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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
As the protest against Bush's certification fell flat and they rolled over for Gonzales, it was a day of humiliation and futility for Democrats.
Jan 7, 2005 | For an hour or so Thursday morning, Alberto Gonzales had played a lawyerly game of Slip 'n' Slide with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That 2002 memo in which he called portions of the Geneva Convention "quaint" and "obsolete"? Gonzales disavowed it. His view of the president's powers during wartime? A "hypothetical" question that Gonzales wouldn't answer. The legal opinion that seemed to authorize torture by U.S. troops? Gonzales said he couldn't remember who asked for it, then blamed the Department of Justice for the conclusions it reached.
Democratic Sen. Joe Biden sat quietly, listening to it all. On another day, in another political reality, he might have been watching a presidential nominee self-destruct. The man who would be attorney general was coming off as evasive, as ill-prepared, as unwilling to accept responsibility for anything that happened on his watch as George W. Bush's White House counsel. But when Biden finally had his chance to put a question to Gonzales, he delivered this clear message instead: "You're going to be confirmed."
Thursday was the first serious work day for the 109th Congress, and it was a day of humiliation and futility for the Democrats who still have jobs on Capitol Hill. Republicans picked up four Senate seats and three House seats in November, and signs of the Democrats' increasing powerlessness were everywhere Thursday. In a hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, Biden and his Democratic colleagues went through the motions of questioning an attorney general nominee whose confirmation is a foregone conclusion. On the floor of the House of Representatives, a handful of Democrats launched a meaningless protest against the certification of Bush's reelection.
For Democrats, the election protest was at least a momentary triumph. Four years ago, with Al Gore presiding, Congress met in joint session to certify the results of the 2000 election. One after another, African-American members of the House rose to protest the vote from Florida, where thousands of black voters had been disenfranchised and the U.S. Supreme Court had called off the recount. Again and again, the members were gaveled down because they couldn't get a single senator to join them in protesting the election results.
It was different this time. When Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones rose in the House chambers, she announced that she had a protest to lodge against the Ohio vote, in writing as required. "And," she said, "I do have a senator." The senator was California's Barbara Boxer, who said she joined in the protest because it was the only way to shed light on the voting irregularities in Ohio and the need for election reform nationwide.
Sen. Ted Kennedy praised Boxer for forcing the issue, saying that to treat the vote certification as a "meaningless ritual would be an insult to our democracy." But as noble as the Democrats' intentions might have been, it was hard to see how the protest itself was anything other than a "meaningless ritual."
The protest put a hold on the vote certification so that each house could retire to its respective chamber for debate and a vote on the issue. But Boxer -- or anyone else who thought the protest would lead to serious discussion of election reform -- must have been disappointed by the sorry spectacle that followed. There was no sense of history being made, no sense that anything was really happening at all. Although a few hundred people protested in the drizzle across the street from the Capitol, the visitor galleries in the Senate were mostly empty. Fewer than a dozen senators showed up for the debate, and only the ones who spoke -- among them, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, in his first floor speech, Barack Obama -- seemed to take it seriously. As Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin made an impassioned plea for a bipartisan effort to improve the electoral system, Dick Cheney and Sen. Rick Santorum sat slumped in a couple of chairs on the edge of the Senate floor, talking and laughing. They weren't listening. With solid majorities in both houses, they didn't have to.
And the Republicans weren't the only ones who seemed to give the protest short shrift. Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, took to the floor to criticize Boxer for facilitating the protest, saying she would undermine the country's confidence in its democracy if the protest were to succeed and the election were thrown to the House of Representatives. And while Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ultimately spoke of the need for election reform, he spent much of the protest debate on the other side of the aisle, kibitzing with Santorum and a few other Republican senators.
When it came time for the roll call, Boxer was the only senator to vote for the protest; John Kerry, who had announced Wednesday that he wouldn't take part in any protest, conveniently found himself on a mission to Baghdad. In the House, 31 Democrats voted to support the objection. Eighty-eight House Democrats voted against it, and 80 of them didn't bother to vote at all. For their efforts, Rep. John Conyers and the others who pursued an investigation in Ohio got neither a serious debate over the voting irregularities nor a commitment from Republicans even to think about electoral reform.
