A Consequential Game of Chicken

"Congressional Democrats, even after their seismic Senate victory Tuesday, ultimately lack the leverage to mandate a new course in Iraq. But they offer Bush his only possibility of rebuilding a public consensus over America's role in the war."

A great opportunity for a compromise? Not likely. As Brownstein writes, "Bush is approaching this intensifying debate with what appears to be utter denial about his political situation. . . .

"Increasingly, the White House is demonstrating not only defiance but disdain in its dealings with Congress. . . .

"Bush has approached Congress with the attitude of a teacher determined to discipline unruly kindergarteners, not as the head of a co-equal branch of government."

In spite of the national consensus behind a timetable mandating the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq by fall 2008, Brownstein writes that Bush, in a "flight of fancy, appears convinced that he can still impose his will on Congress through sheer resolve, even though Democrats control both chambers."

The Importance to the White House

As Suzanne Malveaux reported for CNN yesterday, the White House even scrambled Vice President Cheney for the vote.

"There was high drama here at the White House," Malveaux said. "There was a call that came in from Republican leadership 5:00 to Cheney's office that said look, you need to get down here right away. It looks like the vote is going to be very, very close, very tight. His motorcade sped away, he was on the Hill. As being president of the Senate, he was there for the tie-breaking vote. He did not need to cast that vote, because obviously there was that two-vote spread, so it made it a moot point, but very clearly every step of the way is important to this administration."

White House E-Mails

The public disclosure that some White House aides conduct official business using external e-mail accounts -- possibly to avert the White House e-mail system's automatic archiving -- has alarmed Congressional investigators, has piqued the interest of a (scant) few reporters, and has had a sobering effect on White House staffers.

But in the latter case, rather than properly move all their communication into the suitably secure and documented realm of the White House servers, some Bush aides are apparently instead scurrying to put more and more of their communications out of reach of history -- and, they hope, subpoenas.

Paul Bedard writes for U.S. News: "The growing controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors and what administration officials knew about it is renewing concerns among Bush aides over the less-than-secret aspect of E-emails. Those concerns were elevated this week when a House chairman asked that all aides retain their E-mails.

"But just a week after E-mails in the U.S. attorneys case became a main focus of congressional Democrats probing the firings, several aides said that they stopped using the White House system except for purely professional correspondence.

"'We just got a bit lazy,' said one aide. 'We knew E-mails could be subpoenaed. We saw that with the Clintons but I don't think anybody saw that we were doing anything wrong.'