Now that Wonder Boy has been elected President, we have been assured that despite the rough times at the moment, we should just be patient, as a new era of peace, prosperity and good times is at hand under the beneficent rule of Barack Obama, that magical combination of Abe Lincoln, FDR and Jesus Christ.
We are also being told that we should abjure the bipartisanship and politics of personal destruction that have marred the public discourse of the past eight years. No longer should congressional committees launch massive investigations of every little misstep of the Obama administration and each peccadillo of the new President’s political appointees. After all, that wouldn’t be civil, would it?
Well, of course, I have heard it all before. Exactly eight years ago, in fact, when the Clinton Administration was coming into office. After twelve years of a Democratic Congress trying to do everything it could, fair and foul, to hobble the work of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, the left suddenly realized that this sort of thing, like the vicious attacks against Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, was really beyond the pale and should no longer be tolerated, especially against the nominees and policies of Bill Clinton.
Well, fortunately the Republicans weren’t stupid enough to buy this attempt by the Democrats to avoid serious scrutiny and Slick Willie soon proved that the GOP would have ample cause to make a number of investigations of the most corrupt Presidency in American history.
But even if Clinton had been as pure as the driven snow, the Republicans would still have had the right—nay, the duty—to watch his every move for any mistake or wrong move. Politics ain’t beanbag and the knowledge that your opponents are on the alert for any illegal or injudicious act on your part can sometimes lead one to avoid rash judgment calls, which can only benefit your party and your country.
And although I think the investigations of the Republican administrations from 1981 through 1992 were sometimes over the top, I can’t say that they were never justified. Iran-Contra for example. There is no question that turning the money gained from the sale of arms to Iran to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua was an illegal act, just the same as FDR’s illegal acts to aid Britain in its fight against Hitler prior the US entrance into World War Two. Only of course Roosevelt’s Democratic Congress at the time did no investigations of those breaches of the Constitution!
So when President Obama takes office, the Republicans have the right and duty to be just as tough on him as the Democrats in Congress have been on George W. Bush over the past eight years. Yes, we should support him when he is right and we should never oppose him simply for the sake of opposition, but only when we think our party is in the right. To go easy on him would be patronizing and if we were not as tough on the Dems as they have been on us, they would rightly regard us as a bunch of suckers. As the Republicans learned back in the 1960s and 1970s, contempt is not a good basis for a healthy adversary relationship.
For example, in the past eight years the Senate Democrats have set the standard that a judge nominee for a Federal Court of Appeals slot who believes in a judicial philosophy contrary to theirs, despite being eminently experienced and educated for the job and with an unblemished character, will nonetheless require 60 rather than 51 votes to be confirmed. The Republicans should hold the Democrats to this standard, particularly since they have already given the other party reason to believe that they can be rolled on these appointments, as demonstrated by the fact that despite the disgraceful treatment meted out to Judge Bork and Justice Thomas by the opposition party, the Republican Senators under Bill Clinton let both his very left-wing Court nominees go through with fewer total Republican votes cast against the two of them together than were cast by the Democrats against either Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts in the subsequent Bush administration. Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me twice, same on me.
