Majority Overreach

AFRAID THAT THEIR majority leader, Tom DeLay, would be indicted by a grand jury in Travis County, TX, members of the Republican caucus voted on Nov. 17 to overturn a rule requiring any party leader or committee chairman indicted on a felony charge to relinquish their post. Conducted verbally, the vote overturned an 11-year-old rule initially adopted by House Republicans in 1993 (when they were still the minority party), as a show of their moral superiority to what they considered a corrupt Democratic majority.

In many respects, one can look at the "DeLay rule" as marking the end of the idealism Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution brought the party when it gained the majority in the House a decade ago. It also comes at a time when Republicans-having gained control over the House, the Senate and the White House-have set themselves up as the only game in town, and have wasted little time since the November elections in charting a course to reinvent government in their image. As any political hack knows, however, power in a democracy doesn't come for free. With the eyes of the nation now trained on the ruling majority, any tendency to overreach should be noted by a skeptical press. But as with so much else in our national politics, the gap between what is right and what is reality is a wide one.

Republicans have done a remarkable job deflecting charges of hypocrisy. They have succeeded by turning the issue away from DeLay's alleged criminal acts and into a referendum on the prosecuting DA. The major networks have dutifully fallen in line behind the GOP's talking points, with CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC all making sure to point out that Ronnie Earle, the Texas DA prosecuting DeLay, "is a Democrat," and broadcasting the Republican claim that Earle's investigation was little more than a partisan power play conducted by a wild-eyed Democratic ideologue.

"With Ronnie Earle," notes Duncan Black, senior analyst for media watchdog group Media Matters, "we saw numerous news stories which reported the frequent charge by Republicans in government and the conservative establishment more generally that Ronnie Earle was a highly partisan prosecutor who had devoted his career to going after Republican politicians. This accusation was provided as the 'balance' to the story about the grand jury investigation, reducing it to 'prosecutor investigates DeLay,' but Republicans say it's just a partisan witch hunt.'"

Also missing from the vast majority of press coverage of the matter was the fact that 12 of the 16 politicians Earle has prosecuted since 1976 have been Democrats, which would kind of kill the "partisan" charges reporters ate up so readily. The DeLay matter is just one of a number of instances since the November election where the Republican Party has managed to distort and conceal their partisan maneuverings behind a wall of rhetoric that the national media can only stare up at, taking notes.

CLAIMING DIVINE MANDATE in their election-day sweep, the GOP is using its new power to ride herd over the 109th Congress. Having finally won the sort of power Republicans have not seen since before the New Deal, the party's leadership has moved quickly to take advantage of their monopoly in Washington. Since Nov. 2, Republican Congressional leaders have not only changed ethics rules to benefit their party's leadership, but altered voting rules, blocked Democratic lawmakers from attending meetings, instituted a campaign to ensure that former Democratic staffers cannot find employment at K Street lobbying firms, and have set up a system to abolish the filibuster. In addition, we have seen the ugly emergence of what has been called the "majority of the majority" rule. Favored by House majority leader Dennis Hastert, the rule holds that Hastert will not allow any bill to come up for vote that a majority of House Republicans does not support, regardless of the bill's popular support.

This coup, most of which was completed before Thanksgiving, was done right out in the open. There were no secret meetings, no back-room deals and no attempts to hide anything from the media. Yet aside from some below-the-fold coverage that was treated as little more than procedural issues of interest only to "insiders," none of these stories has really made it to prime time.

"I don't think any of these things has become a major news story," says Jim Naureckas of the non-profit media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "It's treated as if they're issues that are of interest only to political junkies."

As a result of the media's fear of angering the Republican machine and the desire on the part of many reporters to simply transmit what they have been told, a reporter in this environment "has no need to check facts, as the only fact which is being reported is that somebody said something," says Duncan Black. "Providing 'balance' is also easy, as one just finds a dissenting voice and includes it."

As has become commonplace, the press recuses itself from covering the story in anything resembling a satisfactory manner, despite the fact the wholesale changes pushed through by the right are, according to Naureckas, "absolutely huge."

"It's something that should be leading the newscasts every night, that these proposals are being made."

THE 9/11 INTELLIGENCE Bill was initially blocked from passage by Hastert's "majority of the majority" rule because he could not get a majority of House Republicans to support it. The insularity and hubris of this approach is evidenced by the fact that both the president, as well as a majority of the American people, supported the overhaul of our intelligence services. The hypocrisy becomes more rank when you consider that no one has insisted more loudly than Republicans that after 9/11, Americans must put aside partisanship and petty self-interest in order to stand together against a common enemy.

One wonders what the response of Fox News and talk radio would have been if the Democratic Party had held up the passage of the 9/11 bill. If John Kerry can be ravaged for actually having volunteered to serve in Vietnam and the patriotism of anyone disagreeing with the president can be called into question, you can bet that the Brit Humes and Ann Coulters of the world would have launched a scorched-earth campaign against the America-hating liberals. It was the "party of national security"-the Republicans-that held up the bill. And the press, afraid of hitting them too hard, treated the story as little more than a procedural matter.

"While reporters quoted people making reference to chain of command issues and concerns that provisions could endanger troops on the ground, none of the stories I read were clear about the precise provisions in question," says Media Matters' Black. "It was almost entirely a process question-'Will it pass in time for recess? Will Republicans in Congress disobey Bush?'"

Naureckas from FAIR agrees, finding that "The press has overwhelmingly portrayed the 9/11 bill as little more than a question of 'will Bush control his Republicans' as opposed to what happens to civil liberties under the plan."

None of this is new. Republicans barred House Democrats from helping to draft major bills such as the 2003 Medicare revision and this year's intelligence reform package. These measures are not simply the Republican's payback for decades being held under the thumb of the majority Democrats, either. In 1993, most House Democrats opposed the NAFTA bill, despite the fact that President Clinton backed it. Still, leaders of the Democratic-controlled House allowed it to come to a vote and the trade pact passed due only to heavy GOP support, with the majority of Democrats voting against it. Newt Gingrich, the House GOP leader at the time, declared: "This is a vote for history, larger than politics...larger than personal ego."

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF the new Republican tendency to overreach is what has been labeled the "nuclear option." Advocated by Senator Trent Lott, the tactic has been proposed and endorsed by party leadership as a way to force the president's judicial nominees through Congress by declaring Democratic filibusters are unconstitutional, due to the fact that they impede the business of the government. For the past 200 years, the filibuster was the one option given the minority party to keep debate open on any subject, with the votes of at least 67 senators needed to end debate.

Under Lott's plan, a simple majority of Senators, 51, will be able to pass judicial nominees, without having to deal with the minority party whatsoever. Call it a "majority of the minority" rule. What it boils down to is that senators representing a minority of the population shut out the remaining senators, who represent a majority of the population.

As Michael Gerhardt and Erwin Chemerinsky recently pointed out in the L.A. Times, "The GOP plan to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations would do lasting damage to the Senate. Not only do the Republicans hope to do it without following the long-established rules for changing Senate procedure but, if they're successful, they would eliminate a key check, guaranteeing their party's absolute control over Supreme Court appointments."

Granted, this option has not yet been used, because the president hasn't tried to nominate any judges to the bench in his second term, but what of the fact that it has been floated at all? Again, as we've seen, the media has been mostly absent on this issue. Aside from a few purely rule-based pieces, few have bothered to examine the long-range consequences of doing away with a Congressional procedure in place since 1790.

The issue is bigger than just shoddy reporting. The media's inability to get around on this story in general can be seen partly as the result of a decades-long project on the part of the right to control media coverage of its policies through intimidation, flooding the market with well-funded think-tank apologists for its cause, and floating the "liberal media" canard. By constantly harping on the idea that the media has a liberal bias, the right has forced the media to go on the defensive, with the result being that reporters-whether they admit it or not-second guess their coverage of the right, scrubbing it clean of any hint of this alleged bias.

In much the same way, the media is once again getting rolled by the right's message machine now that the GOP has gained a stranglehold on all three branches of government. Over and above their ability to control the debate, their newfound monopoly on power gives them "an understandable advantage," according to Duncan Black. "Generally, they 'make' the news, and the Democrats can only respond to it."

This ability to control the news cycle is something the minority Democrats need to take note of, and a good starting point would be to look at how the right made news while they were the minority party during the 90s. Black continues, "During most of the Clinton administration, the Republicans had the ability to make news by holding numerous Congressional hearings, giving them the power to make news even as they were the minority party. From the perspective of the press, they need to decide whether it's appropriate for them to take additional steps to correct this imbalance. But, this would require injecting their own perspective to take a critical look at those in power. This would open them up to shrieks of 'liberal bias.'"

Indeed it would, but it is the duty of the media in a democracy to investigate and analyze, not just repeat, the sound bites of the nation's leadership. Now more than ever, as one party so thoroughly dominates the national political scene, it is imperative that the press, as FAIR's Naureckas says, "makes it clear how enormous these changes are."