It may not be news, at this point, the way this administration stonewalls the political opposition, the media, and even bipartisan undertakings like the September 11 commission, whose very creation the administration resisted for months. But vigorous debate is supposedly one of the most important underpinnings of a functioning democracy, and in George W. Bush's Washington, we keep seeing again and again that it doesn't exist.
President Bush routinely ducks both his political opponents and the media, and when he does bow to convention, it's within parameters far more controlled than any president of modern times. At his recent press conference, reporters were not permitted to ask follow-up questions, a proscription that enabled him to get away with the usual first-pass evasion that most politicians make while never being confronted with the second, more specific question ("But sir, with all due respect..."). Recently, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and, unlike every president in recent times before him, did not take unrehearsed questions from his Fourth Estate audience, submitting only to pre-selected, written questions.
The absence of democratic exchange is not limited to the administration. On Capitol Hill, the lack of actual dialogue is, if anything, worse. Think about this paradox: Congress is the ground zero of our democracy, right? Yet today, there is precious little democracy on Capitol Hill. Democrats are excluded from meetings. Bills are rewritten at the last minute in the meetings from which Democrats are excluded. An allegation arises in Bob Woodward's book that the administration perhaps illegally moved $700 million toward Iraq War planning without telling Congress. Republican congressional leaders are asked about it; they cannot refute it, instead dancing around the question and trying to change the subject. And even this issue -- quite similar to the Reagan administration's bypassing of the Boland Amendment, which resulted in a serious probe and a presidential crisis -- fades to black.
All this provides the larger context for Condoleezza Rice's appearance on Capitol Hill last week.
To hear The Associated Press tell it in a report that was picked up by The Washington Times, Rice "made a rare trip to Capitol Hill for separate closed-door briefings with Republicans and Democratic lawmakers on Iraq." Sounds nice, appropriate, and even constitutionally responsible, doesn't it?
Well, sort of. Here's what happened. Around 10:30 a.m. last Thursday, Rice met with House Republicans. Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, a member of the House leadership, said that she answered “question after question after question,” a quote that was fairly widely picked up (to the extent that this story was picked up at all) and that conveyed the impression that Rice had been uniquely forthcoming.
And maybe she had -- with Republicans. But she didn't meet with House Democrats, who would have had a few questions of their own given recent events in Iraq, at all.
In the afternoon, it was over to the Senate side. There, again, she had a lengthy meeting with Senate Republicans, a meeting that had been planned in advance and that lasted more than an hour.
Senate Democrats? They fared a little better than their House counterparts: After all, the Senate is the Senate, and senators have more to do with making foreign policy. So staffers in the office of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle got a call -- last Wednesday afternoon, barely 24 hours before Rice was to come to the Hill -- from a Rice aide informing them that Condi was of course anxious to meet with Democrats, too! So, around 2:20 p.m. last Thursday, Rice entered a secure Senate briefing room to meet with most of the Democratic members of the Senate.
What happened next is straight out of Stanley Kubrick or John Frankenheimer, though I doubt even those acerbic minds would have dared conceive of this. A mere 10 minutes into the meeting, the bell rang, signaling a roll-call vote. The Rice meeting was abruptly disbanded, says a Senate leadership aide, after Democrats got to ask Rice a mere five or six questions.
And what was this vital vote, that had to happen at 2:30 and not 3:30 or 4:05? It was on the passage of a piece of crime-victims-rights legislation so mundane and uncontroversial that it passed 96 to 1. To be sure, the vote was scheduled for that afternoon. But Democrats quite reasonably found it a little fishy that, by gosh, the vote had to be recorded at exactly that minute! And how dare they question the timetable! Waiting until 4 p.m. would surely have meant the Senate was soft on crime!
Now, here are the facts that really give away the game. You may be thinking, well, a vote is a vote, they come up often, maybe it was just a coincidence. But this was only the second recorded vote in the Senate of the week, notes a Democratic aide, and just the sixth recorded vote of the entire month of April. This bespeaks another quiet Capitol Hill outrage -- Republicans are sitting on legislation, trying to pass as little as possible so that they can head into the election and charge the Democrats with being obstructionist. They're calling as few recorded votes as they can get away with. Except, of course, at the exact moment that the national-security adviser is just settling in to face her first grilling from Senate Democrats in ages, at a time when Americans are dying left and right in Iraq and the situation looks worse every day.
Rice would surely have faced tough questioning if she'd sat with Democrats for 45 minutes or so. But in Bush's Washington, such moments of genuine colloquy -- and accountability -- are unthinkable. And the administration, and the GOP congressional leadership, continue to get away with this sort of nonsense because the media allow it.
On the subject of this dubious Rice bait and switch, only National Public Radio's Andrea Seabrook bothered to report even some of the above details. The AP article that The Washington Times picked up was far more typical of the shiftless indifference to this story, and to the way this administration constantly defines democracy down. And it will keep happening unless our elite media demonstrate that they care about this.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect. His column appears every Monday.
