The Democrats Deepen the Washington Swamp Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech will say it’s all good in Washington. That’s true, if you believe in the tooth fairy. By Daniel Henninger
Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.
President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.
Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.
These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.
The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”
Days later this newspaper ran a story beneath the headline: “EPA’s $100 Billion Climate-Aid Windfall Spurs Turmoil.” It quoted an unhappy community organizer in New Orleans: “They passed all this stuff, and they committed funding for all this stuff, but then they didn’t actually write out how it’s going to work.” Even the supposed beneficiaries don’t know how to navigate through Mr. Biden’s green Swamp.
On Monday, Gallup released its annual poll of the “most important U.S. problem.” Inflation? No. That’s No. 2. Problem No. 1 is “the government/leadership,” up six points to 21%. As Joe Biden likes to say, this is no joke.
Ronald Reagan was one of the first to popularize the notion of Washington as a destructive cesspool, committing himself to “draining the swamp of bureaucracy” because, he famously said, government should be “the servant, not the master of the people.”
Well, Reagan failed. So much so that some 40 years later, House Republicans have created something called the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. “Weaponization” isn’t a word one ever would have expected to see in the name of a congressional committee.
If the 45th president’s name had been John Doe instead of Donald Trump, not many would disagree it was an abuse of power when the Federal Bureau of Investigation pitched Trump functionary Carter Page into a fact-free twilight zone of investigation through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. So now we have a committee whose remit is to investigate “the collection, analysis, dissemination, and use of information on U.S. citizens by executive branch agencies.”
Rep. Jordan and the other committee chairmen starting oversight hearings this week are, in theory, engaged in a useful exercise—asking the bureaucracies what they did and why. In reality, the committees, and by extension the American people, aren’t likely to learn much from the long list of public officials Mr. Jordan has ordered to appear. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has proven that public officials will endure one humiliating hearing after another rather than say anything useful or true.
The inevitable reduction to absurdity of this inbred unaccountability came clear in this week’s classified-documents standoff, with both the Justice Department and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines saying, we’re really sorry but our hands are tied by the special-counsel investigations.
We don’t doubt that special counsels Jack Smith (Trump) and Robert Hur (Biden) are conscientious public servants. But with a wave of his hand, Attorney General Garland created the ultimate Swamp creature, a special counsel behind which the government’s most powerful agencies can refuse to talk to elected members of Congress. Sen. Warner said this puts his committee “in limbo.” Justice since has said it will work with the committee, but Sen. Warner should plan on spending several lifetimes in limbo.
About that $102 billion the Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend on climate by year’s end—10 times the agency’s annual budget—the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee Rep. Bruce Westerman says plaintively, “Any time Congress channels billions of dollars toward undefined goals, it’s going to need rigorous oversight.” That’s what he thinks.
Democrats subdivided the $102 billion for every conceivable green goal—from iterations of environmental justice to low-carbon labeling on construction materials to such undefinable murk as corporate greenhouse-gas reporting—all of it distributed through a Swamp tributary system of nonprofits, community groups and local officials.
Joe Biden will say next week: Don’t worry, it’s all good. Myself, I don’t believe in the tooth fairy but I do believe in the Swamp—sprawling, unaccountable and on a corrupt binge.
Write henninger@wsj.com
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