Everyone seemed quite polite yesterday when the president had a nice Oval Office chat with Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi. “Bi-partisan” was the buzz-word of the day, and both congressional Dems and the White House seemed to appreciate the inconvenient reality that they’ll each need the other side to accomplish anything.
For Bush, who is unaccustomed to recognizing Dems’ existence, better yet compromising with them, old habits die hard. The very first step the president took after pledging to find “common ground” with the incoming Democratic majority was the re-nonination of John Bolton as ambassador to the U.N., knowing full well the congressional Dems oppose the nomination. Good start to a new way of doing business in DC, right?
And then there was the second move.
The Bush administration escalated its defense of the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program on Thursday, even as Democrats in Congress vowed to investigate the program aggressively once they assume power.
In Washington, President Bush urged that during the lame-duck session that starts next week, Congress pass a bill effectively authorizing the program. And in San Francisco, the Justice Department told a federal court that public scrutiny of the operation risked “exceptionally grave harm to national security.”
But Democrats sounded impatient to begin getting more answers after what they characterized as 11 months of stonewalling by the administration since the program was publicly disclosed last December.
It’s likely to cause some serious tension, right off the bat. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who will soon become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helpfully stated the obvious: “We all believe that monitoring the communications of suspected terrorists is essential. But especially when the monitoring involves Americans, it needs to be done lawfully and with adequate checks and balances to prevent abuses of Americans’ rights and Americans’ privacy.”
With this in mind, as Glenn Greenwald noted, “For the new 110th Congress, a long-overdue investigation of warrantless eavesdropping seems far more likely than legalization of it, to put it mildly.”
In other words, the new, “bi-partisan” Washington is probably poised to get a lot more contentious, right away.
An editorial from the New York Times captured the dynamic nicely.
President Bush was back on TV yesterday, without the scowl he’d been sporting the day after the election but with the surviving members of his Cabinet. He talked about how much he was looking forward to lunching with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and working on “the great issues facing America.” Mr. Bush said his team would “respect the results” of the election.
Just maybe not right away.
Without missing a beat, Mr. Bush made it clear that, for now, his idea of how to “put the elections behind us” is to use the Republicans’ last two months in control of Congress to try to push through one of the worst ideas his administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill have come up with: a bill that would legalize his illegal wiretapping program and gut the law that limits a president’s ability to abuse his power in this way.
Keep in mind, the proposal that’s been on the table in recent months is the “[tag]compromise[/tag]” between the Bush gang and Arlen Specter, which is more of a bad joke that a legitimate deal. Indeed, Specter literally gave the president everything he wanted — and then some.
But Specter won’t be the Judiciary Committee chairman anymore. Said Leahy yesterday, “This administration first hid its domestic spying program from Congress and Americans for years, and when it was discovered, has ducked and weaved on its legal justifications.” In a Democratic Senate, hiding the truth will be far more challenging.
One more key point you’re likely to hear: the White House will no doubt emphasize the notion that the warrantless-searches legislation needs to pass Congress immediately for national security reasons, so the lame-duck, Republican-led Senate needs to take up the measure right away. The argument is wildly misleading — Bush’s warrantless-search program has already been ruled illegal by a federal judge, but the dubious surveillance continues pending appeal.
There is no urgency. Bush just hopes to pull a fast one before Dems take over. Something to keep in mind.