10-28-05, 8:46 am
Throw a few indictments at the ruling party and watch how quickly things change. This week has seen important back-pedaling by the Republican Party and the Bush administration.
On Tuesday, Congress cut funding for new nuclear weapons, the so-called bunker-buster, from the federal budget. The decision was quietly announced when Republican Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) issued a press release indicating that he had agreed to the House of Representatives position that the $4 million request should not be included in the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill.
The Bush administration has argued that developing new nuclear weapons as part of its preemptive war doctrine was a key feature of its 'war on terrorism.' Since 2001, the administration has pressed for massive new spending on a new generation of nuclear weapons, despite the contradictory claim that it was working hard against nuclear weapons proliferation.
The decision to cut the funding was followed by a statement from Council for a Livable World, a non-partisan arms control group, describing it as 'a significant victory for those working for reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons and ending any role for nuclear weapons as a national security tool except to deter a nuclear attack.'
On Wednesday, the administration also quietly announced that it was reversing its decision to suspend Davis-Bacon Act provisions that guaranteed prevailing wages for workers employed under federal contracts.
Bush had ordered the wage cut for hurricane Katrina affected areas under the pretense that lower wages would fuel economic recovery and reconstruction in the Gulf Coast states.
This highly suspect claim came under fire from labor and community groups who charged Bush with helping to fatten the bottom line of favored contractors like Halliburton while hurting working people in the region.
Labor and other groups that spoke out included Voices for Working Families, ACORN, AFSCME, SEIU and Katrina survivors. They vehemently rejected the right wing's attempt to exploit tragedies in the Gulf to promote an agenda that hurts ordinary Americans while lavishing more tax giveaways on millionaires.
According to the AFL-CIO, its members and supporters sent over 350,000 messages to Congress and the White House. Every Democratic and independent member of the House sponsored legislation demanding the President reverse his wage-cutting order. Thirty-seven House Republicans joined in support.
Declaring victory, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney also called for reversals of other of Bush's anti-worker policies. 'President Bush has done the right thing by reversing his decision to suspend prevailing wage,' Sweeney noted in a press statement yesterday. 'But it’s only the first step. He must now reinstate affirmative action requirements for contractors in the Gulf and end his attempts to slash programs for working families while adding new tax breaks for the rich.'
Anna Burger, chair of the Change to Win Coalition of labor unions added, 'This is the right thing to do for the families who are trying to rebuild their lives as well as their communities in the Gulf Coast.... Today’s act is an important step toward making that a reality, but our work is far from over for those families whose lives have been irrevocably changed.'
Rep. George Miller (D-CA), who introduced the resolution calling for a reversal of the President's wage-cutting order, said on Wednesday, 'Let me be clear—the president is backing down today only because he had no other choice.'
The Republican House leadership also backed away from some of the most onerous budget provisions, including tens of billions in cuts to Medicaid, student loans, housing assistance, and other social programs after it could not get enough votes to win passage of its budget cutting package.
A campaign led by the Campaign for America's Future brought 17 hurricane survivors and other protesters to Washington to meet with members of Congress. Thousands of letters, e-mails and faxes flooded congressional offices and many moderate Republicans fled the hard right agenda offered by the Republican leadership.
'I can't believe,' Baker continued, 'that some people in Washington think that after a category five hurricane the solution is to unleash a category five assault on working families. We may not be stuck on roof tops any more – but at times we feel just as stranded and just as neglected by this administration as we did then.'
Other survivors of the disaster, including Dian Palmer and Vincent Wilson of New Orleans, spoke about closed hospitals, the desperate need for Medicaid funds and care, and the difficulty faced by the people of New Orleans to lift themselves up and rebuild because local contractors are losing work and business to huge out-of-town companies with ties to the Bush administration that continue to get no-bid contracts.
After meeting with many survivors of the hurricane disaster, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelos (D-CA) said, 'It is a cruel hoax on the victims of Katrina to use their plight to promote a budget that doesn't address their needs, that increases the deficit and gives tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country. Republicans are asking the poorest children in America, who depend on Medicaid for health care, to pay for the care for the children of Katrina. It's simply not fair.'
Finally, on Thursday, Bush ended his fight for Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, in a move viewed as bowing to the dominant far-right religious fundamentalist section of the Republican Party. In an episode fraught with hypocrisy and contradictions, this latest defeat for the Bush administration signals his weakening leadership over an increasingly divided and ideologically dysfunctional Party.
Throughout the Bush presidency, Republicans charged Democrats with obstructionism for trying to block a handful of some of the most extreme judicial appointments. The President deserves to have his choices voted on in the Senate, Republican supporters snorted repeatedly. They accused the Democrats of being ideologically motivated in blocking some of Bush's nominees.
With the Miers nomination, however, Republicans backtracked on their 'principles' and hinted that they would block Miers' confirmation even before hearings began. They also insisted not that Miers demonstrate that she would uphold the Constitution, as Democrats had demanded of all of Bush's nominees, but that she prove her ultra right credentials by innappropriately assuring them that she would vote in favor of religious right-wing views on abortion, privacy, end of life decisions, other or divisive 'cultural' issues.
These important setbacks for the Bush-Republican agenda come in a larger context of growing popular opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq, strong bi-partisan public opposition to the administration's call for Social Security privatization, and a spate of criminal investigations aimed at the top Republican leadership in Congress and the White House.
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