I’ve seen this piece from The American Spectator linked in a couple of places today , and I finally decided to check it out. If even Bush insiders are saying they’ve pretty much blown it, what’s next for those of us on the other side?
“You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking,” says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. “You get the impression that we’re more than listless. We’re sunk.”
Too pessimistic? Maybe not. Rumors are flying through various departments of longtime senior Bush loyalists looking to jump, but with few opportunities in the private sector to make the jump look like anything more than desperation. Almost daily, complaints from Cabinet level Departments come in to the White House about lack of communication coordination on even basic policy matters.
…Congressional committee sources on both sides of Capitol Hill predict tough slogging on anything of policy consequence. “Social Security is dead as far as my chairman is concerned. So are the tax cuts,” says a Ways and Means staffer of Chairman Bill Thomas.
Before hurricane season wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, the thinking was that Thomas was poised to take up a major tax bill that might feature several critical components of the Bush Administration’s Social Security reform. Now those plans appear to have dimmed considerably.
According to one school of thought, some GOP tax policy changes might have contributed to a more market-oriented approach to reconstruction efforts in the Katrina recovery. Instead, Republicans were stunned to hear about programs that read as if cribbed from the Clinton Administration.
Although Republicans on the Hill are left with a bit of wiggle room to make adjustments to the Bush proposals, they will need political cover if they are to successfully navigate a path made difficult by the Bush team’s allowing the media and Democrats to paint the GOP into a corner.
Forget about the Supreme Court for just a minute. If the above is true, will the Democrats finally stand up, ditch their kneepads, and finally start acting like an opposition party? Bush’s ratings are in the toilet, even after his post-Katrina speech, and the majority-Repubilcan Congress doesn’t rate much better. It’s safe to say neither are terribly popular now. Is it possible that Dems will now realize there isn’t a real price to pay for behaving like an opposition party, and that there might actually be a benefit?
We can always hope. As far as I’m concerned, this administration shouldn’t get anything else from this Congress without a fight, and it shouldn’t be able to count on any Democratic votes. The Dems should instead present better alternatives to the Republican’s agenda, and present them to the public even if they never pass in Congress.
It just might pay dividends in ’06 and ’08.
