, and my answer to you is that I do not." Now, I know judges are supposed to be impartial on the bench, but to deny that you have a personal opinion on one of the most-often debated judicial topics? This strains credulity.
Judge Pickering's record included a few other issues that rightfully needed examination. For one thing, his rulings were disproportionately reversed on appeal. And in an effort to secure his move up the judicial ladder, he solicited letters of commendation from lawyers who practiced before him.
Not that Republicans would ever extract revenge at the expense of national security, but a request by the Judiciary Committee for $1.5 million to investigate failures in the Intelligence Committee was blocked by Senator Lott as payback for the rejection of Judge Pickering. Lott accused the committee of showing a "deliberate pattern of obstructionism" on Bush's judicial nominees and said, "I am hard-pressed to understand why the committee under its current leadership should be entrusted with further responsibilities and resources when they have failed to take action on their primary responsibilities."
But why should Republicans explore intelligence failures when they can make a political point? Maybe so that it'll take longer to analyze why we can't catch terrorists before they kill thousands of Americans, and maybe that will teach those pesky Dems a lesson!
Republicans complained that their judicial nominees were rejected in committee before they could ever have a vote in the full Senate. They may have a point when they say that it would benefit the democratic process to have nominees voted up or down by the entire body, but that didn't seem to matter when the Republicans controlled the Senate. Bill Lann Lee couldn't get a hearing when he was up for the position of assistant attorney general because of his pro-affirmative-action views. And then senator John Ashcroft was against a full Senate vote for Missouri Supreme Court Justice Ronnie White because he didn't agree with one decision White made against imposing the death penalty.
During the confirmation hearings of Miguel Estrada for appointment to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Democrats complained that, just as in the Thomas hearings, precious little information was available about the prospective judge. He gave terse answers during his hearing, and his view of the Constitution's role in the judiciary was unclear. As in the Thomas case, this was fine with Republicans. But when a Clinton nominee, Marcia Berzon, was up for a job with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Republicans wanted transcripts of every ACLU meeting that occured when she was a member, even those meetings she didn't attend. Senate Judiciary chair Orrin Hatch said at the time: "Determining which of President Clinton's nominees will become activists is complicated and it will require the Senate to be more diligent and extensive in its questioning of nominees' jurisprudential views."
The only reason there was a vacancy for Estrada to fill in the first place was because Republicans passed over many Clinton nominees, claiming there were too many judges on that court already. They were just running out the Clinton clock, waiting for their own chance to fill the seat.
It was Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who "declared . . . he'd block every admi
nistration nominee to the federal bench for the rest of Clinton's term in protest of the recent reap-pointment of a member of the National Labor Relations Board without Senate's consent."
In this case, the appointee was Sara Fox, and the appointment was controversial because it was a "recess appointment," one a president is allowed to make when Congress is in, of all things, recess. Clinton was raked over the coals for using this provision to make controversial appointments. But this is the same process Bush 43 used to appoint Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to a post as the top lawyer in the Labor Department. Oh, I get it. Recess appointments are only valid if they're accompanied by nepotism.
Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne pointed out the double standards in judicial appointments in a May 2002 column: "Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott, who now demands that the Senate vote on Bush's judges, is the same Trent Lott who declared in 1999 that 'getting more federal judges is not what I came here to do.' He added that there are not a lot of people saying, 'Give us more federal judges.' Except that this is exactly what Lott is saying now."
When Earl Warren was Supreme Court Chief Justice, presiding over the civil rights era, conservatives accused him of running a liberal activist court. Even if we were to concede that point, let's not be in denial about the conservative activist court run by William Rehnquist. The Warren Court
struck down federal law in twenty cases over sixteen years. The Rehnquist court has struck down thirty-two laws in eight years. Eleven of these were states' rights cases in which the states' laws were upheld; and in many of these cases, the states were trying to avoid enforcement of civil rights guaranteed by federal law. And let's not forget how this states'-rights-friendly court wasn't so friendly to the Supreme Court of Florida when it decided in Al Gore's favor in the presidential election controversy of 2000.