Democratic leadership in House ready to end kabuki play, cave to GOP

[solarbird]

I've watched this coming over the last couple of weeks, and now it's here; Wired's "Threat Level" column reports that the Democratic leadership in the House is ready to surrender to Mr. Bush and give him and their telecom lobbyist friends everything they want. That means "legal" - insofar as that means anything in a government without law - warrantless wiretapping of Americans, a complete shutdown of the only functioning route to investigate Mr. Bush's illegal domestic spying programmes, and retroactive amnesty for the separate and specific violations of the law by telecommunications companies over the last five years.

Glenn Greenwald wonders, aside from everything else, why they have so little strategic sense as to throw their contempt for their so-called constituency in their faces. I like his summary of the political reality of the situation; I added the emphasis:

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.

I have written my "Representative," again, demanding an explanation for this bullshit. I will not get an answer. I have, I believe, been relegated to the "don't even bother with inaccurate form letters" bin. They're going to do what the Beltway Establishment - the New Court at Versailles - has decided it wants to do, and the rest of us can presumably eat the lie that is the cake.

I will no doubt have sincere local Democrats tell me again how important it is to get a greater majority in the Democratic Senate and Democratic House so that Something can Finally Be Done About All This. I do not buy it; I do not see how giving a larger majority to part of the problem is going to fix any goddamn part of the actual problem. If this does not demonstrate the lie behind the posturing, nothing will. Fortunately - for some value of "fortunately," and primarily for me - after the Democratic Party-controlled House finishes passing the Democratic Party-controlled Senate's unlimited warrantless domestic wiretapping and retroactive immunity for lawbreaking "law," I'll have discharged my pledge to ride this thing all the way down. So remember: there is no law, there is no president, there are no representatives, and most of you - and I - are most certainly not citizens of a republic.

Enjoy the kabuki, everyone. None of it is real, except the exercise of power.

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to wrap my head around this, since now all of a sudden I'm on the green card track and may have to live with the consequences -- why on the Lady's green earth would the Dems do this? It sounds like they have completely caved, acting as if they had no majority and could not have any ideas of their own.

Is all of this simply a gladiatorial charade, with no real difference between the red blackguards and the blue blackguards?

just colour me puzzled, I guess....

[leftbase.livejournal.com]

Like you, I pretty much knew this was going to happen. It really is infuriating.

These are the first two entries I posted after the 2006 election:

http://leftbase.livejournal.com/138924.html

http://leftbase.livejournal.com/139174.html

I was happy for like a day and a half. Then I started thinking realistically again.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

So what *do* we do? The tricky part is, some of us who would love to just start chucking spanners into the works need at least a teeny bit of the corporate infrastructure working in order to physically survive more than about four weeks. I could theoretically stretch that to be a few months, but still. (I wonder if they do that on purpose....)