It’s time for Dennis Hastert to go.
Rep. Hastert, R-Ill., ought to announce sooner rather than later
that he will not be a candidate for re-election as Speaker
of the House when the next Congress convenes in January, 2007. He
should do so for reasons both principled and purely political. He
should do so because, in practical terms, his effectiveness is
reaching — or probably has already reached — an end.
And the recent embarrassment of his wild over-reaction to the
FBI’s search of Rep. William Jefferson’s office is merely the
100-pound load that, combined with tons of ethical dead-weight,
broke the elephant’s back.
The first reason Hastert should make this his last term as
Speaker is to fulfill a promise he and his colleagues made when
Republicans first took a House majority in 1995. That promise,
abandoned as part of a larger fit of House GOP hubris in early
2003, was that the Speaker would be limited to four consecutive
terms in that particular leadership post.
This pledge was no mere passing thought. It was an important
part of the reformist initiative of the congressional GOP class of
1994. The idea, formalized in House rules in 1995, was to avoid a
centralization of and aggrandizement of national power in any one
set of hands that the nation’s voters never had the chance to
approve directly. The rule served to unify those upstart
Republicans who wanted term limits on all congressmen and
those who believed, as did James Madison and many of his fellow
Founders, that limiting the terms of legislators would be an
anti-republican restriction on the ability of the citizenry to
choose its favorite representatives.
Even many of the latter group accepted the idea that an undue
concentration of power within Congress, as opposed to a
restriction on the people’s ability to choose their own
congressmen, was subversive of many elements of republican theory.
An endlessly renewable Speakership surely is evidence of what
Madison (in Federalist 48) called “the danger from
legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same
hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive
usurpations.”
In short, the idea of a term-limited Speaker was a wise
application of age-old principles to the modern experience of
abuses of power by self-selected congressional elites.
ALAS, THE CONGRESSIONAL GOP FORGOT its principles along the way, on
multiple fronts. At the beginning of 2003, the Republican caucus
eliminated the term limit on the speaker, relaxed the limits on
gifts and food to members and staff by about ten-fold, and relaxed
restrictions on travel paid by outside sources. Republicans also
changed arcane rules in such a way as to further limit the ability
of the Democratic minority to propose, much less pass, alternative
legislative ideas.
And with Hastert leading the way, Republicans engaged in a
series of floor votes in which they trampled all traditions of
appropriate time limits, not to mention their own promises, while
twisting arms (and allegedly worse) to finally, belatedly, and
unfairly pass legislation that a majority of the House originally
opposed. The worst example, but far from the only one, occurred in
the three-hour pre-dawn vote to pass the hideously expensive
prescription drug benefit for Medicare.
Thus did Hastert institute a culture of brute power in the House
divorced from both rules and tradition, not to mention consistency.
As term limits on the Speaker were dropped, Hastert himself used
the excuse of term limits to force out independent-minded Joel
Hefley as chairman of the House’s ethics committee. (Even Hastert’s
reading of the ethics term limit rule was tendentious: Hefley’s
stint as chairman had lasted only four years, not the prescribed
limit of six.) Yet at the very same time he was citing term limits
to force out Hefley, Hastert waived term limits to keep the slavish
David Dreier as chairman of the House Rules Committee two years
longer than the rules ordinarily allow.
All of this is only background, mind you, to explain just how
long, and how pervasively, Hastert has exhibited the arrogance of
power that leaves him clueless both as to ethical concerns and as
to the political damage such arrogance can cause to his own party.
The House GOP’s hubristic culture, the culture that makes its
members feel immune to expected mores and to any blowback from a
disgusted public — the culture that, even after the Abramoff and
DeLay scandals, makes them unwilling to pass serious reforms on
ethics, lobbyist disclosure, and earmarks — is what has led the
House overall into even-worse poll ratings than the stupendously
low scores President George W. Bush has been receiving in recent
months.
Now comes Speaker Hastert, at the very first moment where House
Republicans can push back against an image of corruption, to step
all over both the law and especially the politics in order to
assert a highly dubious congressional privilege. As if Congress
doesn’t already look privileged enough.
READERS WILL BY NOW, OF COURSE, be familiar with the crazily loud
and intemperate complaints shouted by Hastert about the FBI’s duly
warranted search of Rep. Jefferson’s office. Legal opinion is
somewhat fractured on the constitutional issues involved, but the
dozens of both conservative and liberal experts who have pronounced
the search perfectly valid does indicate, at the very least, that
Hastert’s assertion of legal privilege from such searches is far
from a slam-dunk. All of which makes the intemperate tone of his
complaints all the more objectionable: The more dubious the legal
case, the more circumspect should be its embrace by a political
leader.
Worse still, of course (in the short term, at least), is the
nature of Hastert’s political blunder. In the face of a general
public already fed up with congressional malfeasance and
self-absorption, the very last thing the Speaker should do is to
sound as if Congress is above the law.
Sen. John Warner was entirely right, in contradistinction to
Hastert, when he said that “Congress should not set itself apart
from citizens. We should be treated alike when it comes to criminal
codes.” That bit of wisdom should be familiar to Hastert and others
who signed the Republican Contract with America in 1994: As has
been widely noted, one of the most popular, applause-generating
parts of the Contract was its pledge to, “FIRST,
require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply
equally to the Congress.”
The inviolability of one’s own office space against a duly and
carefully executed search warrant is far from being a law generally
applicable to the “rest of the country.”
If Hastert’s outburst against the Jefferson search were an
isolated incident, a rare lapse in judgment, it certainly would be
forgivable. Because, however, it is part of a consistent pattern of
abuses of ethical norms or of simple fairness, and because
Hastert’s own compromised image is helping drag down his whole
party’s electoral prospects for November, this Speaker should
silence himself politically.
As Republicans realized way back when they first took the
majority in Congress, eight years is long enough for any Speaker to
become the source of horrible static — and to be replaced,
forthwith.
