USA Today
Virtually every member of the U.S. Senate knows there aren't nearly enough votes there to convict the president and send him packing. The only real question is whether the Senate, which is likely to open the trial today, censures the president within a couple of weeks or the process drags on for months.
Should we care?
If it goes on and on, you can forget Social Security reform or tax cuts. But these were long shots anyway. Even if it were business as usual, the Democrats would block any privatization of Social Security. And the Republicans want to reserve their big tax-cutting crusade for the millennial election.
Congress has been deadlocked for a year. Even when it had no impeachment trial on its hands, the Senate did nothing. Why suppose that a long impeachment trial would stop it from doing something else?
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress have become increasingly irrelevant. The nation's business will go on, regardless of whether there's a long, drawn-out Senate trial.
In case you hadn't noticed, America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board. Their decisions about interest rates are determining how many of us have jobs and how many of us get a raise.
When the Fed's Open Market Committee decides to lower the rates, unemployment drops and wages rise. When they raise rates, it's just the opposite. When they decide to hold rates steady, as they did last week, the economy continues to move in whatever direction it was already going.
Congress is out of this loop. Every so often, some senators or House members politely ask Greenspan to visit and talk about the economy. He obliges by riding up to the Hill and muttering convoluted sentences that no two people interpret in quite the same way. Then he goes back down to the Fed and runs the country.
America's foreign policy, meanwhile, is now being run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with some coaching from the Treasury Department. Their decisions are determining the fate of much of the Third World. The giant bailout they just engineered for Brazil, with lots of strings attached, will decide whether Brazil slips deeper into recession and brings most of the rest of Latin America with it.
Here, too, Congress has become irrelevant. Some senators and House members fussed a bit when the administration asked for tens of billions of additional dollars for the IMF. But in the end, the elected representatives came through. They didn't want to be blamed for the global economy collapsing. But they don't know exactly what the IMF is doing with all that money or how it comes up with the strings it attaches.
And when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. He just calls up a few generals, phones Tony Blair in Britain and sends in the bombers.
Have you seen a single congressional hearing or congressional debate on the U. S. Iraqi war? Senators and House members watch the bombs bursting over Baghdad on CNN. When asked, they say they support the president. But they don't know what the president is trying to accomplish over there. Nobody does. And they would rather not talk about that.
In the old days, when American democracy flourished, we occasionally had national debates about all these sorts of things. Senators and House members deliberated over jobs and wages. They had great debates over foreign policy. They decided whether the nation should go to war.
But that was then. Now they just shout at one another and hold impeachment trials.
C-SPAN wants to broadcast the Senate debate about whether to have an impeachment trial, and then broadcast the trial itself, if there's to be one. I hope the Senate allows C-SPAN in.
But C-SPAN doesn't even think about broadcasting the meetings of the Federal Reserve Board or the International Monetary Fund or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. C-SPAN probably doesn't know where these groups meet. Almost no one does.
And yet, these are where the really big decisions are made these days.
A long Senate impeachment trial might create some good sound bites. It will supply a lot of fodder for talk radio and "yell television." But such a spectacle is unlikely to be of much relevance to our lives.
It's too bad Congress no longer debates the things that count.
