Slash and Burn

I was listening to The Majority Report tonight with Sam Seder (who I did a movie with about 11 years ago) as he discussed a hidden agenda buried deep within the 2005 budget (which is not, as yet, reconciled between the House and the Senate, and may never be). It's interesting how things like drilling in ANWR, which the Administration knows it couldn't get passed in the full Senate, end up as these little line items in the budget. Well here's another one that should scare the bejeezus out of you:

The proposal, spelled out in three short sentences, would give the president the power to appoint an eight-member panel called the "Sunset Commission," which would systematically review federal programs every ten years and decide whether they should be eliminated. Any programs that are not "producing results," in the eyes of the commission, would "automatically terminate unless the Congress took action to continue them."

The administration portrays the commission as a well-intentioned effort to make sure that federal agencies are actually doing their job. "We just think it makes sense," says Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, which crafted the provision. "The goal isn't to get rid of a program -- it's to make it work better."

In practice, however, the commission would enable the Bush administration to achieve what Ronald Reagan only dreamed of: the end of government regulation as we know it. With a simple vote of five commissioners -- many of them likely to be lobbyists and executives from major corporations currently subject to federal oversight -- the president could terminate any program or agency he dislikes. No more Environmental Protection Agency. No more Food and Drug Administration. No more Securities and Exchange Commission.

Government needs to regulate. That's my opinion. That's what separates me from the proponents of unrestrained capitalism, many of whom are about to be in jail cells soon. Without government oversight, corporations are beholden only to themselves; and their only concern is profit.

This got me thinking. While the fight over judicial nominees has been painted as a battle over faith, the plutocrats have something to gain from hard-right judges on the federal bench as well, particularly in the Supreme Court. If something like the Sunset Commission passes, it will inevitably wind its way down to the highest court in the land. That's because it explicitly violates the Constitution, as my representative in Congress explains:

The commission not only threatens the environment and public health -- it would also violate the constitutional separation of power between Congress and the executive branch, enabling the president to dismantle programs created by lawmakers. "Under the administration's proposal, Congress would relinquish its constitutional power to legislate," says Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California who has been the commission's most vocal opponent. "Power would be consolidated in the executive branch, and the legislative role would be emasculated."

The only chance of the Supreme Court siding with the Bushies on this one rests in the hands of a change in the ideological makeup of the Court. Ideologues would vote to uphold the Sunset Commission. And then that pesky Food and Drug Administration, and those nasty folks over at the Environmental Protection Agency, to say nothing of the jerks at the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of them would be a memory.

How do we get more ideological judges packed onto the Supreme Court? Doing away with the Democratic capacity to filibuster would be nice. Perhaps Bill Frist is not only getting pressure from the fundamentalist theocrats, but the Bush crew wanting to hand out favors to their corporate buddies.

By the way, that Clay Johnson who's mentioned in the earlier article excerpt? He's a piece of work:

The man behind the sunset commission is Clay Johnson, the most influential member of Bush's inner circle whom you've never heard of. The two Texans have been close friends since 1961, when they met as fifteen-year-olds at Andover prep school and later roomed together for four years at Yale. When Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994, he put the buddy he calls "Big Man" -- Johnson is six feet four -- in charge of all state appointments. Johnson, a former executive at Neiman Marcus and Frito-Lay, refers to Americans as "customers" and is partial to Chamber of Commerce bromides such as "We're in the results business." He is also partial to giving corporate lobbyists a direct role in gutting regulatory protections. One of his first acts in Texas was to remove all three members of the state environmental-protection commission and replace them with a former Monsanto executive, an official with the Texas Beef Council and a lawyer for the oil industry. Overnight, a commission widely respected for its impartiality became a "revolving door between the industry lobby and government," says Jim Marston, the senior attorney in Texas for the nonprofit organization Environmental Defense.

Lobbyists as regulators? Self-policing? Oversight as a thing of the past? Welcome to Bush's world, and what may be the real reason for the nuclear option.