-Caveat Lector- http://www.tnr.com/punditry/beinart021201.html PUNDITRY Procedural Glitch by Peter Beinart Only at TNR Online| Post date 02.12.01 "You've got to give Russ Feingold credit," muttered Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin after Feingold cast the only Democratic vote against a Senate motion to dismiss the impeachment trial of President Clinton. It's a common sentiment. In a Senate Democratic Caucus divided between predictably liberal northern Democrats, predictably moderate southern Democrats, and the predictably opportunistic Robert Torricelli, Feingold stands out as the one guy likely to surprise you. While most of his Democratic colleagues long ago took Clintonesque dives on the death penalty, the Wisconsin Democrat continues to passionately oppose it. While most Democrats support campaign finance reform on two conditions--that it doesn’t include labor unions and that it have no chance of passing--Feingold is actually sincere. In his 1998 reelection campaign, he applied the McCain-Feingold limits to his own campaign, and when the Democratic Party tried to run ads on his behalf, he told the party to buzz off. Feingold was one of the few Democrats to call for an independent counsel investigation of Clinton's 1996 fundraising, and he infuriated the White House by voting with the Republicans to proceed with the impeachment trial and to depose witnesses. And last month, he defied his Democratic brethren on the Judiciary Committee and voted to confirm John Ashcroft. All this has led some Democratic partisans to curse Feingold's name, but overall, it's been a savvy route to beltway prestige. Feingold shares more with John McCain than just a campaign finance reform bill; he’s following the same career playbook. In a Senate whose leaders can no longer really punish renegades, and a city where journalists throw around the terms "maverick" and "bipartisan" like bouquets, defying your own party can get you pretty far. After his vote for an impeachment trial, the New York Times wrote that, "Mr. Feingold's political career has been marked by principled stands that flouted conventional wisdom or party unity." In 1998, USA Today warned that if Feingold lost his seat in the Senate, it would be "Halloween all year long." But there's a difference between Feingold and McCain. In 1998 and 1999, McCain's various heresies--campaign finance, tobacco, Kosovo--seemed genuinely idiosyncratic. But since his presidential run, they have started to form a consistent pattern: it's called liberal Republicanism. With his recent endorsement of Democratic positions on a patients' bill of rights and perhaps even gun control, McCain has become a kind of super-charged James Jeffords. He’s a "maverick" because his positions are unusual in the Republican Party and in his state, but not because they're unique to him. Feingold's a stranger case. His heresies don't follow an ideological pattern; they follow an anti-ideological one. Or put another way, Feingold's ideology is process. He breaks with his party because time and again he places procedure over substance. When he first ran for the Senate in 1992, he posted a list of promises to his garage door: he would keep his primary residence in Wisconsin, he would visit each county every year, he would not miss a vote, he would refuse a pay raise and he would finance his campaigns with in-state money. Not one promise concerned policy. When Feingold stood for re-election six years later, he ran a kind of meta-campaign, focusing greater attention on his refusal to air attack ads or raise more than one-quarter of his funds out of state than on social security, education or any of the other issues that usually dominate Democratic campaigns. On impeachment, Feingold voted with his Democratic colleagues to acquit, but defied them on procedural questions, such as whether the trial should include witnesses. Devotion to procedure over outcome is not a common trait among Washington politicians--which is why during impeachment and the Florida recount both parties flagrantly violated supposed principles like executive privilege, local control, and judicial restraint, to get the result they wanted. But Feingold's career makes clear the opposite danger. The Wisconsin Senator stands on principle no matter whose ox is gored. But it's not enough to have principles; those principles have to make sense. Feingold's vaunted 1998 reelection bid makes the point: he took a stand against negative ads, and out of state fundraising, but a lot of people in Wisconsin didn't see those stands as particularly meaningful. And they were right. There's nothing wrong with negative ads--they're usually more honest than positive ones. And it makes more sense to limit your campaign fundraising based on the interests and ideology of donors than on their state residence. (See "Fussy Russ," TNR, November 23, 1998). Feingold's crusade gripped liberal opinion writers the country over, but it never caught on among Wisconsin voters, who consistently said they cared more about candidates' positions on issues than the way they raised and spent money. But Feingold's tendency towards misplaced acts of principle reached new heights last month with his support for John Ashcroft. When it came time to explain his vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feingold began by evaluating the various controversies dogging the former Missouri Senator's nomination. Regarding Ashcroft's interview with Southern Partisan and degree from Bob Jones University, Feingold said, "I was not happy with the adequacy of John's answers on those issues. I think it does raise some questions of insensitivity." On Ronnie White: "just plain unfair…an extremely sorry chapter in Senator Ashcroft's long public record." On Ashcroft's opposition to desegregation in St. Louis: "certainly troubling." On James Hormel: "unwarranted…a pretty sorry chapter." On Paul Offner's charge that Ashcroft asked him about his sexual orientation in a job interview: "the Offner account does bother me." Feingold did cite "the strength of John Ashcroft's commitments and answers to our tough questions, which were given under oath" as reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt. But then he went on to say, "it is completely understandable to me that critics would regard this as a confirmation conversion." In short, Feingold viewed Ashcroft's record the same way all his Democratic colleagues did. Where he differed was on his "view of the Cabinet nomination process." For Feingold, what mattered was redeeming a process that "has been abused and overly politicized." The Wisconsin Senator said, "I don’t want to be a part of taking the United States Senate and this country farther down that road; a road, which John Ashcroft and others in his party, paved in recent years." Feingold would vote for Ashcroft to show that he was better than Ashcroft, to make sure that Ashcroft received the fair treatment that he denied nominees like Ronnie White, James Hormel, and Bill Lann Lee. And with this argument, Feingold fell into the trap of high-minded reformers throughout American history: confusing procedural equivalence with moral equivalence. If the problem with John Ashcroft's treatment of James Hormel was that Ashcroft didn't afford President Clinton enough deference in his appointment of ambassadors, then the appropriate response would be to show President Bush's appointees greater deference. But the problem with Ashcroft's treatment of Hormel wasn't that he scrutinized President Clinton's appointees, it's that he opposed a man because he was gay. The principle at stake is not procedural; it's moral. And as a result, the equivalence between Ashcroft and Hormel (that they are both presidential nominees) is not what matters. What matters is that one was the victim of bigotry and the other the perpetrator. To atone for the mistreatment of the former by supporting the latter is lunacy. It's like saying that because segregationists were wrong to filibuster the civil rights bills of the 1960s, blacks would be wrong to filibuster legislation to repeal them. Near the end of his monologue, Feingold said, "There are real fault lines emerging in our culture and in our political system, and repairs must be made. And some who have been harmed must be made whole." In Feingold's mind, by abiding by a principle that applied to all nominees regardless of their beliefs, he was helping repair those "fault lines." By ignoring Ashcroft's record, he was bringing the country together. And that’s the proceduralist delusion, that if you get the process right--figure out how much deference presidential nominations deserve or how much money candidates should spend--you can avoid taking sides politically. But the problem with American politics isn't money, it's some people's money, and the problem with the appointments process isn't that nominees aren't granted deference, it's that the wrong ones aren't granted deference. Sometimes fault lines shouldn't be repaired; one side deserves to win. If Russ Feingold really wanted to make James Hormel "whole," he would have "harmed" John Ashcroft. And for not being able to see that, I don’t give him any credit at all. PETER BEINART is the editor of TNR. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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