White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Oh, Congress! How Have You Become So Pusillanimous?

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October 1989 found me in a small hotel, the Londonderry Arms, on the Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland. It was during “The Troubles” and evidence of the sectarian strife was everywhere, even along that beautiful shoreline, complete as it is with the Giant’s Causeway, one of Northern Ireland’s big tourist attractions.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I were reminded of the bitter divisions between Protestants and Catholics when we were stopped by British soldiers at a roadblock. They were polite and checked our papers. While they were doing that, Linda said, “Aren’t those soldiers vulnerable, standing like that in the open road?”

“Take a look over there,” I replied.

Just as I knew there would be, there was a soldier in a ditch with a machine gun trained on us and offering cover to the troops.

It was a reminder of just how bad things were in Northern Ireland at the time with frequent murders, kneecapping, and a lack of any communication between Protestants and Catholics. One people divided by their religious and historical burden.

The Londonderry Arms was a hotel of historic importance, having once been owned briefly by Winston Churchill and which was operated from 1948 until last year by the legendary O’Neill family.

We had been warmly welcomed and made at home by Frankie O’Neill. After dinner at the hotel, he came to me and said, “I am afraid I won’t be able to be with you after today because I am taking my sister to Washington to see the Congress at work.”

“Why?” I asked.

One could imagine traveling to Washington to see the museums, the White House and the Capitol. But Congress in session, that querulous place with its confusing systems and norms?

Then he explained that the Northern Ireland Parliament, called Stormont, after Stormont Castle where it meets, is based on the British House of Commons where party discipline is absolute. Under a parliamentary system, the government of the day would fall if there were no party discipline. If you are Labor, you vote Labor; if Conservative, you vote Conservative. Only very occasionally is there a free vote on a moral issue, like the death penalty.

That meant, O’Neill told me, that in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants were on opposite sides of the aisle and the government was always at a standstill.

He thought the American legislative system, with its ability to incorporate minority views, and for minorities to introduce and pass legislation of interest only to a fragment of the population, was a beacon for Ireland.

I don’t think O’Neill would take his sister to Washington today to see the Congress as it is now: inglorious, pusillanimous, fawning men and women more concerned with their own job protection than discharging the high duty of the House and the Senate. Worse, its magnificent independence has been traded for obsequious party loyalty.

Of course, the lickspittle members of Congress at present are the wretched, obsequious, groveling Republicans who have enabled President Trump to trample the Constitution and usurp the powers of Congress.

But one has to say the Democrats are hardly admirable, not exactly an impressive body of leaders. In their way, they are humbled by their own diminished concept of the role of the loyal opposition.

The Republicans may be the more guilty invertebrates, but the equivalence of the Democrats is also noteworthy in this sad abrogation of responsibility that has taken hold of the political class in Congress. Look no further than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failure of courage in throwing in with the Republicans to keep the government open. It was political will withering in plain sight.

As someone who was covering Congress at the time of O’Neill’s declaration about the superiority of Congress as a democratic legislating arrangement, I have seen that great body subsume the national interest to personal job security and fear of criticism from on high, the White House.

The great thing at that time was the individualism of members of Congress, who had a keen eye to their constituents and what they felt was the national interest.

Sadly, that grand time of free-for-all legislating came to an end when Newt Gingrich took up the House speaker’s gavel in 1994 and introduced a concept of party discipline more appropriate to Westminster than to Capitol Hill. Shame.

Fatigue as the Ultimate Healer

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I first encountered the healthy corrective of fatigue when I was a young writer for a television news service in London. I was chronically late. Every interview I did started with an apology. Every day when I showed up for work, I was late. My supervisor would look at me and at the clock and sigh.

 

One day, I decided that the price of being late was too high: If you have to start with an apology, you never get a decent interview and the long face of my supervisor was painfully reproving. I was tired of my self-imposed misery. I was fatigued with my own sloth. Since that time, I have been fairly punctual.

 

Fatigue, it seems to me, can be motivator in governance and foreign policy. Take the three great revolutions of our time: accommodation in Northern Ireland, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. I submit that in all of these, fatigue played a critical if not seminal role.

 

I have been in and out of South Africa all of my life. Sure sanctions and international pressure played a role in bringing about change. But there was something else at work: fatigue. The people of South Africa were very tired of their own creation. Driving across South Africa in the 1970s with an African relief driver, I ran into what used to be called “petty apartheid”: segregated places to eat. As a result, we took out food and ate it in the car. But at two roadside eateries (they were few and far between), the owners apologized to me for the offensive law. The weight of the injustice was getting to them.

 

That was the first time I saw a sufficient glimmer of hope that peaceful change would come, as it did.

 

In Northern Ireland it appeared that the sectarian violence, which emerged in 1963, would go on forever. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in barbarous ways and terrorism was spreading into Britain. Over the 15 years I participated in a think tank in Ireland, I heard endless speeches from both sides about the hopelessness of the situation in which the Irish Republican Army, the right-wing Protestant “hard men” and the British Army fought a triangular terrorist war.

 

On a summer’s morning in 1982, there were two terrorist attacks in the center of London. A car bomb was detonated as 16 members of the Queen’s Household Cavalry trotted along a Hyde Park’s South Carriage Drive; and less than two miles away, in Regent’s Park, a military bandstand was blown up. Toll for the day: 10 soldiers killed, 55 injured. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for the strikes. All of Britain was on a terrorist footing, but that did not stop an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England two years later.

 

By the 1990s, you could sense a change in Ireland: People were tired of the killing and living in fear. Without that fatigue, that revolution, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and power-sharing, would not have happened.

 

Likewise by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union–the edifice of communism with its incompetence, its privations and its paranoia–had lost the loyalty of the people and the terror apparatus of the state was failing. Russians were tired of it and Poland was in near revolt. Mikhail Gorbachov loosened the reins and things hurtled forward.

 

Alas fatigue is not a policy, not even a strategy. It is just a reality; a factor in protracted disputes, oppressive governance and pervasive injustice.

 

When, then, will fatigue set in between combatants in the Middle East, the oppressed of North Korea or the misgoverned of Africa? According to my theory of fatigue, these things are overdue. But it is easier to fix your own timekeeping than history’s.