Robert Novak spoke to a GOP lawmaker recently and seemed surprised to discover that the Republican was thoroughly unimpressed with the Bush White House’s congressional relations.
A senior Republican senator who avoids the headlines and tries to help President Bush as much as possible was discussing with me two weeks ago the problems of seeking Social Security reform. Then he said something that surprised me: “I have been around awhile, and this is the worst administration at congressional relations that I have ever been associated with.”
I checked with several Republicans in both the House and Senate, and all agreed more or less with that assessment.
Novak suggests this has something to do with poor personnel decisions. I have a different explanation: Bush disdains Congress.
I’m not just referring congressional Dems, though the president clearly has contempt for them too, but I mean the institution as a whole. Bush seems to find it terribly inconvenient that he has to deal with a co-equal branch of government that occasionally makes it difficult for him to get everything he wants exactly when he wants it. Congress, it seems, is a hard-to-tolerate institution that is best ignored and circumvented.
In a historical context, this makes some sense. The executive and the legislative branches were designed to be competing bodies, as part of a dynamic that ensures checks and balances. Presidents and lawmakers, in other words, are supposed to butt heads.
But one of the interesting parts of the current situation is the way in which a Republican president hates Congress despite its huge Republican majorities and the policy positions on which they all seem to agree.
The recent squabble over base closings is the latest in a series of examples. Late Friday evening, when the Bush gang makes moves it hopes to hide, the White House quietly announced it was sidestepping Congress altogether and appointing its own commission.
In an unusual rebuke of a senior senator from his own party, President Bush announced on Friday that by making recess appointments he had completed creation of a nine-member independent commission to review the Pentagon’s list of proposed base closings this year.
Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who strongly opposes the coming round of base closings, has been holding up a vote by the full Senate since last month on Mr. Bush’s choice to lead the panel, Anthony J. Principi, a former secretary of veterans affairs, senior Republican aides said. Mr. Lott was expected to do the same to the panel’s eight other members if the Senate Armed Services Committee approved them, as expected, as early as next week, the aides said.
But Mr. Bush dashed any plan Mr. Lott may have had to stymie the process, a precursor to the first major round of base closings in a decade, by appointing members to the panel while the Senate was in its spring recess, thus eliminating the requirement of Senate confirmation. The appointments expire at the end of the Senate’s session next year, long after the panel is scheduled to finish its work.
Bush could have negotiated with Lott, but why bother? It’s easier and more efficient to just circumvent Congress altogether than have to cooperate with a conservative lawmaker of the president’s own party.
It’s hardly a new problem; Bush has scorned the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue repeatedly. As Mary Lynn F. Jones explained last year:
…Bush misled Congress in July 2002 by spending $700 million lawmakers thought they had assigned to fight the war in Afghanistan, using it instead to plan the war against Iraq. As Bob Woodward told Mike Wallace, “Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution, which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this.”
It’s not the first time and you can bet it won’t be the last. In 2003, the administration hid the estimate of the Medicare prescription-drug plan to ensure that conservative lawmakers didn’t balk over the bill’s cost and vote the plan down. On numerous other measures, such as the No Child Left Behind bill, the administration put its mouth one place and its spending priorities somewhere else. And twice this year Bush has installed judges who could not win Senate confirmation, thwarting the Senate’s “advise and consent” role.
Of course, Bush has never prized Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly ignored questions from the General Accounting Office about his energy panel. Some lawmakers complained after 9-11 that they got more information from news reports than from intelligence briefings.
Novak’s wrong; this has nothing to do with poor staffing at the congressional relations office and everything to do with a White House that simply has no desire to work with lawmakers — or anyone else who might be an obstacle to Bush getting everything he wants. Bush wants a rubber stamp and when he can’t have one, he’ll simply go around Congress, even when it’s lead by Republicans.