Tomgram

Launching a "war on Congress" and other tales from Washington

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Corporate plunderers running Congress, a strategy of racism deeply embedded in the Republican Party, and an administration that wants to give full meaning to the phrase “imperial White House” — this is everyday life in Bush’s Washington. Below, Doug Ireland in the LA Weekly lays out the venal corporate record of the “good Samaritan doctor” Bill Frist, now Senate majority leader; Ruth Rosen in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle provides another chapter in the tale of Republican racism (after all, it’s not as if Trent Lott was dispatched to a monastery to atone for his sins); and finally in a piece picked up off the History News Network, John Dean, former Nixon White House Counsel, and the man whose testimony lay at the heart of the Watergate scandal, sketches out quite vividly Dick Cheney’s desire, on the Nixon model, to turn the three branches of government into about 1 1/2 branches. (For those who don’t remember, no book from that distant Watergate moment ever laid out more vividly how close Nixon took us to a constitutional coup d’etat than Jonathan Schell’s Time of Illusion, a book well worth reconsidering in the present moment.) Tom

The Bad Doctor
Bill Frist’s long record of corporate vices
By Doug Ireland
The LA Weekly
January 10-16, 2003

While TV gushed last week over the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, intervening in a traffic accident, portraying the former heart surgeon as a “Good Samaritan,” in truth the GOP has simply replaced a racist with a corporate crook.

Frist was born rich, and got richer – thanks to massive criminal fraud by the family business. The basis of the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc. (Hospital Corporation of America), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother

To read more Ireland click here

Race and politics
Ruth Rosen
San Francisco Chronicle
January 9, 2003

SEXUAL SCANDAL is not what plagues Republicans. It’s outbursts of racial insensitivity, casually uttered across the country, even in California, where minorities are now the majority.

While TV gushed last week over the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, intervening in a traffic accident, portraying the former heart surgeon as a “Good Samaritan,” in truth the GOP has simply replaced a racist with a corporate crook.

Frist was born rich, and got richer – thanks to massive criminal fraud by the family business. The basis of the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc. (Hospital Corporation of America), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother

To read more Ireland click here

Race and politics
Ruth Rosen
San Francisco Chronicle
January 9, 2003

SEXUAL SCANDAL is not what plagues Republicans. It’s outbursts of racial insensitivity, casually uttered across the country, even in California, where minorities are now the majority.

The latest flap involves Bill Back, a Bush ally who is state GOP vice chairman and campaigning for the top position. In 1999, Back reprinted an essay titled “What if the South had won the Civil War?” in his e-mail newsletter. The essay’s author, William S. Lind, wrote that “history might have taken a better turn” and that “the real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won.”

Back initially said he’s not responsible for the opinions of others and that he’d sent articles promoting a broad range of political positions. But nostalgia for slavery is not a political perspective. It is simply racist.

To read more Rosen click here

The Nixon Shadow that Hovers Over the Bush White House
By John Dean
History News Network
January 6, 2003

Not since Richard Nixon’s presidency have the powers of Congress been in greater jeopardy. Not only is the Bush White House seeking to expand presidential powers at the expense of Congress, but the conservative gang of five on the U.S. Supreme Court are busy trimming congressional powers directly.

The Bush-Cheney efforts, along with those of the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas-O’Connor-Kennedy bloc, are raw power politics and an example of short-sighted decisionmaking. These moves to curb congressional authority also raise the question why. In Part One of this two part-series, I will look at the threat to congressional power posed by the Bush White House; then, in Part Two, I will turn to the threat posed by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Dean served as White House counsel under Richard Nixon. He is a columnist for findlaw.com.

To read more Dean click here