Meteor Blades is, of course, correct to urge Ixnay on Letting Bygones Be Bygones. A new Democratic administration with engorged Congressional majorities cannot let a well-intentioned desire to focus on the economy, the environment, health care, and foreign policy challenges get in the way of accountability for the crimes of the Bush administration. But that is what is likely to happen for a variety of reasons.
Congressional action is like a garden hose. It can only carry so much capacity at any given time. You have to feed a manageable amount of legislation into the system or it all breaks down. That means that Congress can handle three or four big things a year, but no more. And an Obama presidency is going to want to push through a universal health care plan, a green energy initiative, a banking/housing/financial sector reform bill, and some kind of tax reform bill. Where does that leave accountability?
Moreover, Obama is branding himself as a post-partisan politician. If elected, he will have a mandate to push the priorities he ran on in his campaign and the clout to get Republicans to cooperate on some of his priorities…so long as he doesn’t go on a crusade to expose every bit of corruption, crime, and hypocrisy of the Gingrich/Hastert/Bush era. Or…at least that is how the thinking goes inside the Beltway. Criminalizing politics is an invitation for payback…as if the Republicans would play nice in reciprocation.
Here’s the real hope. It is not the Democrats currently in Congress that will demand accountability. With the exception of some of the Class of ’06, the current Congress is complicit in the crimes of the Bush administration. They are too tarnished and institutionally timid after years of abuse in the minority to have the intestinal fortitude needed to look under all the rocks. Culturally, it is only the Democrats that won post-Iraq that have what it takes to expose the truth. The bigger the class of ’08 the more likely that they will force the leadership to do their bidding. Here’s a little reminder about the Watergate Babies (Class of 1974):
The members of the Class of 1974 were young, relatively new to public office and remarkably certain they could remake Washington in their own image. They viewed Congress as ossified, beholden to powerful interests, unresponsive to the people and ripe for the taking.
The Class of 1974 had 75 Democrats to just 17 Republicans (the “Contract” Class of 1994 would have 73 Republicans and just 13 Democrats). This huge influx of Democrats was known as the “Watergate babies.”
The new victors were a Kiddie Corps, half of them under 40. Tom Downey of New York, just 25, was the youngest member of Congress since the early 1800s. “We were young, we looked weird. I can’t even believe we got elected,” Moffett would say two decades later.
This new generation of Democrats offered a new image for their party. Far more than their senior colleagues in the House, they understood the social trends and beliefs that had typified the previous 10 years. Most of them supported the Supreme Court decisions that had legalized abortion and outlawed prayer in schools. Most of them backed busing to achieve racial balance in the schools.
Few were true populists. They were college-educated and professionally credentialed. “We were the children of Vietnam, not World War II,” said Wirth. “We were products of television, not of print. We were products of computer politics, not courthouse politics. And we were reflections of JFK as president, not FDR.”
They were more likely to have been part of the anti-war movement than of the organized labor movement, and few were creatures of the party establishment. One new member, from the suburbs of Philadelphia, was a 31-year-old Methodist minister named Bob Edgar who had begun his campaign by looking up “Democratic” in the phone book to find the local headquarters…
The Watergate generations’s most visible success came almost immediately after their election. Unlike the 1994 class, the Watergate babies did not force a change of majority control in Congress: Democrats had been in charge in the House for two decades at the time. But the fresh faces did force a change within the ruling majority, which had long featured a power structure built on seniority and dominated by Southern “Dixiecrats.”
All but a handful of the freshmen lent their votes to the pre-existing reform movement within the House Democratic Caucus. This forced the committee barons to kowtow, seeking rank-and-file votes to stay in power. This irked F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana, the Armed Services Committee chairman. When he addressed the gathering of freshmen, he called them “boys and girls.” He later lost his chair by 19 votes, with all but a few freshman votes going against him. In all, only three sitting committee chairmen were deposed, but others got the message.
“The [Watergate babies] set an example for other classes by striking out as individuals and developing their own power centers,” said former House Majority Whip Tony Coelho of California (1979-1989). “They became independent and they didn’t become beholden to the leadership.”
Speaker Carl Albert, an old-style Democrat from Bug Tussle, Okla., had little in common with his new ranks of back benchers. The freshmen, in turn, would be so frustrated with his leadership that one firebrand among them, Bob Carr of Michigan, took to the floor in June of 1975 to call on the Speaker to resign.
The rest of that article is a cautionary tale about how the 1974 progressive movement got swallowed up, divided, compromised, and pushed to the fringes of mainstream American politics. But for a time, 1975-1981, they led the greatest reform movement of the second-half of the 20th-Century. They passed campaign finance reform, they created the FISA law, they ran the Church and Pike Committees. We have a new class of reformers coming into Congress. It will be up to them, not Hoyer and Pelosi and Reid, to force the issue of accountability.
