Damage By Conservatives to All 3 Branches of the US Government; Part I of III Parts

Congress in Session

Since I began as a political feature writer and blogger, I have been taking on the current administration for their various political, and quite often illegal activities. To date, I have been especially focused on the loss of personal freedoms that have stood for decades or in some cases centuries, such as the loss of Habeas Corpus. What has been even more disturbing from this over-riding of the constitution by President Bush and company, is the overall devastation that the neo-cons have been responsible for in all three branches of our government. In many cases, moves by this administration and certain Republican Senators and Representatives, or some of their lobbyists and supporters have caused damages that could now take years or decades to repair, if in fact repair is even possible.

This article will be the first of a three, or possibly a four part series to high-light some of the illegal, or at least unethical activities that have occurred over the past two decades and their subsequent negative results. Many of these actions, which were not just illegal, but were also blatant examples of ignoring the US Constitution and some of the rules of order within the branches that have stood for over 200 years. Please note that I will not be using just the information that I have been able to obtain personally, but I will also quote from the findings of other individuals or organizations such as; Juliet Eilperin – Capital Hill Reporter, Matt Taibbi – Editor Rolling Stone Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation Magazine, Alan Wolfe – Author and Professor of Political Science at Boston College, John W. Dean – Previous Republican White House Counsel and current political author, Thomas Mann – of the Brookings Institute and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute (Mann & Ornstein were also the co-authors of the best seller on the latest Republican Congress entitled: The Broken Branch) David Price – House Representative / North Carolina and many others as will be noted.

The foundation for what started the GOP's blatant disregard for the constitution starts with their basic, negative attitude toward government in general. The success of the Republicans in this endeavor began seriously with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. It then went into high gear when the Republicans took over both houses of congress in the mid 1990’s. This anti-government attitude is still strongly supported by a couple of often repeated quotations from two of President Reagan’s most famous speeches, one which was used in his first inagural speech. They were: ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.” And the one quote that is still played many times every week on various talk radio shows: “The nine most frightening words that I ever heard were: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ “

From the beginning of President Reagan’s first term, he proceeded to use his presidency for dismanteling as many government areas of regulation and oversight as possible. Subsequent to President Reagan’s efforts, the quest for dropping congressional oversight went from doing it through the normal, legal political processes, to what later became the direction from the Republican leadership. That leadership consisted of key House Representatives such as; Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and Denny Hastert, and Senators Bill Frist and Ted Stevens. From these individuals came the basic lessons to the Republican Congress on how to expand their agenda while continuing to ignore the US Constitution. The following are some key examples of their questionable or sometimes illegal ways for doing the people's business:

Not Following the Established Rule of Order:

1. Early in 1996, the Republican House came under the new leadership of Newt Gingrich where upon he established the “Tuesday - Thursday” rule for the official working days in the House. No business in the House started until Tuesday and everyone caught their planes or headed home on Thursday afternoons. Therefore, they only worked three days a week while in session. Subsequently, in order to get the work done in three days, much of the floor debate time was severely cut back. (More on this later.)

2. From the beginning, Speaker Gingrich encouraged junior house members to NOT move to or bring their families to Washington DC. This lack of socializing with the other congressmen, regardless of their party affiliation tended to support the "us against them" attitude between the Republicans and the Democrats.

3. Under Speaker Gingrich, House member's trips abroad were severely cut back which kept both parties from getting to know the members of the other party. The Republican’s tried to sell this as a “cutting expenses” apporach, which did fool everyone for a while. However, the real long-term goal was for keeping any real partisan efforts between the House members totally at bay which would help them make Washington DC into a “one party Republican town”.

4. Speaker Gingrich then went on to cut back and to help limit any real floor debates by limiting all the lawmakers to a maximum of 2 minute floor speeches. Therefore, the Democrats were never able to offer any true deliberations or contributions. One Democratic Representative was overheard saying; "All you can do in 2 minutes is insult the other guy." This was exactly what the Republican leadership wanted; more separation of the two parties.

5. Gingrich eventually abolished the Seniority System for determining committee leadership. He personally took on the responsibility of appointing committee chairmen, allowing him to also control their agendas. He therefore became a virtual, "Ruler or King of the House of Representatives."

6. Then things started to disinigrate a bit. After Tom DeLay was successful in redistricting Texas to favor Republicans, as the House Majority Leader he then sought to develop redistricting rules within the house in order to encourage Republicans to vote in a one block group, ah la - only one-party controlling the House of Representatives. Fortunately, some of DeLay's mischief finally caught up with him and he was removed from office and was indicted for his illegal efforts in the redistricting and his relationship with convicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. He also later wrote in his autobiography that while in office, he encouraged key lobbyists that had contributed to the party to submit drafts to him of any new bills that the lobbyists might want passed in Congress, in order to help their business endeavors.

7. For the most part, all Republican’s like to boast of their ability to cut budgets, reduce deficits and to be fiscally conservative. At the end of his second term, Bill Clinton had left Predident Bush a $236 Billion budget surplus. However, as of mid 2006, the surplus was gone and the Republican budget deficit had ballooned to >$300 Billion. Rolling Stone’s Editor, Matt Taibbi wrote “In the age of (convicted lobbyist) Jack Abramoff, what happened to the money is a very ugly question to even contemplate.” He went on to say that the Dick Cheney sponsored “Energy Bill” was one of the explanations for the financial debacle. This “pork-barrel” spending bill of Cheney's was crafted with zero input from the Democrats. Per Taibbi: “This wet dream bill of Dick Cheney’s has left grease tracks on every set of extended palms in the US Capitol.”

8. Up to this time, no one had heard that much about “congressional earmarks” until the Republicans took over Congress. An earmark is a pork-barrel spending attachment to a congressional bill for helping specific members of congress and supporting their special projects. Earmarks have been around the government virtually forever in the US Congress. Unfortunately, the Republicans have made both an art and a major business of their earmarks. In 2006, the number of special project earmarks increased more than double from the 1994 Democratic Congress. The 1994 total of 4,155 Democratic "special projects", had a total dollar amount of $29.11 Billion. This increased in 2006 to 15,832 Republican Congress "special projects" with a total dollar amount of $77.77 Billion.

9. As to doing their jobs in Congress, due to the Republican’s restrictions on being able to have a meaningful debate, the time spent in any debate in 2006 was 97 days, the lowest number of debating hours in sixty years.

10. In bending the rules to exclude any Democrats, the Ways & Means Chairman, Bill Thomas (R-Ca) became so bold as to tell the House Democratic conferees on the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill that "All the debate sessions would be cancelled if any Democrats showed up for the conference".

11. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine wrote: “The Republican controlled Congress set a new set of rules that says that when a Democratic President is in office, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully – but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention.” Since the 1950’s, no Democratic Committee Chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, the Republican Congress dropped that arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton White House for investigating 2 million pages of government documents regarding “alleged” Democratic misconduct. (No misconduct was ever found.) However, since George W. Bush came into office, not one subpoena was submitted to the White House by the Republican Congress.

12. Congress virtually dropped all oversight during the first six years of the Bush presidency. This included areas from homeland security, the war contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the torture at Abu Ghraib as well as the illegal domestic telephone surveillance. Oversight by the Senate is normally a constitutional role for them in national security. Under the Republicans, it was virtually ignored. This is also one of the key reasons the US is unable to identify what happened to Billions of US government tax dollars that have gone “unaccounted for” in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East. Representative David Price (D-NC) has stated: “No congressional function has atrophied more under Republican control than the oversight of the executive (branch)."Many legitimate oversight requests by the Democrats have been blocked by the Republicans.” Representatives John Moss (D-Ca) and John Dingell (D-MI) have stated: “The extent to which partisan loyalty and deference to a Republican president have trumped any sense of institutional identity or constitutional responsibility since President Bush took office.”

13. Allan Wolfe of Boston College has written that liberals and conservatives have disagreed with each other for years on not just political systems but over the means to serve those ends. As he said; “However, from a conservative (Republican) point of view, separation of powers is divisive, tolerance a luxury, fairness another word for weakness, and cooperation (between the two parties) unnecessary.”

There are many more areas (such as the pre-emptive War in Iraq, international relations, universal healthcare, and immigration) where the Republican Congress and the President have tried their best to change the governing management of this country. One could say that the Republicans have sincerely tried to make America into what the President's long time friend (and re-writer of history), Karl Rove proclaimed, that America would soon become a "One party country!" One can only imagine the chaos and anarchy that would develop under those unfortunate circumstances. Fortunately, in all the years since US Congress was originally formed, there have been certain standards and rules that have evolved or have been set up that became the agreed way to do the country’s governing business. The concept has always been that "we must all work together in order to get the peoples work accomplished". For this reason, the attiutude of bipartisan cooperation was developed on a "we'll give up a little here and they will do like-wise, when we need some help at a later date". This became the way a true representative government should function and for the most part, it was one of the reasons that the US became the greatest democratic nation on earth. However, after the Republicans took both houses in the mid 90's and especially after George W. Bush took office; the Republican Congress and the President have been trying to govern by saying: "It's my way or the highway!" Hopefully, after January 2009, that attitude will become history. However, as the great Yogi Berra once said "it ain't over till it's over". So let's hope most of America realizes that this latest Republican experiment with our American government is a failure and it's time for us to learn from our mistakes.

In Part II of this series, I will take on what damage the Republicans and specifically the President have done to the US Judicial Branch and what we can do as individuals to prevent it from becoming even more critical