The Right is Wrong and So's The Left - Congressional Chaos Edition, Part 2: Why Both Parties Regard Dennis Hastert's Speakership as a Failure (It's Not Why You Think)

 

 

Leaving aside the huge asterisk involving Dennis Hastert as a human being (which to be clear was not public knowledge until well after he had left Congress) by any reasonable standard, you’d think he should have been viewed as one of the most successful Speakers, certainly by the standards of the GOP.

Hastert served as Speaker from 1999 to 2007, the longest term of any Republican Speaker in the party’s history.  He never faced a leadership challenge at any time during his tenure. He was endorsed from a wide range of Republicans when he came in, from conservatives to moderates. He kept a far lower profile than Newt Gingrich. He worked together with Clinton after his impeachment, including the New Markets Tax Credit program and Plan Colombia. He helped maintain party discipline very strongly, particularly during the Bush Presidency.  He was a strong supporter of the Iraq Wau and the Patriot Act but also helped passed the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush tax cuts in both 2001 and 2003 and the Homeland Security act. He also helped create Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit. He also is the only Republican Speaker in the last twenty-eight years to leave of his own volition, stepping down as Speaker rather than serve as minority leader. When he left the house in November 2007, he delivered a farewell speech from the House floor, emphasizing the need for civility in politics which was followed by remarks from the new Speaker Nancy Pelosi praising him for his service.

Now I’m not going to defend Hastert’s behavior from an ethical standpoint: several of his actions both involving himself taking kickbacks and his behavior towards the appalling actions of colleagues Tom Delay and Tom Foley is truly horrible. And it’s not like he was a saint as Speaker: his remarks made in the aftermath of Katrina were reprehensible (even though it seemed to be keeping with so many of the policies of W’s administration at the time). But unlike so many Republican Speakers before or since,  Hastert managed to do everything any leader of the House should do. He worked to get legislation passed with Democratic and Republican Presidents.  He managed to get major legislation passed with bipartisan support. (I’ll get to the consequences of that in a second.) He maintained discipline to a great degree and even though there was a narrower majority in the House, that helped get things done. And he did so by remaining (certainly by the standards of his fellow Republican speakers) relatively low key.

So why then did Bob Livingston view his Speakership a disaster? Part of it may have been personal: Livingston later said than he left folders full of advice for him to follow and he thinks Hastert never even looked at it. But considering not only did Hastert accidentally come to power, it’s hard to imagine what he could have done better had he listened to Livingston. And certainly it has nothing to do with his morality or criminal behavior; if we know anything about D.C. during the last quarter of a century it’s that moral turpitude or even criminal behavior is rarely a disqualifier for one’s presence in government.

What was Hastert’s unforgivable sin? As best as I can tell, it seems to be that he was viewed as ‘affable.’ He never became a regular on Sunday talk shows or a household word or figure, and perhaps his biggest sin was that he did not openly exhibit the kind of mean or snarling partisan demeanor that such contemporaries as Tom Delay – and basically every Republican head of legislation since – have done. He was willing to treat Democrats as partners in Congress  because he needed them to get things done for his party and his President.  In the world according to Gingrich and Roger Ailes, that is an unforgivable sin.

It's actually hard to fathom considering but in hindsight the era of Hastert’s speakership was the last real occasion that bipartisanship existed in both Houses of Congress.  There were battles to be sure among both sides, particularly in the leadup to the 2004 election and the aftermath of both the Iraq War and Katrina, but for much of that time both parties managed to create a functioning government. Nancy Pelosi became House Minority Leader in the aftermath of the 2004 elections (Richard Gephardt, who’d held the job for the previous twelve years, resigned from Congress after the election) but Pelosi’s attitude in the House, seems to have been someone who was willing to be civil and tried to get along with Hastert.

In 2006, when the FBI searched Congressman William Jefferson’s  Capitol Hill office, both she and Hastert criticized it, arguing that the raid violated the separation of powers. Granted Jefferson was a Democrat from Louisiana and after the election, Pelosi made sure he would not regain a vital committee seat until he was cleared of wrongdoing. But they were willing to make a stand and in fact Hastert thought it was an even greater violation. He later complained to the President about it. It’s unthinkable to imagine that any bipartisan leaders doing this today or even a decade earlier.

And in retrospect so many of today’s elected officials seem to have taken the wrong lesson from this. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said that she had no use for bipartisanship because it “gave us the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and Abu Gharib.” To put it mildly, this is the attitude of a person who was elected to Congress without having read about its history, and certainly that of someone who was a child when so many of the elected officials had to decide what to do in a time of crisis.

I’m not going to defend the Democrats action in the aftermath of 9/11 or in regard to so much they did during W’s first two years in office.  However, I am willing to concede that so much of what they did was built on factors that many of us, certainly not anyone in the Squad, seems to have taken into consideration.

There might very well have been questions as to America being in a War on Terror, but in the aftermath Americans united around George W. Bush in a way that has never been seen since. That is part of our history when it comes to America in a time of crisis. And as members of Congress know all too well, there can be electoral consequences if you dare to take a stand of principle.

Jeanette Rankin was the first female member of Congress and a pacifist. She is the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into both World War I and World War II. In the latter case, she was the sole voice of opposition in either House. There were many in both Houses who had issues but only she put her vote on the record. She refused to seek reelection in 1942 because she knew she had no chance of winning.

Many had doubts at the time when LBJ issued the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August of 1964 but in passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and only two Senators voted against it: Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon. Both men were defeated for reelection four years later. George McGovern’s position on ended the war in Vietnam immediately resulted in him losing all but one state to Nixon despite the opposition to the war. The Democrats carried the weight of that burden for decades.

And it’s worth noting in the 2002 midterms,  there was no sign the American people had problems with Bush’s stances. For the first time in 68 years, W became the first President to gain seats in both Houses of Congress, actually regaining control of the Senate while doing so.  Given what had happened the Democrats could justifiably assume that Bush had a mandate for his agenda and that little could be immediately be gained by attacking him on it no matter what their personal doubts were.

History would have been something that the Democrats pay attention too. Yes bipartisanship led to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and everything that went with it. Prior to that, it had helped win World War II, get the United Nations and NATO established,  help get an Interstate built, get multiple Civil Rights Bills passed and create the Great Society – you know all the things that people like the Squad take for granted and probably helped them get where they are today.

I’d also argue that given recent events theirs little evident that AOC and so many of her generation see much interest in working with Democrats much of the time. For all the accusations that they make of Republicans performing entirely for the camera, none of them seem to shy away from it the way that people like Hastert did.  They concentrate more on their TV time and social media profile than governing.  This is the attitude of people who live in the kind of ‘safe districts’ that they have no problem accusing Republicans of gerrymandering so that they don’t have to answer to voters.

What would so many of the Squad and these Democrats have suggested that their colleagues of that era have done during this period? I’ve suggested in an earlier article that they might very well have done everything in their power so that Al Gore never conceded to W. in the aftermath of the 2000 elections but how far would they have taken it? Would they have insisted that Gephardt and Tom Daschle in the first days after Bush took office have a press conference in which they said: “Our first legislative priority is to make sure that George W. Bush be a one-term President?” Would they have insisted on primarying Democrats and putting up candidates who refused to accept the 2000 election results were fair (something that many Democrats representatives might have thought but after Bush took office kept to themselves?) Should the Democrats have filibustered every single bit of legislation in the Senate Republicans brought to the floor and brought Congress to a standstill? Should they have been on TV every single night arguing about the illegitimacy of the Bush Presidency? Should they have refused to support the President in the aftermath of 9/11, and in fact accuse him and his administration of treason and malfeasance the day after the bombings took place?  Should Democratic Senators have placed holds on every military official because they did not believe in the intelligence of the Iraq War? Should they have blocked every judicial appointment the Bush Administration made at every level, never mind the Supreme Court?

 The left loves to admonish Republicans for taking all of these attitudes when Democrats are Presidents. Given the attitude of so many ‘progressives’ I think their bitterness towards Republicans flouting the rules is solely out of jealousy. Why couldn’t we have done that first?  Why can’t we do it next time? Of course, as I’ve written before, many on the left want to make sure the Republicans never have elected office again. The bipartisan ship that Gephardt and Pelosi followed in their tenures in the House were built on the idea that Republicans are still human beings. One of the tragedies of the last decade is not only that so many Republicans seem to have forgotten that fact, but so many Democrats have as well.

In the next part I will deal with the chaos that unfolding with the Tea Party movement in the aftermath of Obama’s presidency. We all remember how Republicans treated Obama. I’m going to remind you that many of them didn’t like each other that much either.