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Sunday, September 16, 2007
John Dean, reckless Republicanism, and veto overrides in Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The historical image of John Dean is that of the bespectacled attorney, hunched over a microphone, who coolly brings the scandal of Watergate home to millions of living rooms in a dull, droning monotone.
Thirty-five years later, the former White House counsel is still a whistleblower.
At 7 p.m. Monday, he’ll be at the Carter Center, autograph pen in hand, flogging his latest book: “Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches.”
There’s nothing subtle about the title. It’s one of a number of recent tomes about the excesses of the Bush administration, written by current or former Republicans.
Dean — who, by the way, is now a licensed independent in California — has ditched the lawyer’s monotone for the writer’s polemic. Passion is probably the word he’d prefer.
“But when I see what’s going on — I can’t believe these people,” he said in a telephone interview.
Among his points: A prediction that Republicans are on the verge of turning the word “conservative” into a pejorative — much as they rendered “liberal” into an unspeakable slur in today’s political rhetoric.
Except “conservative” is rapidly becoming a synonym for incompetence, Dean says. From Iraq to Katrina, he said, Republicans have lost their sense of practicality.
And for that, he said, partial blame must be laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that government is the problem, not the solution.
“Why in the hell are you trying to run the government if you don’t believe in government?” Dean asked. “It’s the wrong attitude to bring to the process — and that is, how to destroy it rather than how to make it work.”
“Broken Government” also touches on Dean’s alarm at his former party’s eagerness to expand the power of the presidency, exemplified by Vice President Dick Cheney.
“Republicans and conservatives once were deeply opposed to an overly powerful executive branch — certainly after [Franklin] Roosevelt,” Dean said.
Now they’ve embraced “authoritarian conservatism,” he said. Of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, Dean ranks Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich as “high authoritarians.” Fred Thompson, a U.S. Senate staff attorney Dean faced during his Watergate testimony, is ranked as a “low authoritarian.”
It would be tempting to brush Dean off as an out-of-touch political relic with little relevance to Republican rule in Georgia, which even now is only five years old. But Dean is very much clued into the behind-the-scenes debate that’s roiling the GOP at both the national and state level.
In Washington and Georgia, Republicans are trying to puzzle out what it means to be a conservative.
Case in point: This year’s session of the Legislature came to an embarrassingly messy end because of growing unrest in the Legislature — particularly the House — over the reach of executive power in the state Capitol.
Gov. Sonny Perdue ended up vetoing 41 bills, most of them sponsored by Republicans. He drew his pen through $130 million in proposed spending, and a $142 million property tax rebate.
Unlike in other states, veto overrides have never been common in Georgia. But that may be about to change. Republican legislators have spent much of the summer discussing how best to assert themselves.
The current plan, gaining favor in both the House and Senate, is for legislators to override one or two of Perdue’s vetoes when the General Assembly reconvenes in January. Just to show they can.
One of the vetoed bills may be H.B. 91, a measure to require that state agencies, controlled by the governor, give more detailed information on spending to the Legislature.
“It’s something under discussion,” said state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta), the bill’s sponsor.
She cut loose with this: “The contest of the ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.”
Chamber wasn’t channeling John Dean. That’s Daniel Webster.
