What do the Democrats’ moves in Congress add up to?

There appears to be a kind of wheel-spinning quality to what the Democrats in Congress are doing.  They attach troop-withdrawal timetables to the funding for the war in Iraq—knowing that President Bush will veto, and they’ll be forced to pass the funding without the timetables.  They can subpoena White House officials to testify about the firing of the US attorneys—knowing that the president will claim executive privilege and the resulting litigation will probably not be resolved in time to affect the investigation.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi leads a congressional delegation to Syria—knowing that at best nothing of consequence will be accomplished but that she risks presenting a big bull’s-eye for Bush to aim at.

What’s the point?  Are the Democrats politically motivated?  Sure.  But so is everybody.  Politics is how we govern our country.  The question is not whether someone is politically motivated.  The question is what do their political motivations lead them to do?  Why engage in these seemingly futile exercises?

My old boss, the late Milwaukee Congressman Henry Reuss, would have recognized what is happening.  Reuss thought that the US should have a parliamentary system, like Britain’s, in which the administration—the government, as they call it there—gives up control, not on a predetermined timetable, but when it no longer commands majority support in the legislature.  During the time I worked for him, in fact, he proposed a constitutional amendment to permit members of Congress to serve in the president’s cabinet without giving up their seats in Congress.

What made him yearn for a parliamentary system?  One reason was that under parliamentary systems, executive agencies are headed by members of the legislature, like Reuss, who, when they have to give up control can return to their legislative seats.

But I think the primary wellspring of his conviction on this issue came from historical episodes he lived through, episodes with some resemblance to the time we’re living through today.

Reuss was in high school when Wall Street crashed, and he saw the hapless Herbert Hoover, just eight months into his term and unable or unwilling to deal with the Depression and its consequences, nevertheless lingered in office for three years until the voters could replace him with someone who was willing to take the bold action the crisis demanded.  Thirty-five years later, Reuss was ten years into a long congressional career when he saw first Lyndon Johnson, then Richard Nixon, gain the presidency with the country’s confidence and then lose it when they were unable either to win the war in Vietnam or walk away from it.

By contrast, Reuss looked across the Atlantic in the late 1930s and saw British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain lose his country’s confidence when the bankruptcy of his conciliatory policy toward Nazi Germany became clear.  But instead of having to wait years for an election, Britain’s system forced Chamberlain out the day after Hitler invaded France.

Reuss would have seen today’s Democratic congressional moves for what they are: the closest our system comes to votes of no confidence in the Bush administration.  Democrats can’t translate their control of Congress into government policy, the way they could in a parliamentary system.  But they can keep Bush from putting his policies into effect.

And although much is made of the president’s ability to set the national agenda, it’s the Democrats who are controlling the debate.

American troops are still in Iraq.  But what’s being debated?  Not whether this or that strategy will lead to victory, but whether to start withdrawing troops in the next few months or delay withdrawal until the troop surge has been tried and failed.

On the domestic front, Bush has trotted out a series of domestic notions: health care, immigration reform, alternative energy sources.  But what’s being debated?  Whether the Justice Department acted improperly, unethically, illegally—or just ineptly—in cashiering eight of their own Republican appointees.

The Democratic maneuvers are no-confidence votes on a deeper level as well.  By seeking to hobble the president’s troop surge in Iraq, the Democrats are signaling that, whether the surge is well-advised or not, they do not believe that the Administration is capable of executing it capably.  By their insistence that Karl Rove and Harriett Miers testify in public and under oath, they signal that they believe that without a transcript and the threat of perjury, there is a substantial risk that the two inner-circle Bush advisers will not tell the truth.

All of Reuss’s efforts failed to move the US an inch closer to a parliamentary system, and it’s probably just as well.  But unless the Bush administration’s fortunes improve markedly, the time from now until the country can move on to whatever is next is going to seem much longer than the year-and-a-half that stretches to Inauguration Day, 2009.