Oversight

The Truth About Consequences: Conservatives, Progressives, and Accountability Moments

Sara Robinson — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:59:51 -0400

Whew. Run your bank into the ground? Hey, it was our fault for not keeping a better eye on you. Here's some cash. Since you're rich guys, we trust you to do the right thing going forward, so we're not going to bother you with a bunch of rules and oversight—but you promise to be good now, 'K?

Also, you Bush guys and CIA operatives who thought torture was a fine idea? Yeah, we know we've signed a bunch of treaties that unequivocally require us to bring you up on charges; but we're looking forward now, not back, so, y'no, whatever. It was pretty ballsy of a few of you to actually admit to committing war crimes in public. We know from "audacity" (it's our middle name, in fact), and that was audacity with the gain turned up to 11. I mean, really: We're impressed. Shocked and awed, even. But we're not gonna hassle you about ancient history, because it's so much more important that we keep our eyes firmly on the future. Just promise you won't do it ever ever again, all right?

It's interesting to watch the Democrats trying to work some life back into their long-neglected oversight muscle. Thirty years of conservative misrule have muddled Americans' understanding of words like responsibility, accountability, discipline, and punishment to the point where nobody knows that they mean any more—and don't seem to want to know, either. The social conservatives go on and on about the evils of postmodern morality and situational ethics; and on this score, I can't quite summon myself to disagree. It's been as though nobody on Planet Washington ever had a parent who was able to explain right from wrong, or demonstrate the role cause-and-effect plays in the ethical universe. It's like a moral-gravity-free zone.

Stuff happens. Whatever.

I am neither an ethicist nor a philosopher. But I am a mother, and know a thing or two about disciplining children. (I've got a freshly grounded teenager pouting upstairs right now who would be delighted to tell you all about it. At length. With loud choruses of what a Mean Mommy I am. What he doesn't know is: I take that tune as a clear sign I've done my job right.) And, as an observer of the differences between conservatives and liberals, I know that our attitudes toward discipline—whether it's children or adults who are being called to account—is one of our core areas of disagreement.

Understanding that difference may explain something about how we got here.

For conservatives, the goal of discipline is to assert the power of external authority. In their worldview, most people aren't capable of self-discipline. They can't be trusted to behave unless there's someone stronger in control who's willing to scare them back into line when they misbehave. Don't question the rules. Don't defy authority. Just do what you're told, and you'll be fine. But cross that line, dammit, and there will be hell to pay.

In this view, the whole point of punishment is for greater beings (richer, whiter, older, male) to impress the extent of their authority upon lesser beings (poorer, darker, younger, female). I'm in control, I make the rules, and I'm the only one of us entitled to use force to get my way. Since emotional and/or physical domination is the goal, the punishments themselves often use some kind of emotional or physical violence to drive home that point. Spanking, humiliation, arrest, jail and torture all fill the bill quite nicely. I'm not interested in what you think. Do as I say, or I will be within my rights to do whatever it takes to make you behave.

Note, too, the hierarchical nature of this system. Those at the top of the heap enjoy the freedom that comes with never being held accountable by anyone. This exemption is implicit in conservative notions of "liberty," and is considered an inalienable (if not divine) right of fathers, bosses, religious leaders, politicians, and anyone else on the right who holds power over others. The privilege of controlling others' liberty, without enduring reciprocal constraints on your own, is at the heart of the true meaning of "freedom."

Liberal parenting books, on the other hand, talk a lot about "logical and natural consequences." Since liberals believe that most people are perfectly capable of making good moral choices without constant oversight from some outside authority, the goal of discipline is to strengthen the child's internal decision-making skills in order to prepare him for adult self-governance.

Wherever possible, parents are encouraged to do this by letting misbehaving kids live with the natural consequences of their own bad choices. I'm not mad at you. I still love you. But you spent all your allowance on Tuesday, and now you get to be broke until Saturday—and I'd be lying to you if I let you think that the world works any other way. Since you two can't figure out a peaceable way to share that toy, I'm going to take it away. Now that you've annoyed the bus driver to the point where the principal had to call me and put you off the bus for a week, you're not going anywhere else for a while, either—including that big event this weekend you've been looking forward to for the past two months.

Ah...I've said too much. But you get the point: Conservative discipline is all about reinforcing power hierarchies and achieving control through "respect" (that is: fear), and liberal discipline is about teaching accountability and reinforcing the consequences of one's own choices. And I think the muddle we're hearing out of Washington these days is based on the seriously crossed wires between these two ideas of accountability. We're all using the same words, but we're also all hearing very different things.

Let's be clear: Our system of laws was built entirely on the liberal model. The objective of a hearing, investigation, or trial is to dispassionately discover the facts of the matter, and make sure that the consequences are as natural and logical (read: fair) as possible. We're not judging your inherent worth, just your actions. We are forbidden from using force, or punishing you just to prove to you that we can. We have a sacred obligation to ensure that the consequences are more or less proportional to the crime. A good chunk of our Bill of Rights is devoted to making sure the conservative notion of punishment—the arbitrary exercise of power for power's sake—doesn't ever become part of our system of justice.

Given that, we need to be very concerned that the Democrats, as the liberal party, have apparently completely forgotten how any of this is supposed to work. These days, when you broach the subject of holding someone accountable, they physically seize up. You can actually see the wave of terror gripping their bodies. Over the past 20 years, they've completely internalized the conservative frame that "accountability" can never be anything but an ugly partisan witch hunt designed mainly to take out enemies and bludgeon the other side with the full fury of state power. The idea that such moments might be (and, in fact, very often have been) something noble, fine, cleansing, and healthy for the country is almost beyond their comprehension. Pecora? Truman? Ervin? Church? That was a long time ago. We couldn't possible do that sort of thing any more.

When you think about it, it's not hard to see how this dangerously uniform bipartisan consensus against creating actual "accountability moments" came about. The bracing revelations of Watergate were followed by the Church investigations and Iran-Contra—all of which were liberal-style open inquiries that sought nothing more than to establish the truth and restore justice, but shook conservatives to the core. What the Democrats saw as doling out logical and natural consequences (break the law, go to jail—what's so hard about this?) the conservatives experienced as being on the receiving end of an authoritarian-style punitive smackdown. They were powerful people, above punishment. This wasn't ever supposed to happen to them. (How dare they challenge our authority?) Being who they were, they couldn't help seeing it as anything other than pure payback, a raw demonstration of power. And the only appropriate response was to show the Democrats how very, very out of line they were—by disciplining them in the conservatives' preferred way, with a show of unrepentant and overweening force.

Which, of course, led to the full frontal assault on Bill Clinton. They had to teach that boy who was boss, and get him back in line. The Democrats, in turn, were so stunned by the ferocity of the whole thing (there was nothing logical or natural about any of it) that they decided, en masse, to make sure it never happened again.

Unfortunately, they did this by giving up and swallowing the conservative frame whole. Yep, we get it now: "accountability" is only ever a synonym for "ugly brutal partisan persecution," and we don't want any part of it. Even more unfortunately, this abdication happened just in time for the arrival of George W. Bush—who, as his own parents might be the first to tell you, is the one president in history most likely to grab hold of that lack of oversight and run with it all the way to the end zone, thus clinching the all-time record for Most Fascist President.

I don't have research on this, but I'm pretty sure that after eight years of the most lawless presidency in history, most of us had "restoring real accountability" fairly high up on the Hope and Change list when we cast our votes for Barack Obama. We were craving that even-handed, reasonable, cleansing moment—a season of transparency that would show us where we went wrong, let some air and light into the wounds, and allow us to begin to heal. He sounded for all the world like the kind of morally serious person who understands the difference between right and wrong—and between that kind of old-fashioned even-handed inquiry that simply finds what it finds and deals with miscreants without fear or favor, according to the demands of the law; and a partisan witch hunt that's conducted for no higher purpose than terrorizing your opponents into submission with naked displays of unchecked power. He seemed like just the guy to do it.

So the last thing we expected was to hear him warbling that same terrified-Democrat line, starting within days of his inauguration. Fortunately, as outrage over the torture memos spreads, both the President and Congressional Democrats seem to finding their moral feet again. And not a moment too soon, either—because if they blow this one, it's nothing short of the end of America as we know it.

When the administration says that "we're not looking backward" and "we're not out to assign blame or punish anyone," what it's really saying is that there no longer any real relationship between cause and effect in our government. The very idea of consequences has absolutely no meaning. If you have access to enough money and/or power, there is nothing you can say or do, no amount of money you can steal, no lie perfidious enough, no fraud brazen enough, no treason heinous enough, to get you so much as called up before a hearing to explain yourself.

And that's a truly frightening development. A government that cannot fairly, honestly, transparently hold people to account—where, in fact, nobody can apparently even imagine that such a thing might be possible—is by definition, no longer a government of laws, because the law depends on a strong relationship between cause and effect. When our leaders have so thoroughly internalized the idea that the only possible use of justice is to use government force to seize political advantage or economic power over other people, we've pretty much irrevocably passed the point where we are now a government of men. When even liberals resign themselves to those medieval conservative ideas about justice as our new national norm, they have failed the country—and we have ceased to be America.

The truth about consequences is this: There can be no restoration and reconciliation until people are reassured that the outcome will actually matter, that the real story will be told, and that people will be held accountable for their choices. They are also the very definition of justice, and the necessary precondition of freedom. The most important change we need right now is leaders with a quickening sense of liberal discipline—including the self-discipline and moral courage to stop looking the other way.

The Cheney Rules

Batocchio — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:52:29 -0400

Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman's book Angler expands on his Pulitzer-winning series with Jo Becker and takes one of the closest looks yet into the Cheney Vice Presidency. Its account also raises major questions about transparency, oversight and accountability for the next administration. In a recent article, "How to Angle: 10 Tips for the Next Vice President," Gellman listed his "Cheney Rules":

1. Fly Under the Radar.

2. Winning Is Easy When the Other Side Doesn't Know About the Game.

3. You Can't Be Fired.

4. Everyone Else Can Be.

5. Silence Is Powerful.

.6. Shouting Is Powerful, Too.

7. Know Thine Enemy.

8. Don't Write It Down.

9. Watch the Boss's Diet.

10. The President Really Is the Decider.

Read the full article for all the explanations, but I found three particularly interesting. Let's start with:

2. Winning Is Easy When the Other Side Doesn't Know About the Game.

See Rule No. 1. During his tenure as White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, Cheney emphasized the importance of letting all the president's advisers be heard in policy debate. "Be an honest broker," he advised a successor. But as vice president, Cheney cared more about winning. Just ask Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft and other very senior Bush aides, all of whom learned about historic, Cheney-driven shifts of policy only after the fact. When Rice's lawyer, John B. Bellinger III, complained in 2002 to David Addington, Cheney's hard-driving counsel, that he had not been consulted about the administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program, Addington made no apologies for cutting out the National Security Council staff: "I'm not going to tell you whether there is or isn't such a program. But if there were such a program, you'd better go tell your little friends at the FBI and the CIA to keep their mouths shut."

In addition to this dynamic of secrecy, Cheney took the lead (with Bush's permission) on staffing much of the administration. He not only recommended cabinet officials, but also many deputies and other middle-level positions. It's a strategy described in more depth in Frontline's "Cheney's Law" and in Angler. This allowed Cheney to stack the administration with like-minded folks and allies. Furthermore, as Gellman's book describes:

Richard Hass, who would quit his post as the State Department's director of policy planning after many defeats by the vice president and his allies, said Cheney's methods gave him "three bites at the apple" on every occasion. "There's the one with the president, when they're alone. That's the most interesting one, and we know the least about it. There's his participation in the Principals Committee meetings. And there's the staff role, from the deputies on down."

Angler, p. 54

Not only did Cheney have many deputies throughout agencies in his corner, in some cases he elevated their power:

Cheney arranged for [Scooter] Libby, whom Bush knew only slightly, to hold a third title as assistant to the president. Like so many apparent technicalities to come, this means something.

The presidential appointment placed Libby atop two separate and parallel hierarchies in the White House. He would work for Cheney, but also outrank nearly everyone who worked for Bush in the Executive Office of the President. Among his few peers would be Rice, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and political advisor Karl Rove. No one save Cheney and Bush themselves were his superiors. Like every assistant to the president, Libby would see and have the right to challenge any speech, legislation or executive order before it reached the Oval Office. No reciprocal right came with Card's job, or Rove's, when documents flowed to or from the vice president.

Angler, p. 44

Bush was indeed "the decider" (rule #10), but seeing himself as "big picture" guy, he was content to give Cheney wide latitude, especially on details and policy implementation. Meanwhile, Cheney kept a great deal off of Bush's desk. Rule #9:

9. Watch the Boss's Diet.

Cheney often told the White House staff to keep problems off the president's plate as much as possible. If Cheney cared about an issue, he did what he did with barbecue when his wife, Lynne, wasn't looking: He piled his own plate high. When Cabinet officers brought spending complaints to the White House, Cheney, not Bush, chaired the review panel. When Attorney General John Ashcroft objected to military tribunals for alleged terrorists, he found Cheney, not Bush, awaiting him in the Roosevelt Room. A top adviser to the president could always insist on a meeting with Bush, but how many times does anyone want to dip into that well? Ashcroft turned left as he left the meeting, away from the Oval Office and back out onto the street.

In an interview with Scott Horton, Gellman described Cheney as "a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice." Cheney took an unprecedented approach to the office of the vice presidency:

[Mary] Matalin and others like to blur the line, but "no ambition" and "no agenda" were not quite the same thing. Cheney "gave himself permission not to run for president," as one old friend put it, but he had strong views in abundance on the course his country should take. If anything, Cheney's awareness of reaching the end of the line spurred his pursuit of policy goals that had eluded him before. Not only would this be his last chance, but Cheney was more impervious than ever to public opinion.

Through the next eight years, the vice president fell loyally in line behind Bush's decisions, whether or not he approved. But the first MBA president soon emerged as a manager who left a great deal to his subordinates, and who allowed disputes among his advisers to fester for months and years. The vice president-elect believed vital national interests were at stake. Until and unless Bush settled an argument, Cheney felt free - and even obliged - to use every advantage of his office to prevail.

That is why Cheney raised the status of his aides and inserted them into West Wing policy roles. The vice president was equipping his lieutenants to fight above their weight. Cheney was Number Two, but his office would bear no sign of secondary importance. In meetings of the president's cabinet-rank foreign policy advisers, "Scooter would be with Condi" and the other principals, said William Kristol, who was chief of staff to Dan Quayle in the first Bush administration. "His deputy attended the deputy meetings. Everyone is up a step from my day."

Angler, pp. 49-50

In addition to his other advantages, Cheney also sought an privileged position when it came to information and communication, even when private. As detailed in the truly remarkable rule #7:

7. Know Thine Enemy

It took three years for people on the National Security Council staff to learn that their e-mails and policy memos were bcc'd to the vice president's office. One of Rice's advisers discovered the secret arrangement after preparing a speech in which Bush would denounce the abuse of U.S.-held prisoners at Abu Ghraib and demand an explanation from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Cheney slipped the proposal to his old friend Rumsfeld, who mobilized a counterattack before the memo even found its way to Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, called Hadley to complain, and the draft speech never reached the Oval Office. Nor was this type of intelligence-gathering limited to e-mails: Cheney's office sometimes used NSA transcripts to keep track of what policy rivals were saying overseas.

That's pretty astounding. It's not surprising that liberal viewpoints didn't play a major role in a conservative administration, but it's striking how rule-of-law conservatives such as General Counsel of the U.S. Navy Alberto Mora were also cut out of the loop, and in some cases even Cheney's own peers at the highest level. (Read the Angler excerpts for a prime example involving Ashcroft and the NSA.)

Some of this may only be of interest to students of the Bush administration, but it does raise questions about the mechanisms of government for making consequential decisions and checking power. Cheney's small fan base may applaud his actions, but would not likely feel the same way if a political nemesis held the same power and influence. A system that amplifies one perspective so much, in so many ways – and with other participants often not aware of what that perspective even is - is bound to produce lopsided results. When policy discussions are so imbalanced or in some cases vetting and discussion are almost completely bypassed, the chances for a bad decision grow tremendously. Put more simply, it shouldn't come as a shock when a bad decision-making process produces bad decisions. Ultimately, of course, the responsibility was and is Bush's, because he chose - or allowed - this management culture and this process.

The question remains as to what average citizens can do about this sort of thing if they disapprove. They can of course strive to pick the best, wisest, most trustworthy politicians. But once in office, those politicians may prove difficult to push or hold accountable if they oppose transparency. However, citizens can push for congressional oversight. They can use the Freedom of Information Act and work with watchdog groups. They can support efforts by the National Archives and a few other government entities not to classify documents as secret needlessly and that e-mails and other governmental records be stored and not destroyed. They can pay attention to significant policy changes at individual agencies. They can push the press corps to practice accountability journalism and ask tough questions of an administration. Finally, they can ask themselves what their vision of government is, and whether their officials - and candidates - reflect it. To return to Barton Gellman's interview with Scott Horton:

In [Cheney's] own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions.

Go back and look at what he says about “opinion polls.” Invariably his message is that a politician who pays them heed is failing to do his job. As Cheney sees it, public opinion is fickle, ill-informed, self-contradictory, emotional–nothing like his own conversation with himself and trusted aides. He speaks disdainfully of critics as “elites,” but his own view of democracy is at the far elite extreme. Voters are entitled to choose a president every four years, he said at the National Press Club, but then they need to let him do his job. The transaction is like hiring a surgeon; pick a good one, and don’t try to tell him where to place the knife. This “trustee” model of democracy is associated with Edmund Burke, the Old Whig philosopher in 18th century England. It is not the model that took root here when the Founders designed a plan of government that derived its authority from the people. If you take Cheney’s view, aggressive efforts at secrecy, for our own good, to prevent us from making the wrong choices or interfering with government’s important work, are a rational response.

To return to Cheney rule #2, we're still learning the full extent of the game.