GOP folds on Chinagate

It has now been confirmed that we have suffered extraordinarily major
damage to our national security as a result of the surrender of our
secrets and technology to the Chinese. The report confirming this is now
officially on the table and is no longer merely a matter of speculation.
The damage is more extensive than we had feared. On Face the Nation,
Senator Shelby said the following:

“I believe that this espionage case with the Chinese is the worst
in the history of this country. They have gotten just about everything
that we have. And you will see it, in the out years, in their
development of their weapons.

Because of the important role that nuclear weapons and our
technological edge play in our security, the damage that America has
suffered from Chinese espionage is, in many respects, the equivalent of
Pearl Harbor. The Chinese have assaulted us in an area that would be
commensurate with the power projection capabilities in the Pacific that
we had gathered at Pearl Harbor, and which the Japanese moved to destroy
so that they would have a free hand in the Pacific.

I cannot understand how any American can be complacent about this.
America has indeed been a shining city, but that city has had a
defensive wall around it. This wall was our national security, much of
which depended on our hard-won technological advantage. Our enemies have
just ripped a huge hole in that wall, and we are now waiting to see what
they are going to pour through it in order to destroy us. We will be
struggling to deal with the consequences of this devastating blow to the
integrity of our national security situation for the next 20 and 30
years. And yet many Americans are still just sitting and watching.

We should have a deep sense of outrage, and our political leaders
should have the fear of God in them right now as they sense the
determination of a great people to call to account those who have been
on watch. But I have not seen this fear on the faces of the people in
Washington who have the most explaining to do. Perhaps more ominous than
the damage to our national security is the arrogant assumption of the
Washington establishment that even these revelations are not a
fundamental threat to their power. The confidence our elites now have in
the stupid apathy of the American people is chilling.

The Cox Report is being used by the political elites to serve the
corruption it appears to oppose. It is being used to reveal the fact of
the grave damage we have suffered in such a way that the corrupt
political elites in both parties that are responsible for this betrayal
will not have to fear
being destroyed by the consequences of that revelation. The consequences
of the betrayal are inevitably going to come out anyway, whenever the
Communist Chinese decide to reveal through intimidating use that which
they have stolen from us. The whole point here is to pretend to inform
the American people, but to do so without accountability.

In this context we might consider some recent comments in Human
Events by David Schippers, Counsel for the House Impeachment Managers.
Schippers described the determined effort by the Republican Senate
Leadership to demoralize the House Managers as they prepared to conduct
the trial of President Clinton. Human Events asked Schippers, “What was
the most significant thing that happened during the impeachment process
that the country doesn’t know about, but should?” Schippers replied, “I
think that the most important factor … is that before we ever appeared
on the floor of the United States Senate, the House Impeachment Managers
and I were
told that there was no way we could win.”

Schippers added that this message came personally from the Republican
Senate leadership. He went on to quote a Republican senator as saying to
Congressman Hyde, “”Henry, I don’t care if
you have proof that he raped a woman, stood up and shot her dead. You
are still not going to get 67 votes.”

Schippers said that he knew from that moment on that the House
impeachment team faced a “rigged ballgame” in the Senate, and that the
oath 100 senators had just taken to do “equal and impartial justice”
would be simply ignored — as the same senator confirmed to him it would
be.

This story should make all decent Americans so sick that we resolve
to kick out of our lives not just Bill Clinton, but the whole corrupt
political elite whose poster child he is. With a few noble exceptions,
Republican and Democrat alike have been willing to let this criminal man
stay in the
White House, as the senator said to Schippers, no matter what. We have
now been officially informed that he has surrendered our most vital
secrets to what will become our major enemy. And still they sit there
watching.

Some members of Congress are avoiding the question of whether the Cox
Report should lead to the impeachment of President Clinton on new
charges by saying that the amount and complexity of the material in the
report doesn’t leave time for such decisions to be made before the next
election. But, of course, much of what is contained in the Cox Report
has been before us in
various forms for several years. It was available during the Thompson
Hearings. And David Schippers confirmed in his Human Events interview
that material related to these betrayals was also available to senators
in the “secret room” for legislators to look at during the impeachment
hearings. But the Senate was determined not to look at such evidence,
because no matter what the president was guilty of — rape, murder,
treason, whatever — they were going to leave him in place.

So lack of time is not the real reason, because they have had
sufficient information for some time to move vigorously in pursuit of
the truth. They didn’t do so, over the last several years, because they
don’t have the will to do so. This will continue to be true in the wake
of the Cox Report, and
in fact it is already clear that the GOP leadership is more concerned
with bolstering the party’s image for the 2000 election than in cleaning
house to save the country.

This is worth pausing over. The public is digesting the fact that we
have suffered the most major damage to our national security in our
history, that we have suffered it through the machinations of this
president, and that over the course of the last several years the GOP
has done nothing effective whatsoever to safeguard our Constitutional
system and our national security. In response, the GOP leadership thinks
it will bolster its party’s image in time for the next election by
turning its attention away from this crisis to focus on a mythical
“legislative agenda.” They think that a return to “the economy, stupid”
— spun well in the media — can compensate for the fact that their own
lack of will to confront Bill Clinton has left the Chinese in possession
of technology enabling them to blow us to smithereens.

The GOP elites are apparently betting on continued complacency on the
part of the American people. But a blasé attitude about these matters
will predictably lead to our national destruction. It is bad enough that
we have suffered the damage to our national security. But if we suffer
it
complacently, without howls of outrage that can be heard by our
representatives up and down the country, then nothing will be done about
it. And if business as usual proceeds, the shadow of our danger will
deepen, the tentacles of foreign control, espionage and domination will
lengthen, until we will in fact finally succumb to them simply because
we are not defending ourselves.

The entire political elite in this country is feverishly at work
trying to control the damage caused by the Cox Report — not the damage
to the country, but to themselves. We are faced with corruption across
the board in the political elites — people who in the pursuit of their
political
ambitions have been willingly bought and sold by foreign interests, in
exchange for serving those foreign interests at the expense of the
American people. The rot goes as far back as the bi-partisan policy of
opening toward China. This has involved bending over backward to serve
the
interests of a handful of large international corporations at the
expense of the interests of the American people — and this has been the
project of Republican and Democrat alike. We face a general corruption
throughout the political elite which the prospect of big bucks in China
has fed for years.

Along with the illegal war in Kosovo and the rigging of the Senate
impeachment trial, the complicity of the American political elite in the
cover-up of the fundamental threat to our national survival posed by
Chinese espionage makes clear that we are confronting a general
breakdown in our Constitutional system. We are dealing with a national
political elite in both parties that is increasingly without regard for
the rule of law or the Constitution.

When David Schippers tells us that a Republican member of the Senate
actually looked at Henry Hyde and said, “I don’t care if you have proof
that he raped a woman, stood up shot her dead. You are still not going
to get 67 votes,” we see with pristine clarity that the core of the
problem is lawlessness. The people who are charged with making law, and
with representing the majesty and integrity of the rule of law, have
shown instead utter contempt for it by word and deed. But those who
despise the law are despising the very instrument by which we govern
ourselves. We
should not be surprised that everything such people do tends to be
characterized by disregard for Constitutional procedure. Republican
toleration of the illegal war in Kosovo is cut from the same cloth as
the Senate’s acquittal of a clearly guilty president.

We cannot maintain a system of self-government, a system of
republican government, if such an attitude of contempt for
Constitutional law and order flourishes among our elites. In the rise of
this attitude we are seeing the seeds and saplings of the end of ordered
liberty. Many Americans
apparently still take it for granted that our political and legal
systems will function no matter how irresponsibly we behave as a people.
But this is not so, and thinking that it is may be the most dangerous
mistake of all. The wake-up calls are coming in quick succession now;
the alarms are going off all over America. It is as if we live in a city
with not one or two fires breaking out, but fires springing up all over
the place — a general conflagration is erupting throughout our
institutions of self-government.

Our national apathy about it is the most ominous smoke on the
horizon, because finally it is we, the people, who institute government
to secure our liberty, and we must continually reshape it to that end or
it will become tyranny. If we forget that purpose so far that we watch
contentedly as our ruling class openly refuses to be governed by the
reason for its existence, we will deserve what we get.

When will we care enough to decide that must be urgent in undertaking
the kind of citizen response that might save our republic?

We live in dangerous times, particularly for our liberty. A culture
of contempt for the law is taking deeper and deeper root in the halls of
power, as our elites realize ever more clearly that the public’s apathy
means it is only their own voluntary deference to law that prevents them
from
accumulating unbridled power. A year ago we were stunned to hear
defenders of the president claim that it was acceptable for him to lie,
perjure himself, and cover up the truth about matters he claimed to be
purely personal. Now our entire political establishment is forming ranks
to make the same claim implicitly about national security. The failed
impeachment of Bill Clinton, and his defiant refusal to conform himself
to law or truth, have taught many lessons to those who are eager to
remove the limits on their own power. They are becoming bolder and
bolder, and our nation is moving ever closer to the day when its leaders
will cover up and lie about the lawless, even violent steps needed to
eliminate their political opponents. This has been the pattern in
country after country in the past, and it is emerging here.

God help us if we accept a week or two of public hand-wringing over
the Cox Report as an adequate response.