50 Plus One

Jan. 27, 2006 - Get ready for the divider, not the uniter, when President Bush delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday to a packed House chamber. It will be a ceremonial evening, with Chief Justice John Roberts likely to be joined by newly confirmed Associate Justice Samuel Alito in the front row to look up admiringly at the man who made their careers.

After half the Senate Democrats voted to confirm Roberts, Bush figured he could lose a couple dozen votes and still get a conservative justice confirmed. Alito will be lucky to get three of the 45 Senate Democrats voting for him. To Bush’s way of thinking, that’s a bigger victory than the 22 Democratic votes Roberts received. Bush is a 50-plus-1 president; he’s not interested in winning bipartisan support for anything. 

Building on that attitude in the State of the Union Message, Bush will mount a strong and passionate defense of his foreign policy and surveillance program, going directly at the Democrats and daring them to defy him. He’ll embrace new rules on lobbying and chastise Congress, donning the mantle of “reformer with results” that worked during the 2000 campaign, getting ahead of the scandal, just like he did with Enron when he abandoned his good friend Ken Lay and championed corporate reform.

But this is a more cynical time, and the fancy footwork may not work. The media are pressing for a fuller disclosure of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s contacts at the White House, and that grip-and-grin photo of Abramoff with Bush is bound to be published soon. Republicans along with Democrats are uneasy about the government’s unauthorized eavesdropping of American citizens. And the electoral victory in this week’s Palestinian election of Hamas, a terrorist organization that advocates the destruction of Israel, is a timely reminder of the downside of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

Bush’s SOTU speech is his swan song to rally support for an unpopular war and a pallid domestic agenda. Still, the evening will be his. The Democrats can’t compete with the pageantry that surrounds a SOTU address, but there are welcome signs that the Democratic Party is coming to life. “I’m the designated driver of these guys riding their power trips and getting intoxicated,” says Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, explaining that because he’s not running for president, his role as a member of the Senate tax-writing committee is to provide solid policy advice to his fellow Democrats. His big idea is the Fair Flat Tax of 2005, which would tax all income from whatever source at the same rate, close thousands of loopholes, and simplify everybody’s tax return into a one-page form.

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