Defection to force Bush into middle ground

LONDON: The sudden ending of Republican control of the U.S. Senate is the best political news to come out of America in the six months since the Supreme Court infamously fixed up the presidency for George Bush last December.

The defection of James Jeffords, a moderate Republican representing Vermont, means the Bushmen's grip on the levers of power, principally key legislative committees such as foreign affairs, armed services, environment and judiciary, will be prised loose.

It means that Bush's hawkish vice-president, Dick Cheney, will no longer exercise a casting vote in the full Senate, where since January Republicans and Democrats had been tied with 50 seats each. Most importantly, it means that much of the White House's unexpectedly conservative, post-election agenda is unlikely to be enacted without significant amendment, if enacted at all.

One truly wonderful prospect now is that the Bush administration's plan to open up the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drilling will be stifled at birth. This scheme forms part of a broader, retrogressive Bush energy policy that prefers production -- both nuclear and fossil fuel -- to conservation, and places the business interests of corporate America and the ideological obsessions of a partisan political faction above the health and well-being of ordinary people.

This proposal to exploit one of the last remaining wilderness areas for private gain, on the pretext of the national interest, symbolizes the selfish, destructive forces that successfully lobbied Bush to tear up the Kyoto global warming protocol and, in other spheres, have a disproportionate influence on current administration policy.

That it may now be thwarted is a matter for unconditional rejoicing and, hopefully, the beginning of a significant shift away from the domestically divisive, arrogantly unilateralist and globally destabilizing posture of this second-rate administration, the least legitimate and most unenlightened of recent history.

That Jeffords is to be thanked for all this may be a bit of a stretch, as Americans say. And so it is. Any single Republican senator could have acted, as he has done, to upset the balance of power. And others, on both the Republican and Democrat side, could do so again in future, so finely are the opposing forces balanced.

It would only need a death in office, a resignation due to health or scandal, or another politically inspired defection, to change the arithmetic again. Jeffords says he will now sit as an independent. This means he could continue to support the Republicans on key issues. To counter this possibility, the Democratic leadership is said to have offered him a top committee job. But that the Democrats can now look forward to turfing out old fogeys like Jesse Helms from his pole position on the foreign relations panel does not imply, however, that they will in turn be able to impose their own agenda and priorities.

Not for the first time, but more completely than since the Eisenhower administration, the Senate is now hog-tied, stalemated and gridlocked. Neither party can beat a filibuster or overcome a presidential veto. As when Bush took office in January, bipartisanship is the only way forward. But post-Jeffords, that word will actually have to mean something in practice, if anything much is to be done.

All the same, the implications of this desertion -- the first time ever that control of the Senate has changed hands between elections -- are almost endless, and almost all encouraging. After Al Gore's election trauma, and months of sulking slumber tinged with sycophancy, the Democrats have a chance to mount a meaningful opposition.

And for the American people, a majority of whom did not vote for Bush, this new situation offers the hope that his administration will perforce begin to reflect more accurately their collective views and wishes.

Having run as a moderate and ruled as a reactionary, the president, his hardline advisers, and the overdominant "sunbelt" conservatives of the GOP (Republican Party) may now be dragged back to the middle ground they had no mandate to abandon in the first place -- if only to avoid more mutinies.

Plans to appoint unrepresentatively ultra-conservative judges to the federal bench and the Supreme Court, when vacancies occur, should be one casualty. Another may be Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's ambitious, unfocused and dangerous missile, space and conventional weapons-building schemes.

But the biggest lesson of the Jeffords episode is the need for humility and the necessity of consensus in democratic governance. Bush and his coterie have a tendency to scorn opposing views; and to threaten, bully or ignore those who disagree with them. In four short months, this take-it-or-leave-it style alienated friends and allies at home and abroad.

In short, Bush overreached. Now, out of the blue, comes a deserved comeuppance that should halt him in his tracks. If Bush does not take heed, the remainder of his presidential term is likely to be marked by ever growing acrimony and chronic underachievement.

-- Guardian News Service