Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

December 20, 2007

With Democrats Like These, Who Needs a Majority?

This business about being in the minority isn’t working out so badly for conservatives. Maybe we should have tried this sooner.

Sen. John McCain said recently, and I suspect truthfully, that he pleaded with President Bush to veto the lard-assed spending bills passed by the erstwhile Republican majority in Congress, only to be told that the administration dreaded losing the congressional majority if it did.

It’s a funny thing, dread. A few years ago, a close friend faced a family situation he had feared for some time might come to pass. When I asked him how he was handling it, he said, “The thing about dreading something, and then having it happen, is that you can stop dreading it and start dealing with it.”

Bush is doing a better job dealing with Democratic control of Congress than he did dreading it, and trying to prevent it from coming to pass. Other than a regrettable deal that allowed an increase in the federal minimum wage, the Democrats have accomplished nothing on their legislative agenda.

The recent budget deal between Congress and the president is nearly a complete capitulation on the Democrats’ part. Bush insisted on, and got, a $933 billion limit on domestic discretionary spending in 2008. That’s far from a triumph, but as an increase on the baseline, it’s better than he was able to do when the Republicans were in charge.

The Democrats also failed on numerous occasions this year to pay off the union bosses who must be wondering why they funneled so much time and money into the Democrats’ campaigns. The unions didn’t get the elimination of secret organizing ballots they wanted. They didn’t get the Davis-Bacon Act expansion that would have expanded requirements for “prevailing wages,” and the limits they sought on their own disclosure reports did not come to pass.

The anti-war crowd is, of course, fit to be tied. The Democrats once again gave Bush the money he wanted to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - $70 billion in all – with no strings attached, withdrawal date or otherwise. The party that promised its base it would end the war and bring the troops home has not only failed to do so, but with the success of the troop surge and the improvement in the situation there, a pullout is a much harder sell now than it was a year ago.

At one point, the astoundingly self-serving Sen. Hillary Clinton actually went so far as to demand that Bush pull the troops out before leaving office because the next president shouldn’t have to deal with the problem. There is now zero chance that this will happen. If we’re lucky, of course, the chances of a Hillary Clinton presidency will be about the same.

The Democrats have failed to achieve their agenda because it was never a serious agenda to begin with. They were never going to get the troops out of Iraq because national security won’t abide it. They always knew that. They told their base they would do it, and the base bought it, but it wasn’t true. Not for one second.

Pay-as-you-go budgeting? That didn’t even last the year. The only way they could have kept this promise would have been to raise taxes, and they didn’t even try – not that they would have succeeded.

They didn’t stop warrantless wiretapping. They didn’t get rid of the Patriot Act. They didn’t stop waterboarding.

What they did do, however, is bring out the best in Bush, who no longer has to worry about protecting an unprincipled Republican majority on the grounds that it was better than the alternative.

Maybe it wasn’t. The Democrats have been so ineffective that their own base is seething with rage at them. Granted, some of these folks are of the unhinged variety and wouldn’t be satisfied unless the Democrats were voting articles of impeachment against Bush – which of course will never happen.

But it’s nice to see the far left so upset. They should be. Bush has outmaneuvered Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at every turn this year, and the people who worked so hard to put the Democrats into office have gotten nothing for their efforts.

What we conservatives have gotten, by contrast, is a welcome return of the old, feisty Bush. This is not to say the overall results call for throwing a party. Federal spending is still bloated, the tax code is still a mess and we’re still not pumping oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A serious, principled conservative Congress could and should have dealt with all of this. But we’ve gotten better results than we might have hoped out of an inept Democratic Congress and resurgent Republican president.

Life in the minority is not so bad.

This is Column # DC136.  Request permission to publish here.