Useless Partisanship Weakens Necessary Partisanship

On the matter of congressional oversight and Lloyd Austin.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

In the 21st century there’s nothing to get a rollicking argument going than debating favorite Montequieu quotes. Mine, however, has always been “useless laws weaken the necessary laws.” I have paraphrased that sucker countless times in my scholarly and public writings. The idea behind the phrase is a powerful one: there are are certain policies or structures that may be necessary but, done to excess, can make things worse.

Today seems like a good day to apply that phrase to the concept of partisanship.

Partisanship is an inevitable feature of politics — power is a zero-sum game and politicians often have legitimate policy disagreements. The genius of U.S. constitutional democracy is making these kinds of political incentives work for the system overall — that whole “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” argument. Taken too far, however, partisanship can sabotage the essential functions of government, as the desire for power sweeps away any consensus about the proper rules of the game. You get omnibalancing. You get January 6th.

This newsletter is not about those worst-case scenarios, however. It’s about Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and dysfunctional congressional oversight.

Over the past month or so, Secretary Austin has screwed up pretty badly. The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold and Nancy Youssef provide the basic nuts and bolts of the story:

For four days in January, most of Washington, including President Biden, didn’t know who was running the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was secretly rushed to Walter Reed Military Medical Center on New Year’s Day, suffering from nausea and severe pain. It would be eight days before the president learned why. 

So began a series of events without modern precedent. Austin—sixth in the line of presidential succession and second in the line of military command after the president—was hospitalized and his deputy required to step in from a beach in Puerto Rico where she was on vacation, days before Biden was informed.

Only a small cadre of aides was aware that Austin was hospitalized. Most others in the Pentagon, including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who was carrying out his duties, were kept in the dark, according to the Pentagon’s current version of events. Sasha Baker, the Defense Department’s top policy official and the most senior official present at the Pentagon during that time, attended a meeting at the White House on Jan. 3, unaware that Austin was hospitalized.

Some analysts do not believe this is too big of a deal, but that strikes me as wrong. The Secretary of Defense is not a 9-to-5 job: they need to be available 24/7 — and when they’re not, they need to inform the relevant parties as to what is going on. For Austin to have kept the White House and relevant members of Congress in the dark is, as Slate’s Fred Kaplan notes, “no minor lapse.” Former White House chief of staff and secretary of defense Leon Panetta told Politico, “Let’s face it, they dodged a bullet because if something had happened in that gap that was created, that could’ve been a serious event.”

The lack of transparency is also worse than what the WSJ passage quoted above suggests. According to Politico’s Lara Seligman and Alexander Ward, Austin was “diagnosed with prostate cancer and kept it a secret for weeks,” including from Biden and the White House. Austin’s cancer diagnosis is disheartening, and the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wishes him a speedy recovery. Austin was under no obligation reveal such personal news to the public. But this seems like the kind of health news that even a very private person should reveal to his employer in the federal government.

Read Vox’s Joshua Keating on why this is such a big friggin’ deal. Or read the quotes from Pentagon officials in Seligman and Ward’s piece, like “He made a deliberate decision to not share something so important at minimum with the POTUS. It was reckless and irresponsible…. his judgment should be questioned on this one.” One security colleague texted me, “He needs to lose his job because this is absurd.”

The good news is that the bullet was dodged. The policy damage appears to be nonexistent. Keating concludes, “There does not appear to have been any direct impact on US national security or the military’s ability to carry out operations.” The Pentagon has ordered that a 30-day review to be run by Austin’s chief of staff Kelly Magsamen. The Pentagon’s inspector general announced an investigation into the breakdown in communication. And the White House chief of staff has issued a memo to all cabinet secretaries about delegation of responsibilities that, distilled to its essence, reads as, “this can’t happen ever again.”

Still, the calls for Austin’s resignation are growing louder and slightly more bipartisan. One GOP Representative is filing articles of impeachment. In an administration that has been blessedly free of staff churn, this episode stands out. It is tailor-made for, you know, proper congressional oversight. House Republicans should be holding hearings on this — it’s a legitimate scandal!

In the main, however, congressional Democrats don’t seem too concerned about the GOP reaction. Why? If this Politico report is accurate, it’s because they know that the Republicans have already overextended themselves on stupid oversight, thereby making it more difficult for them to engage in proper oversight:

Despite the brouhaha over Austin’s absence, Hill Democrats have largely eschewed calls for his resignation as they eye oversight efforts. Only one swing-seat first-term Democrat, Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, broke from that pack on Wednesday to say Austin should step aside over his handling of his hospital stay.

The party’s relative silence suggests that Democrats may be placing a bet on the controversy over Austin’s absence: With Republicans already pursuing impeachments of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, they’re less likely to try to turn the revelations about Austin’s treatment and complications into a political cudgel….

Though some [Senate Republicans] are calling on him to resign, many said this week that they’re skeptical of trying to out Austin before Congress has its chance to conduct oversight.

“With Austin, I think we need to hear the whole story,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who noted that it isn’t top of the agenda. “We have so many other things we need to spend time on,” she said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) called Austin’s handling of the situation “just a really sloppy failure” that may raise “some protocol issues” but warned that her House colleagues’ “instinctive reaction is knee jerk: let’s just impeach.”¹

In a world with a functioning opposition party, the Republicans would have — and should have — run with this mini-scandal. Instead, they are… something something Hunter Biden something.

Listen to the first half of Katie Porter’s statement regarding the Hunter Biden hearings that the House Oversight Committee held earlier this week:

You can agree or disagree with Porter’s policy priorities, but she is right about the opportunity cost of dumb oversight.

The United States needs not one but two competent political parties to ensure proper governance. That is because no single group has the monopoly of political or policy wisdom. I’ll vote for Joe Biden in November but I am not so naive as to believe that he has been right about everything, particularly in the areas of foreign policy and national security. The country would be better if it had an opposition party that knew how to properly oversee and investigate the functioning of the federal government. Instead we have a party that may well vote to impeach Joe Biden with zero evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor. The GOP has so cheapened the very concept of oversight that it can’t raise political hell even when that might be the right thing to do.

That is not just self-defeating for Republicans. It’s bad for the country.

1. Credit where due: that story also suggests that House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers will be working in bipartisan fashion on this with his Democratic counterparts. That approach may yield useful information as well.