Condoleezza Rice appeared today before Joe Biden’s Foreign Relations committee. There are 23 members of the Foreign Relations committee, or nearly a quarter of the full Senate. Joe Biden summarized what happened in the hearing as he brought it to a close. It’s too early for a transcript to be available, so I will do my best to paraphrase what he said.
Biden said something like this. “Madame Secretary I think something very profound happened here today. There are 23 members of this committee, and all of them, with one or two notable exceptions, displayed outright hostility, from skepticism, to deep skepticism, to outright hostility to the President’s plan. And I think, if the President cannot win over the Senate, that he will proceed at extreme personal poitical risk.”
My ears perked up when Biden said that. I waited to see if he would elaborate on that warning. But he didn’t. He went on to say that we were setting ourselves up for a very bad situation and that if we could not convince the American people the whole thing is lost. He argued that increasing our commitment would further erode our combat readiness and could even undermine the next President’s flexibility. He told Rice to tell the President that he needed to do more work and he needed to bring in the Senate because they are not buying this plan.
Biden seemed to be sending a clear message. Rice’s testimony had not satisfied the Senate. It was not a partisan point. Bush’s plan has been rejected by the Senate. He essentially told her to go back and try again. And then there was that warning.
This is what I have been saying since early December. The Bush administration has fundamentally miscalculated. They thought they could rely on the Republicans to stand strong behind their policies as they had through their first six years. But they were profoundly wrong. The Baker-Hamilton report was not just some suggestion. It was a mandate. The moment they decided to ignore it I knew that they would have almost no support in the Senate and a cratering of support in the House. And it was my opinion, and it still is, that this would lead to a constitutional crisis. Biden is warning the President that the Senate does not have his back. He does not mean that the Democrats are out to get him. He means that his foreign policy is not supported by the Senate. He must recognize this fact and take some serious measures to address it.
There will soon be oversight investigations and the President is so badly weakened that he cannot look to a substantial bloc in Congress to defend him. It is no longer in the Republican’s interests to defend him.
What is needed is a plan for handling this consitutional crisis.
