This is the first in what will undoubtedly be a series of posts that pick apart some issue taken up by Republicans, or some move on their part, or perhaps just general ranting against them. I take no prisoners when it comes to Republicans, because these folks have allowed their party to be hijacked by the Christian right (which isn't, incidentally), a wide-eyed group of psychotics who are substantively different from the people who fly planes into buildings only in the sense that most of them have not been trained with Kalashnikovs. That said, what follows is a piece of writing that was offered by me for publication elsewhere and ignored by the person to whom I submitted it. I submitted it to this person unsolicited and offered that person the use of it, in whole or in part, asking only that I be cited by name and identified as a "liberal citizen who votes." Of these there are not enough in Indiana.
The issue at hand is old hat by now, I'm sure, but it struck me as important at the time - and got no substantive press. Senate Republicans were threatening to block an up-or-down vote on a resolution offered by Senate Democrats that would call for a vote of no confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This was about a month ago, in early September, 2006. Remember when the Democrats wanted to filibuster the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samurel Alito? Bush and his ilk were in front of every microphone they could find, demanding that each nominee was entitled to a simple up-or-down vote. They did not insist on the same for this proposed resolution. See, the Republicans are in favor of up-and-down votes, and think they have merit...provided they know that their side will come out on top, with no element of doubt. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who will soon start wasting money on a bid for the Republican nomination for President in 2008 which he does not have a prayer of winning, even if he did half flip-flop on stem cells (too little, too late, Doc, sorry 'bout ya), even went so far as to outright declare that the Republicans would block the up-or-down vote by invoking a procedural point of order. They castigated the Democrats for blocking the same kind of vote in the previous situation, and that is an example of hypocrisy. At any rate, here's the piece:
Isn't it interesting to read that Senate Republicans have promised to use a procedural point of order to block a resolution offered by Senate Democrats that would call for a vote of no-confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Is it conceivable that these are the same Republicans who theatened to use their so-called "nuclear option," an arbitrary rule change that would lower the number of votes required to end a filibuster from sixty to fifty-one, if the Democrats went through with their threatened filibusters of then-nominees to the United States Supreme Court John Roberts and Samuel Alito?
I am both surprised and not-surprised to learn of this: surprised, because the Republicans seemed so self-righteous when they insisted on an up-or-down vote on Roberts and Alito; and yet not surprised, because it turns out that the Republicans only support up-or-down votes that they know they are going to win. There was no doubt the Roberts was going to be confirmed handily; and there was little doubt that Alito would be confirmed, as well; but there is enormous doubt as to how the vote on Rumsfeld would turn out, because there are Republicans (even some prominent ones) who would cross the aisle and vote with the Democrats for the Secretary's (long-overdue) ouster.
A strong no-confidence vote against Rumsfeld (even a nonbinding one, as this resolution would be), would echo as a vote of no-confidence in President Bush, and would be enormously damaging to the Republicans in the November elections. There will be a shift in seats after these mid-term elections, as is almost always the case in the mid-term elections during a President's second term; and the shift could be enough to swing the majorities back over to the Democrats. This is a paralyzing fear for the Republicans in Congress (especially those up for re-election this November) and the Republicans in the White House, who are all trying desperately to salvage the disaster in Vietraq and come up with some kind of legacy of which Bush can be proud.
Both tasks will be daunting, and will require at least tacit support in Congress for the President's antics in the remaining years of his term. The willingness by Democrats to filibuster Roberts and Alito was, to some extent (especially in the case of Roberts), political grandstanding, just as this promise by Republicans (it was, according to the Associated Press article printed in the Indianapolis Star on September 6, 2006, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's chief of staff, Eric Ueland, who called it a "promise") to use the procedural point of order to block the Rumsfeld vote is political grandstanding.
But we're not any longer talking about the nebulous possibility that a conservative justice will swing the Court toward overturning Roe vs. Wade; what we are talking about now is accountability for what has happened (and is still happening) in Vietraq, of which there has been none, apart from a tiny amount of empty rhetoric in some of the President's speeches. Refusing to allow this resolution its up-or-down vote demonstrates not only that the Republicans are hypocrites, but also that they are more concerned with keeping their jobs and their majority than they are with doing those jobs. That is political grandstanding of the very worst kind, and it is the kind of politics that has no place in government, at any level of government in the United States of America.
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