Investigative Journamalism

by digby

I realize that there is a growing contigent of readers who find me guilty of innumerable crimes of bad judgment and hyperbolic swamp fever. (I’m not sure why this is only now becoming a problem — I’ve always been this way.) In any case, here I go again:

I simply cannot understand why there is even a debate among Democrats, much less a public debate, about whether or not they should openly call for investigations if they win office. I realize that the Republicans are mau-mauing the hell out of them on this — and the press is hungrily eating it up — but it still makes no sense to me.

First, on principle, the congress has a constitutional duty to do this. If Democrats want people to know that we stand for something, they need to start with the constitution. It is, regardless of the political challenge, their obligation as citizens and elected officials to provide oversight to any executive, much less an openly lawless one. Sorry, kids. You have no choice. I know it would be nice to pretend all this ugliness never happened, but it did. Precedents have been set, wars have been waged, lives have been lost, billions have been wasted, one of our great cities has been destroyed, our moral standing around the globe is nil and everybody knows it. The congress is mandated to oversee the executive and they have failed to do that for the past five years. If the Democrats continue in that failure, they are also guilty of shirking their constitutional duty. It’s that simple.

Second, as a matter of long term political consideration there is the moral hazard of letting the Republicans skate again on what they’ve done. After three Republican administrations out of the last four were revealed to have ignored the will of the congress and operated imperial presidencies, I think it’s pretty clear that they do not believe in a neutral system of checks and balances between the branches; they believe that Republican presidents have unfettered power to do whatever they wish and that Democratic presidents must submit to non-stop harrassment by the congress. This is not a matter of opinion. This is how they have behaved when they have had power, either executive, legislative or both. To let these actions go unexplored, undebated, unchallenged by the congress is to validate this premise. It will happen again — and why shouldn’t it? The Republicans know that the only thing they will suffer from doing this is a temporary loss of power (time for them to catch their breath and count their profits) until things improve and they can go back in and experiment, consolidate and plunder some more. This has been the pattern for the last 40 years. There has been no price to pay. The Republican party is not going to have a “come to Jesus” moment and recognize that they have been on the wrong track lo these many years and they need to clean up their act. This is how they do things and will continue to do things unless the country calls a halt. They cannot do that if they are not informed of the scope and meaning of these actions.

Now I realize that this is not an argument a politician can easily make in his stump speech. But it is a valid argument that Democrats should be making to themselves. And I mean making to themselves, not on the front pages of the New York Times using named surrogates to carry the message that top Democrats don’t want to make publicly.

Third, as a matter of short term political consideration I simply do not agree that this is an electoral loser. The country is very upset with George W. Bush and the Republican congress. The wrong track number is at 70%. It’s bizarre that politicians believe that the voters don’t want investigations into what in the hell went wrong, just because the Republicans say they don’t. By what strange mathematical equation can Democrats believe that when two thirds of the country thinks the nation is going off the rails and the same two thirds disapprove of the president that they don’t want any accounting? That doesn’t seem human to me.

Zachary Roth has written an interesting article in the latest Washington Monthly on the subject in which he concludes that the Democrats would be best served by holding bi-partisan investigations should they win in November. I don’t disagree, if they can keep the Republicans on the straight and narrow. It’s always more powerful to have both parties involved — and it might just happen what with Bush being repudiated on the right for his kumbayaa liberalism and all. But I wouldn’t trust them as far as I can throw them. One wonders if their cooperation is even possible considering their decision to run against the crazed lynch mob Democrats, but if Democrats could pull it off, it would be fine with me. I’m not holding my breath.

Roth himself points out that the Republicans did a nice job of innoculating against any investigations by bringing up the “partisan withchunt” boogeyman which they, of course, embodied in the 90’s:

Since 1997, the House Government Reform committee has issued over 1000 subpoenas related to allegations of misconduct involving the Clinton administration or the Democratic party—compared to just 15 related to Bush administration or Republican abuses. The seemingly endless probes of the Clinton administration turned up little in the way of corruption, and stymied the Republican revolution: In the 1998 midterm elections, with the Lewinsky scandal in the news, Democrats picked up seats in Congress.

But those investigations left a residue of ill will that Republicans have cleverly turned to their own advantage. In a stunning display of chutzpah, GOP leaders are now exploiting voters’ fears of endless partisan investigations—fears that they themselves created with their own behavior in the ’90s—to caution with faux solemnity that Democrats, if given control of one or both houses of Congress, would impeach the president and plunge the nation into turmoil. In a recent fundraising email, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman warned that Democrats “will censure and impeach the President if they win back Congress.”

They’ve got big brass ones, you have to admit. They behaved like a slavering lynch mob for six solid years and now evoke that image against the party they lynched.

I’m not sure how this call for the smelling salts will play to the independents and Democrats who are watching this thing play out with jaws dropped to the floor, but there’s one constituency who is eating it up:

The press corps has been quick to take the bait. “If Democrats win in the midterm elections in November, will the Democrats in Congress move to impeach this president?” Norah O’Donnell breathlessly asked DNC chair Howard Dean on MSNBC’s “Hardball” in April. Dean’s response suggests how deeply this line of attack has Democrats spooked: He hedged, assuring O’Donnell that impeachment “is going to come pretty low on the list,” and quickly pivoted to talk about jobs and port security. And Dean is the Democrats’ attack dog! Other party leaders want even less to do with the question, for fear of giving the Republicans ammunition to argue that a Democratic House would mean endless partisan rancor.

Let’s first deal with Chairman Dean whom I greatly admire and usually find refreshingly candid in these situations. WTF? I can understand him punting a bit on the impeachment question, but why not use that opportunity to make a case for congressional oversight? Democrats need to focus on those things that are emblematic of the administration’s failure and incorporate the need for investigations of them into their platform, not try to pivot away from the issue and look frightened of the prospect. Running from a direct question like that is transparent to any viewer; politicians fool nobody with a “change of subject” on such a loaded question. Frankly, it feeds directly into the widely held impression that “they all do it.” By hedging on the question of accountability, Dems are perceived as either weak or corrupt themselves. Big mistake.

But what can we say about the press? It’s nuts that they are so eager to sound the GOP alarm about Democrats going off the deep end with investigations. Why in the world wouldn’t any journalist’s juices be flowing profusely at the idea of somebody cracking the vault after all these years?

I find this very interesting in light of the fact that they eagerly swallowed every tid-bit of evidence that Dan Burton and Al D’Amato and Ken Starr dribbled down their willing throats. It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? We all try to figure out what motivates the political media and we usually figure it has something to do with kissing up to power or social pressure or careerism. But this breathless recitation of the GOP’s primary talking point for the upcoming election, using it as a cudgel in questions put to Democrats as if they are suggesting legalizing pedophilia or putting Republicans in stocks for double parking, cannot be explained by any of these things.

They seem to agree, as John Dickerson did recently in Slate that Democrats are making a big mistake if they promise investigations, even going so far as to use the 1994 takeover as an example of a party taking the high road. (Media Matters ably dispensed with that silly misreading of history.)

Perhaps the press have not yet internalized the implosion of the GOP establishment. Maybe they can’t remember a world in which Republicans do not have the upper hand. It doesn’t matter. The fact that they are out there raising the “spectre” of investigations like it is even more dangerous than illegal wiretaps on their own phones is extremely revealing. If they ever had any journalistic instincts they’ve been bred out of them by 15 years of GOP establishment rule. The kindest thing one can say is that they don’t know how to be real reporters anymore. I suspect that a fair number of them never wanted to be — and quite a few more have an interest in maintaining the status quo. I’ll leave it to you to speculate why that might be.

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