09 March 2006

House and Senate

There is maybe rain coming today, and my ears are pricked up about it, since I am driving from Washington to the north, through Baltimore and Philly and Wilmington and into the Garden State, paralleling the railroad tracks.

I prefer to ride on the train, but going up late in the day that would require a cab on the distant end, since the car-rental place at the Penn Station in Newark will be long closed by the time of arrival.

So, drive it is. Hyper-alert as I am on travel days, I had to wade through what was happening on the Hill to get to the local weather.

The House passed the renewed provisions of the Patriot Act either Monday night or Tuesday; the bill is now on the President's desk for signature. The Conference Committee completed work on the War and Gulf Relief supplemental, a massive omnibus appropriations bill amounting to $92 billion dollars. Appended to it by renegade senators is a provision to block the Dubai Port World acquisition of limited operating control of some shipping terminals in five U.S. ports.

The President can't veto the bill over the rider, since the troops need the money, and he has to show some compassion to the people of new Orleans. He actually went to the battered lower 9th Ward for the first time to watch the bulldozers yesterday.

He has been to New Orleans ten times, but it is the first time he drove downtown to look at the levee.

Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief; the Republicans go to kick the President in the shins and show their hard line on homeland security and the Democrats got to kick somebody in frustration.

The Emir of Dubai is probably relieved, since the acquisition deal was not intended as much to gain a foothold in America as it was to gain control of key facilities in Asia.

None of them have to drive to New Jersey, and I suspect they are happy about that.

Throwing some random articles in a bag, I noticed that the New York Times has suddenly realized that there is partisan politics on the Senate intelligence committee.

They must have been out for a long lunch. The committees on the oversight of Intelligence were established after the Pike and Church Commissions documented the abuses of the Executive branch and the Intelligence Agencies in the mid-1970s.

I knew a few of the founding staffers from those days, courtly Jim Bush of the House, and two ladies of great dignity who worked for the majority and minority, respectively, and then the other way around when the House changed leadership from Democrat to Republican in November of 1994.

The dynamics were interesting. The House was always famous for being an issue-oriented panel, regardless of who was in charge.

The Senate committee was different. More dignified, perhaps, reflecting the nature of the senior partner of Congress. George Tenet came out of the support staff, and he was about as good as a professional staffer gets.

Senate rules permitted retired military officers to keep their full pensions while working for the Committee, so the staffers tended to be well-experienced and understanding of the peculiarities of the business. That was not true in the House, and the staff tended to be be younger and with less direct experience in how things really worked.

So, the dynamics of the relations between the two bodies was interesting and required a different approach. What I noticed in the mid-1990s was a dramatic shift toward Member prerogatives in the Senate.

I recall one in particular who brought the spoils system to the Intelligence committee from his position on Appropriations, where he had unprecidented access to the inner workings of the budget. He was a Senator from a southern state of vast self-importance,. One year he inisited on having a building named for himself, which aggriavated everyone no end, including theArmy, who felt you should have to die beofre being so honroed.

The Senator felt compelled one day to summon my Boss behind closed doors and lecture him on how the “earmark” system worked. He was blunt. He said if we didn't play ball and go along with the directed spending to the Senator's state he would whack the Agency.

He could cut the air conditioning account, or terminate the landscaping budget.

My Boss was an honorable military man, and corruption was not something that normally occurred to him. He did not understand precisely what game was being played.

My little organization constructed the budget request, and we refused to incorporate the directed funding into the base submission, which was largely invisible. If the Senator wanted his pork, we felt, he was free to add it in the partial light of day in the mark-up process. At least it would be visible, and the money steered to his state would have some visibility.

The Times noticed this morning that there was partisan activity in the Senate, which established an entirely new sub-panel to oversee the National Security Agency, and thus avoided holding hearings on the alleged warrantless wiretaps. 

Senator Rockefeller is the ranking Democrat on the Committee, and he sputtered about it, but demurred on the provision that he got to be on the new body.

The Times says the Committee's action is “breathtakingly cynical.”  I suspect they have their noses out of joint because their big story about the NSA eavesdropping has run its course and produced exactly nothing, except establishment of a new sub-committee and the renewal of the Patriot Act. I suspect they were hoping for impeachment, or at least an indictment or two, and the editors are cranky.

I share the concern. I don't know precisely what is going to remain of the Bill of Rights when we are done adjusting to the Digital Age. The law is always many steps behind the technology.

But I do know this. The breathtaking cynicism of the Senate did not begin this year. You would think that the Times might have noticed.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window