Hiding Behind the White Elephant

What is most frustrating about coverage of the House's newfangled interest in protecting its Constitutional prerogatives is the Times' and the Post's refusal to name the elephant squatting in Speaker Hastert's office: the upcoming and ongoing investigations of many, many of his colleagues. In politics, if the timing smells bad, it usually is. So, why all the sound and fury now? Why didn't Hastert, Sensenbrenner, and Boehner raise their voices against any of Bush's 750 creepy signing statements, or against his refusal to take seriously Congress' advice and consent responsibilities in any number of critically important war and national security decisions?

The idea that Hastert and Sensenbrenner, with their angry bluster, are merely protecting their individual persons in anticipation of future raids, instead of the institution which they lead, is not at all far-fetched, but when the world's most important political papers ignore it, anyone who highlights the hypocrisy is preemptively marginalized. Columns by the Post's Dana Milbank, last Wednesday and the Friday before, have been the lone exceptions to this cone of silence. Among Times/WaPo's coverage, for example, Milbank's column is the only place where you can read Representative Van Hollen's reminder to his colleages of a "number of examples of overreaching by the executive branch where there's been a total lack of oversight by this Congress: the torture memorandum, detainees, enemy combatants, signing statements, domestic surveillance, data-mining operations." Adam Liptak's most recent analysis of the episode notes that "Congressional leaders may have overreached in describing the search as a flagrant violation of the Constitution," but declines to speculate on their motives for doing so beyond a single quote from a law professor: "Here the story that leaps out at you is that the Republicans are worried that they're next."

The story is not that Congress is nobly defending its independent status under the Constitution; the story is that they are selfishly crying constitutional-wolf years after the wolf has entered, devoured the coop, and left.