THE STUPID PARTY STRIKES AGAIN

If the Republicans in the Senate actually found a clue, they could essentially end the Democrats' judicial filibusters and put them on a semi-permanent defensive stance for the upcoming elections. But alas, the GOP isn't known as the stupid party for nothing, and is apparently incapable of countering the evil party effectively, even when it commands both the moral high ground and the strategic advantage.

What am I talking about? Those memos, the ones that show for a fact that the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been puppets for various hard left activist groups for the past couple of years. Imagine for a second that a pile of memos demonstrating conclusively that the GOP had been taking orders--not mere suggestions, but orders--from various far right groups, or from industries with vested interests in pending legislation surfaced. Imagine how the press would treat that disclosure--it would be Watergate times two. Imagine how the Dems would treat it--Washington would probably be in the grips of serious scandal fever. And for good reason, really. The parties are meant as ideological vehicles, and as competitive yin and yang to keep government relatively honest and somewhat functional. They are not, however, meant to be merely the above ground operation for various unelected heads of various fringe groups that prefer to operate below the horizon, or that operate out of sight because the American people reject their radical opinions. The Democrat memos prove, conclusively, that at least several very influential elected Democrats have been merely robots for left lobbying groups outside the mainstream--way outside, in the case of one or two of them. They have not been acting as elected representatives of the people; rather, they have been controlled by people who are unaccountable to the public at large. I hope you agree with me that this is a very bad thing.

So, given those facts, one could assume that the GOP would press the Dems to stop being minions of the left and start assuming their Constitutional responsibility to offer advice and consent to the President regarding his choices of appointments. One should never assume anything with the Senate Republican leadership, though, which has instead opted to turn up the heat on the staffer who gathered and leaked the memos to the press. That might make sense if the staffer actually did something illegal, but according to the original recipient of the leak, the Wall Street Journal, the staffer did no such thing.

Now back to the accused staffer. The excerpts from the memos appeared in the Journal on a Friday. By Monday, Democrats had succeeded in turning the spotlight away from the memos and onto the leaks. In this, they had the help of two unlikely allies: Chairman Hatch and Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist. Sen. Frist knew the Medicare bill was coming up for debate that week and, as one Republican insider explains, he wanted "to keep the partisanship down." Remember--this is the GOP leadership's response to Democratic memos containing such niceties as "most of Bush's nominees are nazis." By Sunday night, Nov. 16, the two GOP leaders authorized the Capitol Police to secure the committee's server room and obtain backup copies of the computer tapes on which staffers' files were kept. Over the next week two federal prosecutors conducted interviews of 50 committee staffers. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Hatch announced that he was putting an unnamed GOP staffer on administrative leave "pending the outcome of the full investigation." The next step is for forensic computer experts to evaluate the tapes. The total cost of placating the Democrats is expected to add up to $500,000.

A statement put out last week by Mr. Hatch's office says that the accused staffer "improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in the media reports." That accusation bears scrutiny in light of how the committee's computer system is organized: Until Nov. 16, all Judiciary staffers used the same computer server and had access to a shared drive, a system put in place when Sen. Leahy took over as chairman in 2001 and hired his own IT staff.

The Leahy techies neglected to put up a firewall between the GOP and Democratic staff, making it possible for all staffers to read everything posted on the shared drive. No one hacked into anyone's private files. These are, in effect, Leahy leaks.

So the memos came from a shared system, with no wall between the parties and their files. Leahy, one of the Dems named in the memos as servant to the fringe, is responsible for the configuration of the system in question (to the extent that any official is responsible, at any rate, since he procured both the system and the staff that set it up). The GOP staffer seems to be in the clear here, but the Dems ethically should remain on the hook. They have in effect sold their seats to lobbyists, and have become mere tools instead of representatives. But Senators Hatch and Frist have turned to linguini spined enablers, allowing the Dems to shift blame from themselves and onto the staffer. Idiots. And in the mean time, Bush's appointments continue to be grounded for the worst of reasons--because various lefty lobbying groups want to influence certain cases (thus openly politicizing the judicial process down to its roots), or because some of them might draw minority support away from the Dems, or because the lefty lobbying groups think all of Bush's appointment are "nazis." One of the memos actually says that. As an aside, ponder what would happen if a GOP memo surfaced that described all Dem nominees as "Communists." The furor would shake Washington to its roots.

So the GOP is, as usual, trying to play nice with a bunch of people incapable of playing fair, and for their trouble they'll probably end up losing a quality staffer and take a few undeserved bruisings in the press. The real scandal is the memos and their content, not how they found their way to the press. No top secret material got disclosed, no military operations have been compromised. What has been compromised is the integrity of the Democrat party and its operations on the Hill, and by extension the process of vetting and approving nominees to the bench. And I would say that the compromise extends far enough that it threatens how well the government itself can function. One side is playing in bad faith and getting away with it, while the other side seems intent on helping sweep the whole thing under the rug. A pox on all of them.

(thanks to Hanks)