Untitled Document

14 November 2006

Lame Ducks

I got up yesterday with the oddest feeling. I had no job to go to for the first time since 1977.

I am not unemployed, technically. That will happen early next month, but my calendar is remarkably clear. I think I know what I am doing next, though that changes from minute to minute. It is not unlike the legislators who came back to town for the Lame Duck session of the 109th Congress.

The verdict is in, all the contests resolved. The losers are still in office though, until the 110th Congress convenes with all the new faces and ju-jitsu reversal in the leadership.

With a small majority in the House, and a razor-thin one in the Senate, it appears that the American people have sent with the new majority a clear message to stop doing crazy things, and no clear mandate to do anything else loony.

Extricating ourselves from the War seems to be high on just about every agenda, and no longer seems loony. This morning's news of the kidnapping of the Ministry of Education- the entire Ministry- by persons masquerading as cops is a surreal pinpoint in the kaleidoscope.

The Lame Ducks and New Lions are waiting for the report of the Iraq Study Group, a distinguished bi-partisan panel of former officials. They are reported to be considering a bold return to diplomacy as a prelude to reduction in troop levels. That was how we won the Vietnam conflict, as I recall, and is probably the way we will end our portion of this one.

Having as much time on my hands as a defeated Republican, I got into one of those speculative discussions about trying to figure out the landscape for the new Congress while looking at the phone, hoping someone would call to offer me the perfect job.

A lot of folks are being more pro-active downtown. It looks like Nancy Pelosi has locked up the Speakership, though her support for John Murtha of Pennsylvania as Majority Leader could weaken her before she even gets the gavel. Wiley Steny Hoyer of Maryland seems to think he has the votes locked up for that position, and he is a force to be reckoned with.

I had an opportunity to watch Steny do his thing a few years back. We needed a new headquarters building, and intended to build it at the Anacostia Naval Base in the District. You might have noticed from the “Taxation Without Representation” license plates on the limousines that the District has no members in Congress.

We were a little dim on that, too, thinking that having the building on Government land near the customer was the right thing to do. Steny beat us senseless until we had the Hoyer epiphany: we really wanted the building to be located in his District, out in the Suitland wilderness. Suddenly everything was right as rain, and the building sprung from the Maryland soil in soaring steel and glass.

Steny's portrait is in the auditorium now.

Murtha is protecting that only his military credentials and early stance against the war are what propelled the Democratic tsunami, and maybe he is right. Steny's partisans have darkly that Murtha also plays the earmark game, and is ethically challenged.

I suppose it is best to get this out of the way now, and hope that everything is sweetness and light in January. After the big jobs get sorted out, Nancy will have to figure out the committees.

Early word is that she is going to boot fellow Californian Jane Harman off the Intel Committee where she would become the Chair in January. Nancy have had a falling out, and what goes around, comes around.

So the Committee may go to Alcee Hastings, who has the strong backing of the Congressional Black Caucus. We have not heard from them in twelve years.

Some spectators are whispering that Rep. Hastings was convicted of bribery and impeached from the Federal Bench before he ran for the House. He has been a good congressman, best that money can buy, and there is no reason he couldn't be a good chairman.

Still, some think that his appointment would declare that business-as-usual will go one, and there could be a play to install Rep. Silvestre Reyes of El Paso as the Chair, leap-frogging Hastings. Reyes is a Vietnam vet and a former Border Patrol Agent.

That will irritate the CBC, though the move would build fences (no, not that kind) with the growing Hispanic presence in the house, and no one really knows how hard Nancy will push against the established order.

Most of the rest of the line-up is pretty well set in the Houose, with the usual suspects. Over In the Senate, it is Robert Byrd, King of West Virginia, as the new Senate Appropriations Chair, Carl Levin as Chair of Armed Services, Joe Biden as Foreign Relations, and Jay Rockefeller at Intelligence.

Of course, if Joe Lieberman decides to play ball with the GOP the way Jim Jeffords of Vermont did with the Democrats, that could all be turned on its head.

It all depends on where Lieberman sees himself. Could he be the only man to run for Vice President as a both a Democrat and a Republican, if John McCain wants to partner with him for the 2008 Election?

Joe is anything but a lame duck, and would have four years left on his term after the election if he didn't make it. He has absolutely nothing to lose.

Connecticut Republicans elected him, after all, when the anti-war Democrats tried to run him out of the Senate on a rail.

I thought about the Lame Ducks over at the Pentagon, too, the ones whose carts were hitched to the Rumsfeld mule. They made a lot of people unhappy in their tenure, and I imagine they are going to get flushed out pretty swiftly. I think I know who is the first to go.

But we can talk about that tomorrow. As a Lame Duck, I have all the time in the world.