Character Witness

By: Peter Beinart

To conservatives, the Bush administration is everything its predecessor was not: decent, ethical, honest. It doesn't abuse government power or the public trust. As Wall Street Journal columnist and presidential hagiographer Peggy Noonan has put it: "Bush brings character to the table."

That's the claim. Here's the record over the last eight months:

Texas

Since at least the 1960's, congressional redistricting has been governed by a simple rule: It occurs once per decade, following the national census. (The exception being when courts invalidate a state's redistricting plan, thus requiring a second one.) Usually, then, states draw the maps. But, when they cannot do so in a timely fashion, the Supreme Court has stated that judges may draw them themselves.

That's what happened in Texas in 2001. The state legislature deadlocked, so a three-judge panel drew new U.S. House districts. In November 2002, voters elected candidates in those new districts, and everyone assumed that would be that.

But those same elections handed the GOP control of both houses of the state legislature. And so Texas GOP boss and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay did something unprecedented: He redrew the map to create four more Republican seats. Republicans rushed the new plan through the state legislature until desperate Democratic legislators fled the state, thus preventing a quorum. GOP leaders then apparently urged Texas police to enlist the Department of Homeland Security in tracking down the missing Democrats. Now, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports, the Texas Department of Public Safety has inexplicably destroyed all documents concerning this abuse of federal power.

Think this wasn't part of a national strategy orchestrated by the White House? Then explain the fact that Colorado Republicans have done the exact same thing. Last November, Republicans won both houses of the state legislature there as well. This year, they used their new majority to replace a court-ordered redistricting plan with one that guarantees them more seats. (As in Texas, the Colorado GOP did this by packing blacks and Hispanics into overwhelmingly minority districts. And you thought Republicans opposed racial separatism.) The Houston Chronicle, which endorsed Bush for President, wrote last month that such actions "would set a precedent for redistricting any time a Washington bully wanted to impose it". Beltway conservatives, by contrast, have expressed not the slightest concern.

Filibuster

Throughout the Senate's history, its members have been able to block legislation through endless debate, or filibuster. Under Bill Clinton, Republicans filibustered the 1993 economic stimulus plan, campaign finance reform, and higher cigarette taxes. Now the Bush administration is upset that Democrats are filibustering two of its judicial nominees. So Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has called for eliminating the filibuster as we know it. Breaking a filibuster requires 60 votes, but Frist proposes changing that so 60 are required only on the initial filibuster vote; subsequent votes would require 57, then 54, then 51. The filibuster, in other words, could be broken with a simple majority - rendering the device virtually useless. Frist has also threatened to employ a rare parliamentary maneuver to ban filibusters on judicial nominees altogether. Had the Clinton administration tried that during the GOP's (far more frequent) filibustering in the 1990's, I suspect conservatives might have said something about abuse of executive power. Today, they seem unconcerned.

Iraq

Once upon a time, conservatives thought presidential duplicity was a grave offense. Not anymore. On October 7, 2002, President Bush declared in a nationally televised speech that: "Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAV's [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." That was a functional lie. Iraq's drones, the Bush administration later admitted, had a maximum range of several hundred miles. They could reach the United States only if flown from a warship stationed off America's coast (a virtually impossible scenario given Iraq's almost nonexistent navy).

Three days later, the Senate authorized the President to use force against Iraq. And six days after that, the Bush administration announced that North Korea was enriching uranium to build a nuclear weapon. The news prompted a slew of questions about why the President was focused on Saddam Hussein when Kim Jong Il might represent a greater threat. But the North Korea revelation hadn't affected the Senate's Iraq vote because the Bush administration made sure Senators hadn't known about it. For six days leading up to the vote, the White House kept Democratic Senators in the dark about its North Korea discovery, preventing them from making a fully informed decision about one of the most important Senate votes in a generation.

Flash-forward to January 28, 2003. In his State of the Union speech, Bush noted that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa". But, when the Bush administration handed over the documents that allegedly detailed Saddam's purchase to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the agency came back with a startling reply: They were forgeries. The Bush administration quietly admitted as much.

One sentence later in that State of the Union address, Bush claimed: "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." But, after investigating that claim, the IAEA insisted it too was false. The tubes Iraq had bought were far more appropriate for conventional rockets. Not everyone in the Bush administration was surprised - experts at the Department of Energy had been telling journalists the same thing for months. Confronted with the IAEA's conclusion, Colin Powell half-retreated, noting: "We still have an open question with respect to that."

These stories of Bush administration dishonesty and abuse have not been denied in the conservative press as much as they have been ignored. In researching this column, I could not find a single substantive defense of Bush's UAV claim, or his filibuster plan, or his uranium allegation, in any elite conservative publication. Fred Barnes last week defended the Texas redistricting plan in the Weekly Standard but, incredibly, never acknowledged the key issue: that states traditionally limit themselves to one redistricting per decade. For conservatives, it seems, this administration's decency and honesty are ideological axioms that require no empirical defense. President Bush is not President Clinton. That's all they need to know.