WASHINGTON — Unless someone steps in to stop it, the descent to bitter partisanship in Washington will increasingly jeopardize the functioning of government. The looming crisis requires President Bush himself and the leaders of both parties in Congress to act in concert to reverse this dangerous trend.
The latest symptoms of the disease were on display last week, in the party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to refuse to send the nomination of Judge Charles Pickering Sr. to the Senate for confirmation and in the refusal of Bush to allow Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to testify before congressional committees.
By insisting on flexing their muscles on clearly debatable issues, both parties and both branches were deliberately antagonizing their opponents. Their actions invite retaliation, and as the sorry spectacle grows, public cynicism will increase.
This vicious cycle needs to be stopped — and stopped now. And the responsibility falls directly on the men who lead the government — George Bush, Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt. They have contributed to this impasse and it is up to them to stop it.
The way back to common sense and comity is clear. Take the issue of the Pickering nomination, which would have elevated him from a district judgeship to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Judiciary Committee’s 10 Democrats voted against Pickering; its nine Republicans supported him.
Fair enough. But then that same partisan majority refused to let the full Senate vote on the nomination. Majority Leader Daschle claimed there was no precedent for sending the nomination to the floor with an adverse recommendation. But even if he is correct in his claim, his obduracy on the Pickering nomination is inappropriate. The Constitution gives the power to appoint judges to the president, "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate." It does not empower any 10 members of one party to veto the choice of a president of the other party.
If those senators are really convinced of the need to reject the president’s choice, they ought to have confidence they can persuade a majority of the other 90 senators they are right. And leading a Senate in which his party has a one-vote majority only because of the defection of a single Republican senator, Daschle ought to have enough respect for the opposition’s viewpoint to say that when there is such controversy over a nomination, he will submit the question to the judgment of the whole Senate. Otherwise, there will be more and more retaliatory moves of the kind Minority Leader Lott already has threatened.
Now consider the case of Ridge’s refusal to testify at formal congressional hearings. Bush created the post of homeland security director by executive order, making Ridge’s office a new element of the White House staff. He insists that as a staff member, giving advice to the president, Ridge should not be subject to formal questioning by Congress.
White House staff members generally meet only informally with members of Congress. But Ridge is in a different position from, say, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice; she coordinates policy of the Defense Department and the State Department, whose heads testify regularly on Capitol Hill. Ridge has operational responsibilities unique to his office, such as developing the threat warning system he announced last week. No one in the Cabinet can explain that policy or defend it as well as he does.
What is more, for him to fulfill his duties — including a promised reorganization of the scattered border security agencies — he will absolutely need the cooperation of Congress. Why then frustrate Congress by refusing to let him testify?
It would behoove the president to acknowledge that Ridge’s role is really comparable to that of the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mitch Daniels, the current OMB director, is an important policy adviser to the president, but he also runs a coordinating agency whose work is of vital importance to Congress. Under the statute creating OMB, he is confirmed by the Senate and available to testify.
Bush should say he recognizes now, if he did not last September, that this new, permanent Office of Homeland Security is of sufficient importance that Congress should give it a statutory basis, that its director should be confirmed by the Senate and should testify when asked.
It is only by everyone stepping back from these embittering and unnecessary jurisdictional fights that the rapid descent into ugly partisanship can be halted. The president and the congressional leaders meet each week. This ought to be on the agenda.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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