Tornado Alley (PROG)

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After 5 bad years, new hope for democracy in 2006
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist

Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Goodbye to 2005 and hallelujah. After the battering the Constitution has taken through five grim years, it's showing some signs of life.
The most conservative court in the country tells the administration to stop trying to manipulate the judiciary in its handling of terrorist suspects.

The most egregious snooping allowed by the Patriot Act may not survive congressional scrutiny next year; the dismantling of Social Security is dead. The phony "deficit-cutting" budget bill squeaks through the Senate on the vice president's tie-breaking vote: there's not a vote to spare.

One congressional crook, California's own Randy Cunningham, has resigned. The Hammer is twisting in the wind. His friend and patron Jack Abramoff is negotiating to rat out his former friends. Two other Californians, Richard Pombo and John Doolittle, are trying to avoid the stench of the Abramoff swamp.

Congress bans torture, despite heavy-handed pressure from America's No. 1 chicken hawk, whose own No. 1 aide has been indicted for lying in the outing of Valerie Plame.

And with the president's poll numbers down, the media, red-faced over their own dereliction of duty in the run-up to Iraq, seem to have found a little courage to challenge and question the administration's strategic leaks. A trial judge in Pennsylvania says intelligent design isn't science; it's thinly veiled religion. The school board that approved it is voted out of office.

OK, better to put all this in the category of not-bad news rather than good news. Most of it is things not getting worse, not necessarily getting better.

Congress, which seems as hard to shame as the White House, is still preparing to approve more tax cuts for the rich, which will wipe out whatever "deficit-reduction" it imposed on the backs of Medicaid recipients, needy college students and the elderly.

The president is still waving the bloody shirt. We're at war, he says. It won't cost you anything but your privacy. If you don't support domestic snooping you're aiding the enemy. If you think Americans and Iraqis are dying every day and Iran's mullahs are growing stronger because of the ideological hubris of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, et al., you're not a good American.

Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been blocked, but the administration still refuses to push for any real efforts to reduce oil consumption - higher gas taxes, fuel efficiency standards - that would conserve many times whatever gas ANWR would produce and cut revenues to the Arab sheiks who now finance the terrorists.

The White House drags its feet or simply neglects tougher security at the ports, on airline cargo, most of which is never screened, at oil refineries and power plants, mostly because of resistance from the affected industries. In the meantime, Congress continues to treat homeland security as pork.

Katrina taught us how well prepared the country is for disasters, even those about which we get advance warning. To this day, the help that was promised months ago - the part that, as in Iraq's reconstruction, isn't being peeled off by the politically well-connected - is caught in a limbo of bureaucracy, neglect and incompetence: It's low priority stuff. FEMA, like a host of other federal agencies, is a catch basin for hacks.

What we haven't fully appreciated is the extent to which this administration has politicized practically everything - the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council.

The politicizing isn't new. But not since Watergate, where the Nixon administration enlisted the IRS, the FBI and the plumbers to go after the targets on its enemies list, has it been so systematic. Not for decades has there been so widespread an effort to distort information or to suppress it altogether.

From false data about abortion, to the denial of global warming, to the distorting of intelligence about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to unauthorized snooping, to the lies about the costs of the subsidies to the pharmaceutical industry under the new Medicare drug program, ideology and the political agenda drive this administration's information policies. Nixon would be proud.

Still, as the year ends, there's a promise of change in atmosphere. The president, who firmly declared he wouldn't bow to political pressure or set a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq is recognizing the real timetable, which is next year's congressional election calendar. Forty years ago, Sen. George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, told Lyndon Johnson that the way to get out of Vietnam was to declare victory and bring the troops home. Watch the White House roll out the Aiken strategy in the months ahead.

Another terrorist act in this country, no matter how much it may be due to administration negligence, could change the political weather again.

But in the meantime, we may have a chance at some restoration of the nation's historic checks and balances.

One-party rule always has its limits. Happy New Year.

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/schrag/v-print/story/14021484p-14853971c.html