>An Unusually Effective Minority-Bush and the congressional GOP embarrass the Democrats.
by Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard
07/30/2007
The biggest surprise in Washington in 2007 is who's turned out to be the strongest force in town. It's not Democrats, though they control the House and the Senate. It's not a bipartisan alliance of moderates, who often imagine themselves as pivotal but never are. And it's certainly not a conservative coalition, if only because there aren't enough conservative Democrats in Congress to fill a closet at the Heritage Foundation. The most powerful group is President Bush and congressional Republicans.
But of course, you say. A Republican president and Republican legislators are a natural coalition. Except not in this case. After the calamitous 2006 election, there was no love lost between the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Republicans blamed Bush for losing Congress, while he and his aides felt congressional Republicans had largely brought disaster on themselves. Full-scale cooperation seemed unlikely. But it's happened.
True, Bush and the Republicans aren't dominant. They're a minority, but an unusually effective one. One measure of this: At the end of 2007, there will be more American troops in Iraq than when Democrats took over Congress in January. Another: Democrats have momentum on no domestic issue, not even health care. A third: Senate Republicans last week defeated an amendment urging Bush not to pardon former White House aide Scooter Libby and won overwhelming passage of another that says terrorists jailed at Guantánamo shouldn't be transferred to U.S. soil.
There's more, much more. Of the "six for '06" bills touted by House Democrats, only one has become law. And that one,
which raises the minimum wage, passed not on its own, but only because it was tacked onto the Iraq funding bill. Senate Democrats have fared no better. Majority Leader Harry Reid listed 10 issues on which he wanted action. His lone success so far is the minimum wage hike.
Democrats are stymied, foiled, and frustrated. Republicans have hindered or obstructed them at almost every turn. Last week, Democrats and the media were excited that Reid got 56 votes, four short of the required 60, to impose cloture on an anti-Iraq war amendment, then pass it by a simple 50-vote majority. The assessment was Democrats were gaining, Republicans and Bush crumbling. But on the next cloture vote--on the Democrats' most highly touted effort to force troop withdrawals--they got only 52 votes.
This doesn't mean the war is now a political plus for Republicans. It remains a huge drag. But Republicans have won the argument that Congress, before mandating a retreat in Iraq, should wait at least until General David Petraeus reports to Washington in September on how his counterinsurgency strategy--the "surge"--is doing.<
|
