But it isn’t all doom-and-gloom for Dean, as he saw how the Democrats, who won total control of the First Branch in the 2006 midterm elections, restored due process and checks-and-balances/oversight of executive power in the 110th Congress. He saw the House freeze billions of dollars worth of earmarks (which skyrocketed under Republican control over the years), require more transparency on them and clean up much of the fiscal mess the Republican-led House left behind. Restoring regular voting time limits to prevent last-second arm-twisting for votes (ex. Medicare bill) and a “pay-as-you-go” fiscal policy in the House was a welcome move, though Democrats have not stuck with it as time as gone on. Congress also went from having a criminally scant amount of oversight in previous Congresses to having boatloads of hearings and investigations, especially on the politicization of the Justice Department, the Iraq War and Afghanistan/War On Terror.
“Second (Executive) Branch: Broken And In Need Of Repair”
[Presidents set the tone for a whole party, and in that respect wish Dean put the following facts in this, the “Executive” section instead of the “Legislative” chapter of the book.]
Other valuable insights on how Washington became so partisan and divisive in recent years can be found in a study by Bush’s own 2000 campaign pollster Matt Dowd, who said that the “center of the electorate has collapsed.” It was given to Karl Rove when Bush was still president-elect and promising to “unite” the country. But Rove, using this study, convinced Bush to lead the way for partisans like former Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay (R-TX) divide the country for as long as they were in power. The strategy of using “wedge issues” to divide the electorate, originally coined by fellow Nixon-era conservative Pat Buchanan -- for President Nixon and his “Southern strategy” of turning blue-collar Democrats into GOP voters -- was again prominent in all the elections that followed: abortion, gay rights, religion and other culture issues were all or in part used by Republicans to win in the 2002 midterms, 2004 re-election of Bush and even the 2006 midterms (which backfired somewhat for the first time in recent memory).
“Third (Judicial) Branch: Toward The Breaking Point”
In brief, Dean makes compelling and explosive cases of how the late Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist and current member Clarence Thomas lied under oath multiple times during Senate confirmation hearings to get their jobs and is critical of how poorly both political parties have managed these hearings over the years. He also takes issue with not just the hard-right push of the federal judiciary since the Reagan and now Bush II years, but Republican use of it to achieve at the judicial level what they cannot in Congress – progress on social/cultural issues. Indeed, Bush has appointed over one-third of its members in his two terms, mainly social conservatives and also Federalist Society fans (ex. Samuel Alito). Dean fears a radical “fundamentalist” bloc of judges (a la Antonin Scalia) will use an outdated view of the Constitution to go easy on executive power and weaken free speech. He believes they (as opposed to liberal-minded judges) are the real judicial activists. But so far, judicial experts like Cass Sunstein have convinced Dean that the Supreme Court hasn’t gone too radical as of yet and hopes that a step-by-step conservative philosophy of power known as “minimalism” is what is guiding the High Court’s big decisions (ex. lifting of D.C. handgun ban).
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