Karl Rove doesn’t have a whole lot to work with in this election season. Our foreign policies are failing, gas prices are high, wages are not rising with inflation, and education and health costs are soaring out of control. In addition to these problems, revelations about torture and illegal warrantless domestic surveillance have led John Conyers to propose a select committee to investigate the administration.
The oversight I have suggested would be performed by a select committee made up equally of Democrats and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader.
The committee’s job would be to obtain answers — finally. At the end of the process, if — and only if — the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee.
Faced with the prospect of impeachment if Bush loses the House, Karl Rove decided to go on the offensive and actually campaign on their crimes. Far from backing down on torture and illegal warrantless domestic surveillance, the President decided to attempt to get Congress to legalize these crimes. The idea was twofold. It would allow the Republicans to look strong of terrorism, and force the Democrats to vote against measures branded as keeping America safe. If the measures passed they would inoculate the President from any potential impeachment inquiry by ratifying what he has done in law. If the GOP has a successful election, they can say the people have ratified their crimes too.
But it hasn’t worked out the way Rove planned it. Instead, the Democrats have remained united and quiet, while the GOP has become divided and defiant.
The rival Senate bill on interrogations — approved by the Armed Services Committee on Thursday and sharply criticized by Bush yesterday — is silent on how the CIA should comply with the Geneva Conventions. Its intent, according to several government officials, is not only to avoid sending a signal to other nations that Washington is reinterpreting its treaty obligations, but to leave in place a historic understanding of international law, which would render unlawful many of the extreme interrogation techniques the CIA has been using.
Actually, it would not render those techniques illegal. Those techniques are already illegal and will remain so under the Senate bill. What Bush wanted was for those techniques to be rendered legal. He has not succeeded, and no less of a figure than his very own former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, came out forcefully against legalizing torture.
Meanwhile, Bush’s attempt to legalize illegal and warrantless domestic surveillance is limping along. Arlen Specter passed the bill they wanted out of the Judiciary committee, but he also voted for Dewine’s bill and Feinstein’s bill. The Senate will have to sort out which bill they want, and there is always the possibility of a Democratic filibuster (which Rove presumably wants). As Glenn Greenwald has documented, Americans narrowly oppose the NSA program, and believe Bush should get warrants. It’s not clear how Bush can score political points by politicizing Democratic opposition to the Specter bill. It’s also not clear that Specter will even vote for his own version of the bill. And, in the House, Heather Wilson, who is in a dogfight for re-election, is not cooperating with Bush either. They had to cancel her committee meeting on Wednesday to try to get their ducks in a row. Here is how Muckraker puts it:
The result: a nettle of fights no Republican wanted to have over how to resolve serious differences within their party. And all just weeks before an election which could shove the GOP into dreaded minority status in one or both chambers of Congress.
For once, the Democrats aren’t complaining about getting shut out of a debate over national security issues. “Look at the lineup for the morning talk shows this Sunday,” one Democratic staffer told me happily this afternoon. “It’s all Republicans!”
But it’s created a serious problem for the White House. To win, it has to figure out how to strike compromises with key moderate Republicans on these issues — but still have legislation that Democrats will vote against.
Can it be done? I don’t see how to split the issues surrounding warrantless wiretapping or detainee abuse in a way that would simultaneously win support from moderate Republican holdouts and alienate Dems.
The Muck goes on to ask how the White House could have miscalculated so badly, before answering their question with something that should have been obvious.
It’s just befuddling enough to make one consider that the White House might have had an alternate motive to try for this legislation now.
Far from being a cheap gambit, the Bush administration may have made this last-minute push for legal cover because it believes it could be the closest thing to a firewall against investigations — even impeachment — in case of a Democratic takeover. If the laws don’t change, and courts continue to rule against the administration, hearings and investigations move from being a left-wing pipe dream to becoming a political necessity.
I believe the President chose John Roberts and Samuel Alito only after assessing their affinity for his Unitary Executive theories, and finding them sympathetic. The torture and surveillance bills are simply another arm of the same strategy. He’s trying, and failing, to legalize his crimes in case the Democrats take over the House of Representatives. That prospect is looking increasingly likely. The question is, does the President have a team in place to rig the vote? Will they resort to vote tampering to avoid impeachment? My question is: “What other choice do they have?”
