With the Democrats soon to be in charge of the Senate and with today’s confirmation of Scaife’s pal Theodore Olson to be solicitor general, is it possible we may be headed back to the partisan wars of the Clinton era? Both sides are trying to figure out how the new Senate power arrangements will affect partisan retribution and tit-for-tat politics. When will shooting back at the other team be appropriate-and when just payback?
The first big test was the Olson nomination, which deadlocked 9-9 in the Judiciary Committee last week before being approved 51-47 this afternoon on the floor of the Senate. The Democrats didn’t have enough votes to stop it, despite big doubts about Olson. But the only way the Republicans got the nomination to the floor was under the power-sharing arrangement that was worked out after the Senate split 50-50 in November. With the Democrats soon to hold a 51-49 advantage, that arrangement is doomed. Olson snuck in just under the wire.
He and Attorney General John Ashcroft had better keep each other company, because they are the last very conservative nominees who can expect to be approved before the next election. Sen. Pat Leahy will replace Sen. Orrin Hatch as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which reviews such nominations. And soon-to-be Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be able to scuttle most controversial nominees that do clear the committee on the floor.
You can expect that the Republicans, especially in the Senate, will quickly accuse the newly emboldened Democrats of returning to the highly partisan ways of the past. (New York Times columnist William Safire has already begun the drumbeat). Without the responsibility of controlling the chamber, GOP firebrands can go into hard-edged opposition, where they feel more comfortable, anyway.
So much for “changing the tone in Washington.” That, you may recall, was Gov. Bush’s main argument for electing him last year. Now we are told that to stop the “politics of personal destruction” and end the “cycle of recriminations” Olson had to be confirmed. “If there’s ever going to be a de-escalation, someone will have to go first, no matter how painful that is,” The Washington Post editorialized last week in support of the nomination.
It’s a nice sentiment, but probably wishful thinking. The problem with the “de-escalation” theory is that it assumes that politicians actually want to put all of that unpleasantness behind us. But do they? If the president truly wanted to “change the tone,” he never would have nominated for an important post like solicitor general someone like Olson, who played such a central part in poisoning the political culture in the first place. It was a stick in the eye, a way of saying to the Democrats: “We’re going to make you swallow this Clinton hater whether you want to or not.”
Olson is understandably sensitive about his role in trashing Clinton, the first time ever that a sitting president’s actions before coming to office were subjected to such partisan venom from Washington. The man who will soon be the representative of the people in the Supreme Court (the role of the solicitor general ) would rather we forget his anonymous articles in “The American Spectator” accusing many Clinton administration officials, pre-Monica Lewinsky, of committing serious “crimes” for which there was never any sustainable evidence. He has not apologized to any of those officials for smearing their reputations or admitted that Whitewater and the rest of the pre-Monica “scandals” never panned out in the way he claimed they would. He has not renounced his membership on the boards of Scaife-funded organizations determined to destroy Clinton.
By testifying that he was “not involved” in the “origin or management” of the Arkansas Project, Olson is probably smart enough to be telling the literal truth. But can anyone doubt what would have happened if , say, a President Gore had offered an ambassadorship to one of the Maine lawyers who peddled the DUI charges against Bush during the campaign and then testified evasively about it? Olson (who repeatedly called Clinton a “liar” on TV) and his relentless wife Barbara (the author of a hatchet book on Hillary Clinton) would have been the first to cry foul.
The details of who did what to whom in the Clinton era are irritating now, the residue of a time we’d rather forget. Almost everyone says he wants to “move on” to whatever comes next. But there are plenty of folks who don’t really mean it, from Democrats who will find vengeance easier on the next controversial Bush nominee, to Republicans like Richard Mellon Scaife, willing to do what it takes to crush the opposition.
