What We Stand For: Installment #1 Posted by Michael Signer

I'd like to keep on with the discussion of what progressives stand for, not just against.  Hat-tipping to a discussion by Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly asks the same question.  Like almost everyone, he ends up inconclusively:

So what do liberals need to fight back? Although no set of principles is going to cover every base, I'd argue that we need three or four backstops that underly a lot of the things we want to accomplish. But what?

So, to take up the gauntlet, here's one idea (for a few others, check out this great working paper titled, "The Values That Unite Democrats" by the Truman Project's Ganesh Sitamaran and Peter Buttigieg).  I'll tie this into foreign policy at the bottom, I promise:

In politics, progressives believe in probity for probity's sake.  They believe politics can be more honest, more thoughtful, more considerate, and more enlightened.  This is why we have a principled basis for disparaging the brutishness of conservatives like Tom DeLay and John Bolton and, before them, Newt Gingrich.

As I noted last week, the progressive stance in both the DeLay and Bolton affairs has been inspiring, in part because of our principled opposition to the basic conservative idea that, well, being a dick is not just OK in politics, but admirable.   

Governing by Cliche Posted by Lorelei Kelly

This just in...well-sourced speculation about next moves in the Bolton confirmation saga:  The administration may sit back and let the Senate Foreign Relations Committee do as it pleases and even vote down the nomination of Bolton. They may simply take the committee's decision as a negative recommendation, but still push for a floor vote on the nomination so he could still win. So much for valuing deliberative democracy.

Since November, I've been voraciously reading about the rise of the American conservative movement.  For a good overview, I recommend The Right Nation by  John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge. After finishing it, I felt invigorated by the notion that this political undertow that we are presently struggling against is not an accident, but an outcome.

Just what happened to the level headed elected folks who understand that liberal democracies require give and take to survive in the long term? That the word "liberal" itself is a mainstream notion, a positive norm for advanced societies that intentionally stay open minded, innovative and problem-solving.  On the Republican side, many of these liberal minded elected leaders have been purged or have left government altogether. My moderate Republican friends often lament about how extreme their party has become. Although I sympathize with their plight, I am incredulous. Like that line from Cold Mountain "you control the weather, and then have the audacity to bellyache when it rains."

But as for my side, I can't help feeling let-down by the liberal boomers and their seeming negligence of the ideas and infrastructure of the left.  Why weren't we going for the sandbags and pitchforks on January 1, 1995, when Congress flipped to the Republicans?

Two cliches that the conservative movement lives by: "Nature abhors a vacuum" AND "Half of winning is just showing up".

Not Anti-Bulldog, Just Anti-Bolton Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I stand by my earlier prediction that John Bolton will not make it, but I'm also awfully glad that people like Steve Clemons at thewashingtonnote and Laura Rozen at warandpiece are not so confident and are keeping up a relentless fight to get important information aired.

I want to weigh in on one point:

Conservatives are pushing the line that progressives don't like Bolton's toughness. Bill Kristol says that Bolton's critics will only allow girlie-men in the job of UN Ambassador. Never mind that this statement (besides being demagogic and sophomoric) ignores all the other criticisms of Bolton, and sidesteps the fact that his intemperance matters mainly because it has reared its head when he's tried to suppress bona fide intelligence and retaliate against its messengers. All that aside, Kristol's remark is just plain false.

The proof in the pudding is Richard Holbrooke. He is as tough as they come - just ask any one of the 188 ambassadors whom he muscled into agreeing to cut U.S. dues to the UN during the longest period of sustained prosperity in U.S. history. Holbrooke (for whom I worked) said that when it came to dues reform, we realized the membership would not accept an American diktat. But the truth was that, since it was enshrined in the national law of the UN's largest Member State and Host Country, the mandate to lower our dues was about as close to a diktat as the UN had seen. The membership knew it, and they resented it. But Holbrooke was smart enough not to rub it in people's faces, and to craft an approach that allowed our edict to pass by consensus.

The approach we took was actually similar to the one Bolton used in getting the UN's Zionism-is-racism resolution overturned in 1991. We refused to take no for an answer, mobilized skeptical U.S. embassies around the world, and traveled door to door to UN missions in New York, many of which no UN ambassador had ever visited before. Holbrooke did the same thing on subsequent fights to get Israel admitted for the first time ever into a UN regional group, and to prevent Sudan from being seated on the UN Security Council. 

Holbrooke was also one of the toughest critics the UN has seen. His mantras were that the organization was "flawed, but indispensable" and that we had to "fix it to save it." This is not far from Condi Rice's assertion that the world body must reform if it is to survive. Holbrooke launched a self-proclaimed "attack" UN's Department of Public Information, calling it bloated, wasteful and ineffective. 

Holbrooke was no softie when it came to employees either. I worked for him and lived in fear of making a mistake. I once got chastened for bringing then-former Senator Frank Lautenberg to a lunch late, after accidentally pushing the wrong button in the elevator (Holbrooke was standing at the elevator door when I got out, wanting to know what why we had gone to the 22d floor. To this day I cannot figure out how he knew where the elevator had been). 

But I and many others loved working for Holbrooke because he was open-minded, creative, committed to using his platform to make the UN work better and because he was indisputably effective as Ambassador (as Jesse Helms conceded at the end of his tenure). We are not afraid of a tough Ambassador. On the contrary, we need an ambassador who is forceful enough to effect change, but also one who is effective enough to realize that change at the UN cannot be forced. 

For more details, see my article on Retail Diplomacy published in The National Interest (which almost titled it Multilateralism for Conservatives). 

Hasta la Vista, Bill.

Tomorrow's Headlines Today Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Three topics I'd be very interested in if I were a magazine assignments editor, a corporate strategist, or the head of State's Policy Planning shop*:

1.  A small-c conservative shift in Europe is larger than most engaged Americans realize, with implications that we haven't much thought through.

Exhibit A is how the selection of Pope Benedict XVI stunned many American observers, even though in retrospect he was doing some pretty good campaigning for himself in the Italian media.  More specifically, how his election has been attributed to the church's concern with the decline in European catholicism.  (Remember that Europe is still vastly over-represented in the College of Cardinals.)  And what issue did he take on first?  A gay marriage law in Spain.  I'd never argue that the church's European cardinals are exactly in tune with the continental zeitgeist... but yet...

Exhibit B is the upcoming referenda on the EU constitutional treaty in France and the Netherlands.  The treaty is in trouble in France and a concern in the Netherlands, both traditional bastions of pro-EU sentiment.  In neither country is the vote really about the 400-page accretion of specificities and compromises that make up Giscard d'Estaing's treaty; in both the anti-treaty sentiment is tinged with anti-Muslim sentiment that has seized on the prospect of Turkish admission to the EU as one of its rallying points (an  opposition it shares with Pope Benedict, by the way.)

If a major EU country votes down the treaty, that will provoke a near-crisis.  Even if France and the others pull a "oui" out of the fire, the going for the Euro-phile project, and for the tolerant multiculturalism that many Americans, rightly or wrongly, associate with "Europe" is going to be tough for a few years. 

Might that have implications for how much energy and vision Europe can devote to challenges beyond its borders?  Are the "non" campaigners and the cardinals tapping into some very real discomforts with what the 21st century looks like, discomforts not unlike those that make Americans go running to George W. bush for another four years of safety from terrorism?  You bet.

2.  A diffuse, unsteady but very real "third wave" of democratization and "people power" is crashing around the world right now.  If I were a Bush Administration speechwriter, I'd be bragging about it at every opportunity.  Why aren't they? 

A theory:  we all spend a great deal of time worrying about democracy producing results we don't like in places like Iraq, citing the example of fundamentalists elected in Algeria 14 years ago, and so on.  But interestingly, the results most inimical to Washington's order of things right now are coming from Latin America.  Chavez is still in power, and still tweaking Washington; Ecuador can't seem to keep a government in power; and voters in Uruguay and elsewhere have acted n their dissatisfaction with how little growth has trickled down to bring in a "pink tide" of leftist governments in recent years.

And then there are the plucky democracy campaigners we can't (or won't) do much of anything to help -- Zimbabwe, Togo.

So narrowly, this wave of democratization was not made in Washington.  But it is changing the face of some critical regions -- the former Soviet Union, South America, parts of Africa -- in ways that are good for core US values in the long run, but perhaps challenging for Bush Administration interests in the short run. 

3.  An amen, brother to Derek's thoughts on building a strategic reserve of people who actually know something about the Arab and Muslim worlds to help make policy on them, with one addition; in my experience, we are also pretty short on Asia experts.  The broad issue corresponding to terrorism here is strategy for how the US positions itself politically and economically in a world where Asia is on the rise -- and then the ability to carry out such a strategy.  I find the Asianist shortage to get more severe the higher-up one goes; there are still too many of us reformed Sovietologists around.  Many of the Bush Administration's miscalculations, to my mind, can be explained by the paucity of policymakers whose minds were formed anywhere other than in the US-Soviet cauldron.

*Funny note:  I wanted to link to Policy Planning on State's website.  When I searched for it, this is what I got.  I had to pull up the org chart to reassure myself that the Policy Planning staff (of which I am an alum) was still there.

From GWOT to GWOE Posted by Derek Chollet

Last Sunday, the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland reported on a shift of Bush Administration policy that, if true, would mark an important and long overdue change in the way our government approaches the war on terror.  The core of this would be to broaden our policies from fighting a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT, if you live in the bureaucracy), to a “Global War on Extremism” (or GWOE, which one cannot utter without sounding like Elmer Fudd).  The GWOE would seek to fight not only active terrorist networks like Al-Qaeda but meet the broader challenge of the millions of potential jihadists that we are losing everyday in the war of ideas.  As Hoagland explains:

“The policy directive is set to delineate three essential tasks in GWOE: The Department of Homeland Security keeps the lead in defending U.S. territory against terrorist attack; the State Department will be in charge of counter-ideology against Islamic extremism, tasked with broadening and greatly strengthening the weak ‘public diplomacy’ campaign of the first Bush term; and the Pentagon will destroy or disrupt ‘networks’ of terrorism, wherever they exist.”

If this proves right, it’s about time.  The fact that we don’t have such a policy already is a testament to the weakness of our current approach – and the current Administration’s failures.  According to Hoagland, new thinking along these lines has been bottled up for over a year inside the bureaucracy. 

While such a policy shift would be welcome, there’s at least one huge problem: the State Department’s “public diplomacy” is not just weak, it’s a shambles.  The world’s greatest communications power has been out-communicated by a guy in a cave.  And we found out last week that Rice’s pick to run this effort, Bush confidante Karen Hughes, won’t even show up for her job until this fall.  This is ridiculous.  Suzanne is right to recommend that she leave Texas and get to work.

And what should she do when she gets on the job?  Rob Satloff -- who has probably thought more about the possibilities of "public diplomacy" in the Middle East than anyone else, and after having lived there recently, actually has an idea of what might work -- has some recommendations.

But reshuffling inside Washington’s bureaucracy – important as that may be – will only help us fight the GWOE if it leads to meaningful policy outcomes.  And I believe that one of the most important would be for the government to lead and fund a major effort to develop a new generation of experts that will enable us to better understand Islam and the greater Middle East.  People have been arguing this point since 9-11, but the fact is that right now, we still don’t have the minds to win potential jihadists’ hearts.

Stanford’s Peter Berkowitz and Mike McFaul have been all over this problem and have ideas to solve it.  They point out that in the departments of political science at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago or Yale universities, there are no tenured professors who specialize in the politics of the wider Middle East.  As they explain, “programs in and outside of universities aimed at comprehending and combating Islamic extremism [do] exist, but they are woefully underdeveloped and changing at a snail's pace. Everyone now recognizes that we lack ‘human intelligence’ -- covert agents, spies and informants -- in the Middle East. But we also suffer from shortages of NSA linguists, academic scholars, and senior policymakers trained in the languages, cultures, politics and economics of the wider Middle East.”

The government, working with foundations and the private sector, needs to take the lead in addressing this pathetic fact.  If the Administration fails to act, Congress should as it shapes next year’s budget.   

Weekly Top 10 List: Top 10 Things the Bush Administration Could Do, With No Change of Policy, That Would Improve America's Image Around the World Posted by Suzanne Nossel

This is a list of steps the Bush Administration could take to improve America's poor image around the world, without the need for any shifts in policy.   The best part is, they don't have to do all 10.  Any one would help, and a handful together would send a powerful signal.  Thanks to Heather for the inspiration and her input.  Errors, and I'm sure there are some, are all mine.

1.   Get Behind Gordon Brown's Global Anti-Poverty Initiative – UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister wannabe Gordon Brown is championing an effort to get the G-8 countries to live up to commitments made in 2001 (during Bush's first term) to end poverty.  Even if Bush cannot sign onto everything, a nod toward the effort would help show that the U.S. respects the priorities of others and cares about those who have the least.

2.  Declare that the U.S. Does Not Intend to Maintain Permanent Bases in Iraq – By quietly withdrawing its bases from Saudi Arabia in the years after September 11, the Bush Administration tacitly acknowledged that, despite the strategic advantages, having a standing U.S. military presence in the Middle East can become a flashpoint for anti-American resentment. Given the legacy of the Iraq occupation, the point is doubly true there.  During the campaign, Bush stated that the U.S. "had no ambition in Iraq." Though debate on the matter is still raging, a clear statement by Bush would go a long way toward clarifying the U.S.'s intentions in a direction that will reassure the region.  Only problem is it seems Cheney is moving in the opposite direction.

3.  Get Karen Hughes Out of Texas and Into Her Job as Head of Public Diplomacy – Appointing Karen Hughes to front the Administration's public diplomacy effort at least signaled that the country's cheerleader would have the President's ear.  But now the Administration says Hughes won't even start the job until the fall. But the U.S. can ill-afford allowing its pep squad a semester off.   Hughes is waiting for her son to go off to college, but there are worse things in teenage life than a summer in DC.

4.  Initiate a Credible Independent Investigation of the Abuses at Abu Ghraib – Some Americans may have already forgotten the shame of Abu Ghraib, but the misdeeds there will die hard in the minds of people around the world, many of whom saw the prison scandals as emblematic of American abuse of power.  The Army's own just-completed investigation has drawn sharp criticism for essentially clearing the senior-most officials responsible for the prison from any wrongdoing.  Bush should show the world that the horrors of Abu Ghraib have not been forgotten or swept under the rug.

5.  Nominate a  U.S. Ambassador to the UN that Will Command International Support – This assumes John Bolton does not survive the confirmation battle now underway.   Though UN officials tried to put on a brave face, the world saw Bolton's appointment almost as a punishment being unleashed by the Bush Administration.  We have talked here about the sorts of qualities needed in a new ambassador.  Laura Rozen has some ideas of people the Administration would trust, but who would be received in a much more positive light.   

Bolton - Countdown Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I think Bolton's finished.  As reported in this morning's New York Times, Dick Cheney has resorted to the argument that troubled  Kevin Drum:  that there are plenty of other jerks who hold high office in Washington.  But not too many of those are in Category 4.  The law draws a distinction for Category 4 - an employee at will can be fired for any reason - including the color of his tie or bad taste in music - but cannot be dismissed on grounds of race, gender, or whistleblowing.   The same line applies here.

I don't see how Bolton comes back:  allegations and witnesses are piling up - including several like Colin Powell and former Ambassador Thomas Hubbard - who have public credibility; Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska - not exactly the bleeding edge of the Republican party - is now wavering; there is a mandate to further investigate and another three weeks ahead during which it appears very likely that more of the same facts will come out; based on what Hubbard and others have said there is talk that Bolton may have spoken untruths during the hearings that have been held thus far.

How does Bolton crawl back?  Lorelei wrote here a few weeks ago about Stepford Wonks.  It will be interesting to see whether we witness any Stepford Senators - independent-minded members committed to getting to the bottom of the charges against Bolton who get called to the White House and come out with all traces of skepticism wiped away.   That's what happened to Representative Charlie Norwood in 2001 when, after a 4 hour meeting at the White House, he agreed to withdraw a bill he had championed that would have introduced a ground-breaking patient's bill of rights. 

We ought to be on the look out for more of the same.   

The Theocon Threat Posted by Michael Signer

Andrew Sullivan has a terrific piece up in today's TNR called "Crisis of Faith".  His argument, in brief, is that today's conservative movement -- while wildly successful -- is riven by a split between two radically opposed ideas:  what he calls the "conservatism of faith" and the "conservatism of doubt."

Crusades, however, are not means of persuasion. They are means of coercion. And so it is no accident that the crusading Republicans are impatient with institutional obstacles in their way. The judiciary, which is designed to check executive and legislative decisions, is now the first object of attack. Bare-knuckled character assassination of opponents is part of the repertoire: Just look at the swift-boat smears of John Kerry. The filibuster is attacked. The mass media is targeted, not simply to correct bad or biased reporting, but to promote points of view that are openly sectarian, even if, as in the case of Armstrong Williams, you have to pay for people to endorse your views. Religious right dominance of the party machinery, in an electoral landscape remade by gerrymandering, means that few opponents of fundamentalist politics have a future in the Republican Party. It's telling that none of the biggest talents in the Republican Party will ever be its nominee for president. John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki, and Rudy Giuliani could never survive the fundamentalist-dominated primaries.

Indeed, by their very nature, conservatives of doubt are not particularly aggressive politicians. Fiscal conservatives have been coy in expressing their outrage at Bush's massive spending and borrowing, easily silenced by the thought that Democrats would be even worse. Defenders of an independent judiciary are drowned out by the talk radio/Fox News/ blog-driven megaphone of loathing for unaccountable judges. Many moderate conservatives voted for the law to protect Schiavo. Republican defenders of gay marriage are few and far between. Those few voices of dissent are increasingly portrayed as mavericks or has-beens. You will find precious little time for people like Christie Todd Whitman on talk radio or in the conservative blogosphere.

In my native Virginia, the schism between these two ideologies of ideology, if you will, has caused a small civil war within the Republican Party.  A new PAC funded by faith-based conservatives is actually fielding Republican candidates against the Republican legislators who supported Governor Mark Warner's tax reform package. 

For foreign policy, the question is how much longer we can sustain faith-based strategies.  As an erstwhile political theorist, what's fascinating to me is that the idea of American republican democracy -- which, in its original genesis, was less of a traditionally European (meaning German or French) metaphysically-driven enterprise and more of a prudential, pragmatist one -- has somehow been converted into an article of faith for the theocons. 

Why is this bad?  Only because the core belief of the liberal-minded progressive is that everything should be subject to debate.  And you should be able to have thoughtful conversations on, say, why the Administration isn't focusing more on democratizing Kuwait or Sudan or Russia, or why the more pure form of democracy we see in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela merits such disapprobation from the Administration.

These are complex questions and illuminate the spectrum of democracy, from the Greek ochlocracy (mobs ruled by demagogues) to the parliamentary system to American-style republican democracy.  But because the Administration has theologized the idea of democracy, we can't have the conversation.

So we're going to make a lot of mistakes.  I believe that progressives in general should be outrunning the Administration on democratization -- but not if it leads us to poor reasoning and to looking either silly or stupid, depending on the day.  Secretary Rice's prudential, diplomacy-based democratization (see her meeting with opposition reformers in Belarus for an example) looks different, and far better, than the Wolfowitz/Perle school of placing it all on black -- or red.

AID for AIDS Posted by Suzanne Nossel

This idea sounds interesting and smart - create a kind of Peace Corps for health care workers to help with AIDS in Africa.  Apropos of the earlier discussion on what progressives could do differently in dealing with global health challenges, this may be part of the answer.   

My sense is:  1) it probably ought to be a lot bigger than they are proposing; 2) we ought to include not just doctors but nurses too (not clear if they are included, but at the specified salaries my guess is no); 3) we ought to push every European country to create something similar;4) we ought to create something similar for medical school professors - so they can get paid for a year to go teach in a country  in desperate need of health care professionals.

The full article goes into the problem of the brain drain among medical professionals trained in African countries that desperately need their expertise, but who are offered great opportunities in Europe or the US and grab them.  This is a tough but important one.

In my mind, this whole line of thinking is related to a point that both Heather and I have brought up concerning how we broaden the pool of people willing to perform government service by widening the array of service options available.   This work is not military service, but it is in furtherance of a key U.S. foreign policy objective: stemming the global AIDS epidemic.  If it proved necessary in order to recruit in the numbers needed for a stabilization corps or an international medical corps, maybe we should offer people who did this kind of work some of of benefits that accrue to veterans.

U.S. Should Create Organization To Mobilize Health Care Workers to Countries Most Affected by HIV/AIDS, IOM Panel Says

21 Apr 2005

The United States should create an HIV/AIDS "Peace Corps" to send health care workers to "fill the yawning doctor gap" in countries most affected by the pandemic, according to an... Institute of Medicine report released on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reports (Chase, Wall Street Journal, 4/20).

The report, titled "Healers Abroad: Americans Responding to the Human Resource Crisis in HIV/AIDS," was requested by the State Department's Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator to suggest ways to create one of the "key manpower components" of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, according to the Washington Post (Brown, Washington Post, 4/20). PEPFAR is a five-year, $15 billion program that directs funding for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to 15 focus countries, including Botswana, Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Haiti, Guyana and Vietnam (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 4/6). The law (HR 1298) authorizing PEPFAR calls for the creation of a "pilot program for the placement of health care professionals in overseas areas severely affected by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria" (Washington Post, 4/20).

Proposal Details

The report recommends creating what it calls the U.S. Global Health Service -- a "select corps" of 150 HIV/AIDS physicians and other specialists who would commit to two years of service as federal employees and receive $225,000 in salary and benefits, the Journal reports. An initial 100 fellowships providing $35,000 for a year of service also would be made available to early and mid-career professionals, and a third component would offer 100 recent medical school graduates as much as $25,000 annually in loan repayments for two years of service.

A partnership program also would send U.S. health care workers to fill in for local health professionals who are trained outside their native countries (Wall Street Journal, 4/20). The program would not find a job or provide a salary for people seeking to work abroad but instead would match health care workers with organizations or academic institutions that operate oversees. Although the stipends offered under the proposed program would be less than an average U.S. salary for the positions, the initiative would be created to "make motivated people believe they can afford to interrupt their career for such work," while increasing their skills and marketability, according to the Post (Washington Post, 4/20).

Implementing the program would cost approximately $100 million in the first year -- about 3% of PEPFAR's total budget. If the number of fellowships and tuition-repayment recipients in subsequent years increased to about 1,000 from the initial 100, the cost could rise to $140 million annually, according to the report's authors. "The Global Health Service is a vehicle of American compassion that's long overdue," Fitzhugh Mullen, professor of pediatrics and public health at George Washington University and lead author of the report, said, adding that the program also would be a "strategically important way to use our health care sector."

Home to Roost? Posted by Lorelei Kelly

For those who have been working on Capitol Hill over the past decade, the abrupt postponement of the Bolton nomination process is like a cool sip of water in a parched wasteland.  The oversight process, albeit on a near fluke, actually worked.  Even if its just the political gods rearranging Ohio's feng shui after the election...I'll take it.

Hannah Arendt once said:

refutation of theory through reality has always been at best a lengthy and precarious business.  The manipulation addicts, those who fear it unduly no less than those who have set their hopes on it, hardly notice when the chickens come home to roost...

Conservative movement types will doubtless miss the trail of feathers leading to the Foreign Relations committee hearing room.  The Bolton affair invites too many delicious left-wing conspiracy reveries to actually stop the heavy breathing and consider the strategic implications of what's happened.

This is significant.  Personified by Mr. Bolton, the fang-toothed political style of the Bush administration, their congressional allies and their chorus of support. may well have reached a threshold within the Republican party.  Thank goodness for the self-respecting Senate. Hopefully this is a sign that decorum and civility will survive despite the toxic circumstances which the lower chamber has fully embraced.  In fact, the "House of Fun" Representatives should just hire Don King, move to Vegas to practice duking it out for the next election.  Just for kicks, let's review the Bolton leadership style as it manifests on Capitol Hill:

• Conference committees often do not meet publicly, instead doing most of their work on bills in private.  Sometimes conference committees designed for working out differences between the House and Senate never meet.
  
  
• House votes are held open long past official time limits to allow the leadership to brow beat for votes.
  
  
• Amendments proposed by minority members are killed by the Rules Committee, often in late night meetings.  There are few opportunities to propose amendments (closed rules) and far too little time to read bills before votes.

These behaviors along with the increasingly obvious and unseemly co-dependence between commercial interests and the Republican party have made even good-government Republicans seem seedy by association. Over the past year, Roll Call newspaper has reported on how lobbyists are given insider seats while legislation is being written (lots of space since the Dems aren't invited) and on closely orchestrated teams for messaging and issue organizing corporate grass-roots campaigns (also known as "astro-turf").

It is too bad the administration didn't take the path of caution and send an agreeable candidate up for the UN post.  In that scenario, Congress might have passed the prior weeks discussing the foreign affairs budget and the administration could have spent its political capital pushing for its innovative and very worthwhile Office of Post-conflict Reconstruction and Stabilization at the State Department.

Policy is colliding with politics. Will the Bolton experience persuade the more radical elements in the party to change their ways?  I remain skeptical.  As long as the Rovian calculation between politics and policy garners few such casualties, the RNC will continue to run its messages through the most reptilian part of the human brain, the commercial interests will stay lined up at the conference room doors and Americans won't catch sight of the possibility of our greater good until these players are cast aside.