All week Senate Republicans have been using the word "stunt" to describe the closed-door meeting on prewar intelligence that Democrats forced on them earlier this week. An apoplectic Bill Frist came before the microphones to declare, "This is a pure stunt that is being performed by Senator [Harry] Reid, Senator [Dick] Durbin, and their leadership."
The majority leader was not mincing words, and you knew he was pissed off when he started naming names rather than just calling them "Democrats." And when he even found a way to say something nice about Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader defeated in the last election, you knew something was different. "I'll have to say," Frist said, "not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader have ever I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution."
And if you weren't sure how angry Frist was, he added: "This is an affront to me personally. It's an affront to our leadership. It's an affront to the United States of America. And it is wrong. It's very important for the American people to hear it directly as it's unfolding."
The ruin of the republic is at hand.
There is no question that Reid and the Democrats broke with the rules of the place, but that happens all the time, and in general, it is the Democrats complaining about transgressions.
It was Frist, for example, who went to South Dakota to campaign against Daschle, the first time ever that one Senate party leader went to the home state of the other to campaign against him. Daschle lost and Reid, though, he will not say it, has never forgiven Frist for that. And so stunt in return for stunt is comedy for the political gods.
The larger political dynamic at work is about control and power, and it is hard to tell whether the stunt was a cause or an effect of that byplay. Clearly, one little closed-door meeting was not the source of the GOP's panic; it was the sudden realization that Republicans were not entirely in control that left Frist and his Republican colleagues so upset. It is hard to be in charge when you're not in control.
The stunt also underlined the generalized anxiety that has taken hold of the GOP in the wake of the president's collapsing poll numbers, the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the non-indictment of Karl Rove, and the rising body count in Iraq.
It is a bad sign for your presidency when the good news of the week is that your closest political adviser has narrowly escaped criminal indictment. For a White House that has lifted political discipline and tight message control to a high art, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, with his four-corned indictment of Libby, is a nightmare -- they had and have no control over him.
And there is a lot about Reid, when he is not trying really hard to be statesmanlike, that cannot be controlled. This is a guy, after all, who took on the mob in Las Vegas and was forced to start his car by remote control from a distance (after a live bomb was found rigged to his wife's car when Reid was head of the Nevada Gaming Commission). He is going to be hard to scare, especially when you show up wounded for the fight. And that, in essence, is the situation in which the GOP finds itself at this point. The Republicans are bleeding, and they're fairly worried that it's going to get worse.
When John McCain held yet another hearing this week on how former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and onetime Tom DeLay staffer Michael Scanlon, trading on their close ties to the Republican power structure, defrauded several Indian tribes of more than $60 million, it was a reminder of how much worse it could get. The FBI has more than 50,000 of Abramoff's e-mails, and Scanlon is supposedly cooperating. The four corners of those indictments could hold a few important names. The subpoena received this week by Representative Bob Ney for documents involving Abramoff can't be making anyone comfortable.
After Reid forced the issue, Rick Santorum, chair of the GOP conference in the Senate declared: "This is purely political, settling an old political score. This is pre-2004 election politics … . For some reason they can't move on. They have to continue to replay the 2004 election." Wrong.
This is so not about 2004. It's all about 2006 and 2008, and Santorum -- who is up for re-election next year -- ought to know better. He is one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot in 2006. In a state that has voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections, running for re-election on the GOP ticket in the sixth year of a Republican presidency would be nerve-racking anyway. Considering the increasing unpopularity of this administration, it out to be downright terrifying.
More frightening, however, is a motivated, united Democratic Party not willing to play by the old decency rules. Because that could only mean more stunts, making it harder for Republicans to exercise their control of the Senate -- and that, of course, could lead to an actual loss of control the next time an election comes around.
A motivated, united Democratic Party -- now that would be a stunt.
Terence Samuel is the former chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
