Alberto Agonistes

There can be little debate that the framers saw the Congress as the central organ of government, and there can be little doubt that that dream is dead. No proper eulogy--only the impotent anger, eye-rolling, sighing, shuffling of papers, rocking in seats, hollow threats, vapid assertions of personal and institutional disappointment from Senantors Specter and Leahy, honor amputees who can't even enforce their own subpoenas or contempt citations, let alone, ye gods, end a numbingly disastrous, criminal war. Bested by a twit with a faulty memory. What a day for the Greatest Deliberative Body Evar Assembled.

The good senators have taken the unsual tact of whittling a mountain down to a molehill, mounting its minor rise, and bellowing as if their voices will carry and echo. Press coverage emphasizes to varying degrees that, yes, the committee is very, very, very displeased with the Attorney General. And yet with all the machinery of power bestowed on them by the central organizing document of these United States--the power to spend or deny, the power to hold their own trials if the courts and executive fail them--they choose to avail themselves only of the power to pontificate, which any madman with a streetcorner and a conviction about the drug trade, alien overlords, and the Queen of England can do just as well.

Ordinarly I would be a fan of any diminishment of the powers of government, but there's no favor to be found in increases in the power of executive fiat. The plain course of action is to impeach the president. The argument that impeachment is an action of such gravity that it can only be taken up under the most dire necessity--and the corollary that the Clinton impeachment was entirely destructive to the system--strike me as wholly unconvincing. I too regretted that Clinton's impeachment sprung from the very expensive and largely fruitless investigation of a partisan witch-hunter, but I hoped that taking the tarps off the mechanisms of impeachment a few decades after they'd been tuned up for Nixon would normalize the process, that we would see a legislature far more willing to use this tool to hold executives to account, that perhaps a greater preponderance of executive trials--once every couple of decades, at least--would be a neat blow to the age of executive power.

Clinton, recall, went in and beat the charges: a perfectly fine, reasonable, substantive outcome. This business that it "prevented" him from "governing" is transparent nonsense. It assumes that governance is a positive, singular act emenating from one man. Unfortunately, the idea stuck that "the business of governing" was somehow impeded by the government acting in one of its Constitutional duties, and it made everyone timorous.

Last night on NPR I heard ol' La Nan Pelosi prattling on about not having "a signature," about Senatorial obstructionism, about "ending this war." The mad scene is better out on the heath. What you have here is a supposedly coequal branch of government that has spent decades ceding its own power--willingly and often willfully. When last it dusted off one weapon in its arsenal, it was terrified by the Bang! And put it away. And pretends it doesn't exist. To be bested by Alberto Gonzales--a man of no skill, no distinction, no particular intelligence, no popularity, no honor, no dignity, no especial worth; to be bested by a guy whose only tactic is to play dumb; to wail and cry and harangue and harumph and hold hearings and threaten the tyranny of heaven and earth and the seven seas; and to come away holding nothing but your own dicks? The word for that is contemptible. The word for that is lame.