The Senate has blocked President Bush’s attempt to overhaul US immigration laws. This was a key part of his domestic agenda and was opposed even by some Republican legislators. Is this the final humiliation of a failed US president who is still nevertheless set to remain in the Oval Office until January 2009? Further, does this not throw up a dangerous fault in the US political system that could have far-reaching consequences for the rest of the world?
The 1951 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution limited the American president to two terms. The change came about after Franklin D. Roosevelt won four successive terms ending only with his death in 1945. Once described as “The UnAmerican Amendment”, the change was seen at the time as a Republican revenge for the long dominance of the New Deal Democrats. Now ironically Washington is saddled with a lame duck Republican president who still has 16 months of his term to run, while possessing minimal public and Congressional support at home and almost no political capital abroad.
Had Bush had the lure of a further electoral victory, he might not have been tempted to throw so many of his eggs in the shape of 30,000 extra US troops into one basket in the final play of the Iraqi “surge”, which was doomed to failure even before it began. He might indeed have paced even his ignorant diplomacy to avoid confrontation with the democratically-elected Hamas Palestinian government, to have reined in the Israelis in the Lebanon and the West Bank and to have found an alternative to saber-rattling against Iran. Instead Bush demonstrated that his vision was as limited as his understanding of the outside world and went for broke. And broke he is.
It is hard to see how the Bush administration can reinvent itself because it is so mired in the folly of its Iraq debacle. It has been easier for the British Labour party, which has replaced a partially discredited leader in Tony Blair, with the relatively fresh face of Gordon Brown. The British socialists can therefore start trying to unwind the lies and misjudgments over Iraq and the slavish following of Washington’s ill-informed intervention. The British system makes such a volte-face feasible, if not in this case necessarily possible. The American system does not.
Were the unthinkable to happen and Bush to quit, the office of president would pass to Vice President Dick Cheney, a man who has been every bit a part of the problem as his chief. It seems therefore that the world is faced with almost a year and a half of having the most powerful and influential office in the world occupied by a discredited and weakened incumbent. This cannot be good at any time but especially when US politicians are already maneuvering for advantage in advance of the presidential primaries and actual contest way off next year. If his immigration law humiliation is indeed “the end of the enterprise” for Bush, what can fill the treacherous power vacuum until January 2009?
