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A colleague of mine from the Presidential Recordings Project, Tim Naftali, recently posted at the Huffington Blog on Cindy Sheehan's activities outside of the Bush vacation home in Crawford, Texas. Entitled"Cindy Sheehan and James Madison," Naftali's post argues that Sheehan's questions"are those that Congress should be asking more forcefully but because the legislative and executive branches (and soon the judiciary) are controlled by the same political party," this hasn't happened, showing that the doctrine of separation of powers,"an ingenious means of not only placing restraints on government but also a way to ensure vibrant public debate," has fallen by the wayside.
Tim's absolutely right that Congress hasn't been asking hard questions about the war in Iraq. This seems to me part of a broader transformation of American political culture that began in the early 1990s. We have moved toward a quasi-parliamentary system, with ideologically homogenous congressional parties under strong leadership that do the bidding of (or consistently oppose) the occupant of the White House.
Such a change might be a good thing; it might not. (As a historian of Congress, I don't consider it a good development.) This transformation, however, does not mean that ordinary people, like Sheehan, haven't had a chance to make their voices heard on the war in Iraq. The course of Bush's policy (and the shortcomings of that policy) was clear before the 2004 election. As a couple of recent polls have noted, for critical swing voters--especially non-college educated whites--cultural issues were more important than economic and/or foreign policy ones. This finding is troubling--but it certainly doesn't suggest that the people have been shut out of the political process.
Naftali also hails “Cindy Sheehan's eloquent vigil on behalf of truth in Iraq.” On this point, I’m dubious. As Christopher Hitchens points out in today’s Slate (in a comment published after Naftali’s posting), Sheehan has argued that her son “was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel.” Eloquent is not the one adjective that immediately comes to mind to characterize such a statement.
Well, on the question of electoral influence of the outcome, another consequence of the diminution of legislative authority is that the only meaningful vector of influence on Iraq has been the election of the executive. Rather than having two or three ways in which to express meaningful pressure, voters who doubt the wisdom of the war have been compelled to see that influence entirely concentrated on the Presidency.
And when you say, "They had their chance and they did not", you of course do not want to forget that a very large popular minority did vote against the President. The country was in fact very nearly evenly divided. That is precisely the situation where democracies run into serious trouble: when an extremely large minority plurality feels very strongly about a political decision, but when an election produces a complete negation of their views.
A political leader has two options when faced with a minority opposition which is nearly the same size as the coalition which supports his policies. One is to try and make meaningful conciliatory gestures, to alter course so as to encompass aspects of both coalitions, to unify rather than divide. The more bitter the division, the more this course may be advisable for the health of the democracy itself. In the case of the war in Iraq, the current President hasn't even made minor accomodations or gestures of conciliation to his political critics. He hasn't been more forthcoming or transparent about the conduct of the war. He hasn't addressed concerns about detentions in Gitmo or elsewhere. He hasn't shaken up the staff in charge of the war. He insisted on appointing a man who has been convincingly documented as a person who shaded or altered intelligence reports to fit his ideological preconceptions. His Vice-President insists on making statements about the insurgency that appear to bear little resemblance to the reality. And so on.
So that's the second option, when your opposition is nearly as large as your support: govern with little care or attention to the opposition and little concern for what deep division may do to the society of which you are the steward. Under such a circumstance, a very large minority in opposition may well feel, with some justification, that their voices are not being heard, because there is no recognition at all that 49% of the voting population has views that differ from the President's. It is as if they do not exist. This is also a circumstance that eventually spawns a disengagement with the formal political process: people tend to identify with formal politics only as long as it produces some recognition of their own existence and convictions, some accomodation of their own deeply-held views. When the people disengaged are a small or fringe minority, a democracy can easily endure that. When it is nearly half the voting population, it cannot, not for long.
I agree entirely with your point on the unhealthy nature of the diminution of congressional power--which, it seems to me, has been developing over the last 2 decades or so, with perhaps a brief interruption in 1995.
But I'm uncomfortable with the argument advanced by many pro-Sheehan bloggers that the "people" somehow haven't had the chance to use the political process to influence developments in Iraq. It seems to me that our political system has transformed into a European-style quasi-parliamentary system. (I don't think that's a good thing, because in such a system, as you note, there is minimal legislative oversight of the executive.) Just as the Spanish voters decided that Iraq was such an important issue that they kicked out a pro-Iraq political party in spring 2004 elections, American voters could have done the same thing in Nov. 2004. But they did not. That might or might not have been the correct choice (if the recent polls are correct suggesting that for some voters, cultural issues trump all, I'd say this is a disturbing development), but it was a choice made, through the democratic process.
Robert KC Johnson -
8/16/2005
On a pro-Sheehan website, she says she says, "You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." If you get Israel out of Palestine, there would be no more Israel.
Again, not a comment I would term eloquent.
Timothy James Burke -
8/16/2005
KC:
The curious thing to me here is that you reduce "the people having their voice heard" to the casting of votes in the Presidential election.
The entire point about Congress' ability to compel the executive to transparent disclosure is that this is where the representative function of government is best realized. By design as well as inevitable drift, the executive has a remote ability to connect to the total span of the American public. Congress is apportioned by state and by district, and represents us in all our particularity. When Congress is more or less shut out by the executive--or declines to exercise its capacity to review the executive's decisions and demand disclosure of information to the public, when Congress cannot or won't hold public hearings on matters of concern, the people's voices cannot be heard, and the people cannot obtain information that is vitally necessary for the making of informed political decisions (including choosing elected officials).
So the distinction you draw here--between a Congress which is increasingly outside the loop of political decision-making and increasingly disinclined to publically review the decisions of the executive and a public which has its voice heard through the casting of votes strikes me as just plain wrong. If the legislative function is weakened or neglectful, then the American public of necessity is not having its voice heard and does not have access to information that it needs. The two things are deeply interrelated.
Anthony Paul Smith -
8/16/2005
Is it not true that our military exists to defend the U.S. and not Israel? It's not like she said anything anti-Semetic (though you do seem to confuse anti-Semticism with any disdain or criticism of Israel) and a pretty decent arguement could be made that invading Iraq did more for the security of Israel than it would ever do for the U.S.
I agree that our current system seems to be failing, though I'd suggest scrapping the whole thing and starting over.
Jonathan Rees -
8/16/2005
Go here [Sorry if this link is messed up. Do these comments read html?]:
Google the quote and you get Hitchens and a lot of right wing message boards like Free Republic. Under these circumstances, I think I'll believe Cindy.
JR
Robert KC Johnson -
8/16/2005
It's my sense that in the aftermath of Arafat's rejection of the Wye settlement and his subsequent endorsement of an intifade that employed a suicide-murder tactic, a lot of people, and not just Hitchens, changed their perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian debate.
Robert KC Johnson -
8/16/2005
Absolutely. 2002 represented an extraordiary failure of both the press and congressional oversight. Even if the congressional failure can be explained through the lens of partisanship and the Democrats' (in retrospect) ill-founded strategy of conceding the national security issue to the Pres., the press' handling of Iraq matters in 2002-3 is hard to understand.
Manan Ahmed -
8/16/2005
I agree KC. The proper place for all these tough questions was in the lead-up to the war or when the WMD came up missing or during the campaign. And it was the job of the press to do so. Not some poor mother of a dead soldier. The Sheehan "coverage" is a case of johnny-come-late-come-sheephisly. Is it a case of "personalizing" every storyline? Can't we ever have a discussion or an investigation without a "face"?
As for Sheehan herself - she has the right to say what she wants, where she wants - whether you think it is eloquent or not is besides the point.
Louis N Proyect -
8/16/2005
How odd for Hitchens to raise a stink about somebody bad-mouthing Israel. In the mid-90s, before his brain had been rotted out by alcohol and imperialist apologetics, he would wrote things like this:
Not only does the ideology of "Greater Israel" provide a context for these nuts, lone and otherwise, but so do Israel's taxpayers and armed forces, and so do (a point left out of this week's appalled wailing in the American press) the taxpayers of the United States, who finance the occupation.
I do not mean this in a general metaphorical sense. On my last visit to Hebron, in August of 1991, I went to the alleged tomb of the alleged patriarch Abraham (who has oddly gained in stature from the belief that he is sacred to three religions that he knew nothing about). Entering the tomb, which is a combined mosque and synagogue, I was searched in the usual blunt manner by unsmiling Israeli soldiers. O.K., that's fine, security first and all. Yet what did I find inside but a hefty settler with a Kalashnikov slung over his back. "Look here," I said na^Kvely to the soldiery, "after all your legendary security there's a chap in the holy place bristling with weaponry." The officer, a not-very-polished immi- grant from Canada, decided to treat me as if I were as green as I looked.
"We are here," he said, "to protect the rights of these people." In that case, I asked, why were "these people" allowed to carry guns themselves? What would happen to a local Arab resi- dent, perhaps one even born in this town, who was carrying a gun for his protection? I got a look, and an answer, that said in effect: "It's a Jewish thing. You wouldn't understand."
The settlers of Kiryat Arba are there to prepare for the day, for which they pray regularly, that the Arabs are all driven out or killed. The Israeli army is there to uphold their right to bear arms. The only mystery about the affair of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, then, is that it hasn't happened more often. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the spiritual leaders of this ghastly place, has openly defended those who take the lives of the indigenous. Tomorrow, he will defend those who take the lives of secular Jews. Meanwhile, he is a pensioner of the U.S. loan guarantees that underwrite the colonists and pay to guard them with conscript soldiers.
So how disgusting it was to hear Yitzhak Rabin, that prince of hypocrites, as he addressed the Knesset and spoke of Goldstein as "a foreign implant." If that was true when Rabin said it, it was true the day before and the day before that, when Rabin was stalling on behalf of just such "foreign implants" to delay the long-overdue and meagerly drawn Jericho accord.
It's all very well to say that Goldstein was, as Rabin eva- sively phrased it, "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism." The fact is that he went unchallenged as he wore an Israeli army uniform, and that he was not searched as Arabs are all the time, and that the I.D.F. was and is there to protect people like him, who do not conceal their aims, and that Kiryat Arba (as ugly and militarized an architectural eyesore as can be found anywhere) will not be dynamited, as dozens of Palestinian homes would have been by now if the murderer or even suspected murderer had been Palestinian. As for Judaism, Amos Oz has already pointed out that the rabbinical authorities employ the neutral damage-control term "bloodshed" to describe Goldstein's act. He may have been a bastard, but he was their bastard.
