Let's Boot The Worst Congress Ever

The Worst Congress Ever
How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts --
in five easy steps
MATT TAIBBI

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...s_e ver/print

See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen and read what people are
saying in our politics blog.


There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the
Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal
commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked,
raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman
of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder:
What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and
incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These
were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a
political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of
thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning
and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a
debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a
place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and
rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze,
idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to
misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political
crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no
native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still
provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight
deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than
a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control
this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary
vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past
six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their
oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious
policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host
of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial
interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and
they nailed their target.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a
failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and
the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law
School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would
shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an
exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment
corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the
outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his
policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and
drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension
of the White House."

The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury,
frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal
government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes. In
case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:

STEP ONE
RULE BY CABAL

If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP control,
just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional office buildings
like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the minority offices for the
various congressional committees, you will inevitably find exactly the same
character -- a Democratic staffer in rumpled khakis staring blankly off into
space, nothing but a single lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on
his wall, his eyes wide and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape
victim. His skin is as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun
in seven years.

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways
of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the
size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in
the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the
Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation
but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington
was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed
together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared
the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and congressional
business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that
the Democrats represent simply does not exist.

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by
consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work
around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the
letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a
backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind
the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp,
where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a
fact the Republicans don't even bother to conceal.

"I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says Winslow
Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer in the
Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici at the
time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats were debating
what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he says, 'Why are
you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room when the decisions
are made.' Just said it right out in the open."

Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into the
history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the offices of a
Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once worked for both
Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas Democrat David Pryor
simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers trapped in the basement
laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever happen again. These days,
they consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing on a
bill before Rove's well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up for Bush's
signature.

The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to the
greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired
by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an
ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes
you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat
prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when
Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a
little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when
Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a
Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good
turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats
again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to
examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the
chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and
walked out.

"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case
anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the
microphones on his way out of the room.

For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no further
than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas -- a pugnacious
Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having an affair with a
pharmaceutical lobbyist -- enjoys a reputation rivaling that of the rotund
Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign took place just before midnight on
July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a "substitute" pension bill on
Democrats -- one that they had never read -- and informed them they would be
voting on it the next morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding
that the bill be read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to
confer. But Thomas wanted to move forward -- so he called the Capitol police
to evict the Democrats.

Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference
hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate
versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include at
least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans have
managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly juvenile
behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after happy hour.
GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in for a photo op and
then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes,
gavel it out -- all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the
process. Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real
conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching
the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to
figure out where the conference is," says one House aide.

In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret
conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans
closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one
answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous "Land Shark" skit
from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to
make a sound. "Rangel was the land shark, I guess," the aide jokes. But the
real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. "This meeting," he
informed Rangel, "is only open to the coalition of the willing."

Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the phenomenon
has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that once prevailed
helped Congress form a sense of collective identity that it needed to
fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the power of the other two
branches of government. It also enabled Congress to pass legislation with a
wide mandate, legislation that had been negotiated between the leaders of
both parties. For this reason Republican and Democratic leaders
traditionally maintained cordial relationships with each other -- the model
being the collegiality between House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and Minority
Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s. The two used to hold daily meetings
over drinks and even rode to work together.

Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed over the
years, historians note that Congress has taken strong bipartisan action in
virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry Truman who instigated
investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, and Republicans Howard
Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles on the Senate Watergate
Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment.

But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional investigations
like this during the last six years," says David Mayhew, a professor of
political science at Yale who has studied Congress for four decades. "These
days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing this sort of thing. Too
much nasty partisanship."

One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot Act.
The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in the
Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to zero, with
famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying aye. But when the
bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans simply chucked the
approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more repressive version,
apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a minority
member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was just for show."

To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes,
Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of "closed"
rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility of
amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a
bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way that
the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to legislation
drafted by the majority.

In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five percent of
all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year Democrats ran
the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent -- and Republicans were
seriously ****ed. "You know what the closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln
Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House floor. "It means no
discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic." When
Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to throw off the gag rules
imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules
Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free
debate on the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he
declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted
rules."

How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first session of
this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were appropriations
bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one open vote -- H. Res.
255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005.

In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, outside of
appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills have been a
genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed clover of
legislative politics.

When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally
resembles what one House aide calls "preordained Kabuki." Republican leaders
in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation: the one-vote
victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the leadership cooks up some
hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and then scales it back bit by
bit. Once they're in striking range, they send the ****er to the floor and
beat in the brains of the fence-sitters with threats and favors until enough
members cave in and pass the damn thing. It is, in essence, a legislative
microcosm of the electoral strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such
devastating effect.

A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade
Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As has
often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at night,
away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified by what they
see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the "Dracula" Congress:
Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between midnight and 7 a.m.

CAFTA actually went to vote early -- at 11:02 p.m. When the usual
fifteen-minute voting period expired, the nays were up, 180 to 175.
Republicans then held the vote open for another forty-seven minutes while
GOP leaders cruised the aisles like the family elders from The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, frantically chopping at the legs and arms of Republicans
who opposed the measure. They even roused the president out of bed to help
kick ass for the vote, passing a cell phone with Bush on the line around the
House cloakroom like a bong. Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina was
approached by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who told him, "Negotiations are
open. Put on the table the things that your district and people need and
we'll get them." After receiving assurances that the administration would
help textile manufacturers in his home state by restricting the flow of
cheap Chinese imports, Hayes switched his vote to yea. CAFTA ultimately
passed by two votes at 12:03 a.m.

Closed rules, shipwrecked bills, secret negotiations, one-vote victories.
The result of all this is a Congress where there is little or no open debate
and virtually no votes are left to chance; all the important decisions are
made in backroom deals, and what you see on C-Span is just empty theater,
the world's most expensive trained-dolphin act. The constant here is a
political strategy of conducting congressional business with as little
outside input as possible, rejecting the essentially conservative tradition
of rule-by-consensus in favor of a more revolutionary strategy of rule by
cabal.

"This Congress has thrown caution to the wind," says Turley, the
constitutional scholar. "They have developed rules that are an abuse of
majority power. Keeping votes open by freezing the clock, barring minority
senators from negotiations on important conference issues -- it is a record
that the Republicans should now dread. One of the concerns that Republicans
have about losing Congress is that they will have to live under the
practices and rules they have created. The abuses that served them in the
majority could come back to haunt them in the minority."

STEP TWO
WORK AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE -- AND SCREW UP WHAT LITTLE YOU DO

It's Thursday evening, September 28th, and the Senate is putting the
finishing touches on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, colloquially
known as the "torture bill." It's a law even Stalin would admire, one that
throws habeas corpus in the trash, legalizes a vast array of savage
interrogation techniques and generally turns the president of the United
States into a kind of turbocharged Yoruba witch doctor, with nearly
unlimited snatching powers. The bill is a fall-from-Eden moment in American
history, a potentially disastrous step toward authoritarianism -- but what
is most disturbing about it, beyond the fact that it's happening, is that
the senators are hurrying to get it done.

In addition to ending generations of bipartisanship and instituting
one-party rule, our national legislators in the Bush years are guilty of
something even more fundamental: They suck at their jobs.

They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws they're
forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that Bush has been
president, Congress has failed to pass more than three of the eleven annual
appropriations bills on time.

That figures into tonight's problems. At this very moment, as the torture
bill goes to a vote, there are only a few days left until the beginning of
the fiscal year -- and not one appropriations bill has been passed so far.
That's why these assholes are hurrying to bag this torture bill: They want
to finish in time to squeeze in a measly two hours of debate tonight on the
half-trillion-dollar defense-appropriations bill they've blown off until
now. The plan is to then wrap things up tomorrow before splitting Washington
for a month of real work, i.e., campaigning.

Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the final,
frenzied debate. "Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this country," Leahy
pleads, "and following an hour of debate, we get rid of it?"

Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes -- yeah, whatever, Pat. An hour
later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the diminutive chair
of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted Stevens, reads off the
summary of the military-spending bill to a mostly empty hall; since the
members all need their sleep and most have left early, the "debate" on the
biggest spending bill of the year is conducted before a largely phantom
audience.

"Mr. President," Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present. "There are
only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense appropriations
conference report must be signed into law by the president before Saturday
at midnight. . . ."

Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a junkie
pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense he could do
it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary -- $436 billion in
defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq "emergency" -- he ****s
off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma --
one of the so-called honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party's
leadership on spending issues -- appears in the hall and whines to the empty
room about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed
into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is
acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages,
there is no one in the hall to listen to him.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a year. In
the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the
second session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest
days worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-three. That means that House members
will collect their $165,000 paychecks for only three months of actual work.

What this means is that the current Congress will not only beat but shatter
the record for laziness set by the notorious "Do-Nothing" Congress of 1948,
which met for a combined 252 days between the House and the Senate. This
Congress -- the Do-Even-Less Congress -- met for 218 days, just over half a
year, between the House and the Senate combined.

And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story. Those who
actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those
"workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress has arranged
things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday
and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for
the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers: On nine of its
"workdays" this year, the House held not a single vote -- meeting for less
than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off
three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full
fifteen percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours.
Figuring for half-days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost
two months less than that "Do-Nothing" Congress.

Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many
appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal year,
Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely on "continuing
resolutions" for their funding. Why is this a problem? Because under
congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of three levels: the level
approved by the House, the level approved by the Senate or the level
approved from the previous year. Thanks to wide discrepancies between House
and Senate appropriations for social programming, CRs effectively operate as
a backdoor way to slash social programs. It's also a nice way for
congressmen to get around having to pay for expensive-ass programs they
voted for, like No Child Left Behind and some of the other terminally
underfunded boondoggles of the Bush years.

"The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is
supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things like the
increase in population," says Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy
for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "It's their main job." Instead,
he says, the reliance on CRs "leaves programs underfunded."

Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty -- approving all
government spending -- Congress devotes its time to dumb bull****. "This
Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri Schiavo -- it never made
appropriations a priority," says Hughes. In fact, Congress leaves itself so
little time to pass the real appropriations bills that it winds up rolling
them all into one giant monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and passing it
with little or no debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all federal spending
into a single bill that hits the floor a day or two before the fiscal year
ends does not leave much room to check the fine print. "It allows a lot more
leeway for fiscal irresponsibility," says Hughes.

A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were frantically
poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the night before the
scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that had not been in any of
the previous versions. The item would have given senators on the
Appropriations Committee access to the private records of any taxpayer --
essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the Senate with the license to
snoop into the private financial information of all Americans.

"We were like, 'What the hell is this?' "says one Democratic aide familiar
with the incident. "It was the most egregious thing imaginable. It was just
lucky we caught them."

STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS

The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to serve as
a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and Senate, after
all, are supposed to pass all laws -- the president is simply supposed to
execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and downs, Congress has been
fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental responsibility, regardless
of which party controlled the legislative branch. Elected representatives
saw themselves as beholden not to their own party or the president but to
the institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional independence
was Sen. William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon
with equal vigor during the course of his long career.

"Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson," says
Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the aisle. "You
wouldn't see that today."

In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for
the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a
Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or
meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is president,
no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant
congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink
the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress -- and only
then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address
and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen
Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.

The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the
Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman
issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In
the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and
issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and
Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government
documents.

Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George
Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open
rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills
passed on time.

And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million
investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent,
when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150
million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD
secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a
mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars
investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed
Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.

"Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress -- perhaps
more important than legislating," says Rep. Henry Waxman. "And the
Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that they
were going to be good Republicans first and good legislators second."

As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee, Waxman
has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker, obsessively
cranking out reports on official misconduct and incompetence. Among them is
a lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush
administration that should have been investigated -- and would have been, in
any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush
years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of
Valerie Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White
House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task
force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration's
politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist
influence at the EPA.

Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has actually hurt
the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his policies unexamined
even by those in his own party. Without proper congressional oversight,
small disasters like the misuse of Iraq intelligence have turned into huge,
festering, unsolvable fiascoes like the Iraq occupation. Republicans in
Congress who stonewalled investigations of the administration "thought they
were doing Bush a favor," says Waxman. "But they did him the biggest
disservice of all."

Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In 2003,
Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman that
would have established an independent commission to review the false claims
Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the
chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold
hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear
threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government
Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence
casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration before
the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence
Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration
had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the
president won re-election. "I think it would be a monumental waste of time
to re-plow this ground any further," Roberts said.

Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He refused a
request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats for hearings on
the famed "Downing Street Memo," the internal British document that stated
that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence about the war, and he was one of
three committee chairs who rejected requests for hearings on the abuse of
Iraqi detainees. Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress
spent only twelve hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton
administration, by contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours
investigating the president's alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting
list.

"You talk to many Republicans in Congress privately, and they will tell you
how appalled they are by the administration's diminishment of civil
liberties and the constant effort to keep fear alive," says Turley, who
testified as a constitutional scholar in favor of the Clinton impeachment.
"Yet those same members slavishly vote with the White House. What's most
alarming about the 109th has been the massive erosion of authority in
Congress. There has always been partisanship, but this is different. Members
have become robotic in the way they vote."

Perhaps the most classic example of failed oversight in the Bush era came in
a little-publicized hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee held on
February 13th, 2003 -- just weeks before the invasion of Iraq. The hearing
offered senators a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials on a wide variety of matters, including
the fairly important question of whether they even had a ****ing plan for
the open-ended occupation of a gigantic hostile foreign population halfway
around the planet. This was the biggest bite that Congress would have at the
Iraq apple before the war, and given the gravity of the issue, it should
have been a beast of a hearing.

But it wasn't to be. In a meeting that lasted two hours and fifty-three
minutes, only one question was asked about the military's readiness on the
eve of the invasion. Sen. John Warner, the committee's venerable and
powerful chairman, asked Gen. Richard Myers if the U.S. was ready to fight
simultaneously in both Iraq and North Korea, if necessary.

Myers answered, "Absolutely."

And that was it. The entire exchange lasted fifteen seconds. The rest of the
session followed a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a hearing on
C-Span: The members, when they weren't reading or chatting with one another,
used their time with witnesses almost exclusively to address parochial
concerns revolving around pork projects in their own districts. Warner set
the tone in his opening remarks; after announcing that U.S. troops preparing
to invade Iraq could count on his committee's "strongest support," the
senator from Virginia quickly turned to the question of how the war would
affect the budget for Navy shipbuilding, which, he said, was not increasing
"as much as we wish." Not that there's a huge Navy shipyard in Newport News,
Virginia, or anything.

Other senators followed suit. Daniel Akaka was relatively uninterested in
Iraq but asked about reports that Korea might have a missile that could
reach his home state of Hawaii. David Pryor of Arkansas used his time to
tout the wonders of military bases in Little Rock and Pine Bluff. When the
senators weren't eating up their allotted time in this fashion, they were
usually currying favor with the generals. Warner himself nicely encapsulated
the obsequious tone of the session when he complimented Rumsfeld for having
his **** so together on the war.

"I think your response reflects that we have given a good deal of
consideration," Warner said. "That we have clear plans in place and are
ready to proceed." We all know how that turned out.

STEP FOUR
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

There is a simple reason that members of Congress don't waste their time
providing any oversight of the executive branch: There's nothing in it for
them. "What they've all figured out is that there's no political payoff in
oversight," says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. "But there's a
big payoff in pork."

When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate, conspired
to work only three months a year, completely ditched its constitutional
mandate to provide oversight and passed very little in the way of meaningful
legislation, the question arises: What do they do?

The answer is easy: They spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the nation
had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to Congress, the budget
is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more than sixty-five percent of all
the money borrowed in the entire world will be borrowed by America, a
statistic fueled by the speed-junkie spending habits of our supposedly
"fiscally conservative" Congress. It took forty-two presidents before George
W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled
that number in six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from
countries the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to: The U.S.
shells out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including
payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.

What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that is an
ugly question to even contemplate. But let's take just one bill, the
so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a law that started
out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney's energy task force and spent four long
years leaving grease-tracks on every set of palms in the Capitol before
finally becoming law in 2005.

Like a lot of laws in the Bush era, it was crafted with virtually no input
from the Democrats, who were excluded from the conference process. And
during the course of the bill's gestation period we were made aware that
many of its provisions were more or less openly for sale, as in the case of
a small electric utility from Kansas called Westar Energy.

Westar wanted a provision favorable to its business inserted in the bill --
and in an internal company memo, it acknowledged that members of Congress
had requested Westar donate money to their campaigns in exchange for the
provision. The members included former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin
and current Energy and Commerce chairman Joe Barton of Texas. "They have
made this request in lieu of contributions made to their own campaigns," the
memo noted. The total amount of Westar's contributions was $58,200.

Keep in mind, that number -- fifty-eight grand -- was for a single favor.
The energy bill was loaded with them. Between 2001 and the passage of the
bill, energy companies donated $115 million to federal politicians, with
seventy-five percent of the money going to Republicans. When the bill
finally passed, it contained $6 billion in subsidies for the oil industry,
much of which was funneled through a company with ties to Majority Leader
Tom DeLay. It included an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for
companies that use a methane-drilling technique called "hydraulic
fracturing" -- one of the widest practitioners of which is Halliburton. And
it included billions in subsidies for the construction of new coal plants
and billions more in loan guarantees to enable the coal and nuclear
industries to borrow money at bargain-basement interest rates.

Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting the
costs of private projects on to the public -- these are the specialties of
this Congress. They seldom miss an opportunity to impoverish the states we
live in and up the bottom line of their campaign contributors. All this
time -- while Congress did nothing about Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark
Foley's boy-madness or anything else of import -- it has been all about
pork, all about political favors, all about budget "earmarks" set aside for
expensive and often useless projects in their own districts. In 2000,
Congress passed 6,073 earmarks; by 2005, that number had risen to 15,877.
They got better at it every year. It's the one thing they're good at.

Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control of the
government's finances. For the past six years, it has essentially been
writing checks without keeping an eye on its balance. When you do that,
unpleasant notices eventually start appearing in the mail. In 2003, the
inspector general of the Defense Department reported to Congress that the
military's financial-management systems did not comply with "generally
accepted accounting principles" and that the department "cannot currently
provide adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the
financial statements."

Translation: The Defense Department can no longer account for its money. "It
essentially can't be audited," says Wheeler, the former congressional
staffer. "And nobody did anything about it. That's the job of Congress, but
they don't care anymore."

So not only does Congress not care what intelligence was used to get into
the war, what the plan was supposed to be once we got there, what goes on in
military prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, how military contracts are being
given away and to whom -- it doesn't even give a **** what happens to the
half-trillion bucks it throws at the military every year.

Not to say, of course, that this Congress hasn't made an effort to reform
itself. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and following a public
uproar over the widespread abuse of earmarks, both the House and the Senate
passed their own versions of an earmark reform bill this year. But when the
two chambers couldn't agree on a final version, the House was left to pass
its own watered-down measure in the waning days of the most recent session.
This pathetically, almost historically half-assed attempt at reforming
corruption should tell you all you need to know about the current Congress.

The House rule will force legislators to attach their names to all earmarks.
Well, not all earmarks. Actually, the new rule applies only to nonfederal
funding -- money for local governments, nonprofits and universities. And the
rule will remain in effect only for the remainder of this congressional
year -- in other words, for the few remaining days of business after
lawmakers return to Washington following the election season. After that,
it's back to business as usual next year.

That is what passes for "corruption reform" in this Congress -- forcing
lawmakers to put their names on a tiny fraction of all earmarks. For a
couple of days.

STEP FIVE
LINE YOUR OWN POCKETS

Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been
roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need only
look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe-taker and GOP
ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham recently sent from prison to Marcus
Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham -- who was
convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs, furniture and
jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM -- bitches out Stern in the
broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.

"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with
Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life," Cunningham wrote.
"I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions
[sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."

The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of
remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade for
ratting him out ("90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade," he writes), but his
frantic, almost epic battle with the English language. It is clear that the
same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of
a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can
barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly
appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman
of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and
Counterintelligence:

"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have &
will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the
Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans
law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you wanted an expert
on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."

How liablest you have & will be? What the **** does that even mean? This guy
sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder Congress couldn't
pass any spending bills!

This is Congress in the Bush years, in a nutshell -- a guy who takes $2
million in bribes from a contractor, whooping it up in turtlenecks and
pajama bottoms with young women on a contractor-provided yacht named after
himself (the "Duke-Stir"), and not only is he shocked when he's caught, he's
too dumb to even understand that he's been guilty of anything.

This kind of appalling moral blindness, a sort of high-functioning,
sociopathic stupidity, has been a consistent characteristic of the numerous
Republicans indicted during the Bush era. Like all revolutionaries, they
seem to feel entitled to break rules in the name of whatever the hell it is
they think they're doing. And when caught breaking said rules with wads of
cash spilling out of their pockets, they appear genuinely indignant at
accusations of wrongdoing. Former House Majority Leader and brazen ****head
Tom DeLay, after finally being indicted for money laundering, seemed amazed
that anyone would bring him into court.

"I have done nothing wrong," he declared. "I have violated no law, no
regulation, no rule of the House." Unless, of course, you count the charges
against him for conspiring to inject illegal contributions into state
elections in Texas "with the intent that a felony be committed."

It was the same when Ohio's officious jackass of a (soon-to-be-ex)
Congressman Bob Ney finally went down for accepting $170,000 in trips from
Abramoff in exchange for various favors. Even as the evidence piled high,
Ney denied any wrongdoing. When he finally did plead guilty, he blamed the
sauce. "A dependence on alcohol has been a problem for me," he said.

Abramoff, incidentally, was another Republican with a curious inability to
admit wrongdoing even after conviction; even now he confesses only to trying
too hard to "save the world." But everything we know about Abramoff suggests
that Congress has embarked on a never-ending party, a wild daisy-chain of
golf junkets, skybox tickets and casino trips. Money is everywhere and guys
like Abramoff found ways to get it to guys like Ney, who made the important
discovery that even a small entry in the Congressional Record can get you a
tee time at St. Andrews.

Although Ney is so far the only congressman to win an all-expenses trip to
prison as a result of his relationship with Abramoff, nearly a dozen other
House Republicans are known to have done favors for him. Rep. Jim McCrery of
Louisiana, who accepted some $36,000 from Abramoff-connected donors, helped
prevent the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians from opening a casino that would
have competed with Abramoff's clients. Rep. Deborah Pryce, who sent a letter
to Interior Secretary Gale Norton opposing the Jena casino, received $8,000
from the Abramoff money machine. Rep. John Doolittle, whose wife was hired
to work for Abramoff's sham charity, also intervened on behalf of the
lobbyist's clients.

Then there was DeLay and his fellow Texan, Rep. Pete Sessions, who did
Abramoff's bidding after accepting gifts and junkets. So much energy devoted
to smarmy little casino disputes at a time when the country was careening
toward disaster in Iraq: no time for oversight but plenty of time for golf.

For those who didn't want to go the black-bag route, there was always the
legal jackpot. Billy Tauzin scarcely waited a week after leaving office to
start a $2 million-a-year job running PhRMA, the group that helped him push
through a bill prohibiting the government from negotiating lower prices for
prescription drugs. Tauzin also became the all-time poster boy for pork
absurdity when a "greenbonds initiative" crafted in his Energy and Commerce
Committee turned out to be a subsidy to build a Hooters in his home state of
Louisiana.

The greed and laziness of the 109th Congress has reached such epic
proportions that it has finally started to **** off the public. In an April
poll by CBS News, fully two-thirds of those surveyed said that Congress has
achieved "less than it usually does during a typical two-year period." A
recent Pew poll found that the chief concerns that occupy Congress -- gay
marriage and the inheritance tax -- are near the bottom of the public's list
of worries. Those at the top -- education, health care, Iraq and Social
Security -- were mostly blown off by Congress. Even a Fox News poll found
that fifty-three percent of voters say Congress isn't "working on issues
important to most Americans."

One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six
years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more than
ninety-three ****ing days, that's for sure. But you can boil the whole
sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of power.
Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal, finished in time
for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And brains too stupid to be
ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing else in the Bush years,
it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to
get rid of it.

Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.