McHugh Watch

Yes the war drags on. A mounting pile of American bodies. Thousands of soldiers whose bodies have been wrecked. Families put under enormous strain. Veterans left abandoned in rat infested quarters. The horrific mass of dead and suffering Iraqis. But who’s counting and in any case should we? Down the road, this will may seem a small price to pay in the grand game of oil supply geopolitics.. The thirst for oil of China and India grows apace, and we may run out before you can say ‘black gold‘.

Is it any surprise that the Bush Cheney administration has no intention of getting out of Iraq even though getting out is the only way to forge a stable middle east? So how to keep control of the spiggot? WMDs – check. Force protection – check. The enemy without – check. Besides, doesn’t Iran also have a lot of oil too? Since when did you expect McWho to vote in any way contrary to the interests of his plutocrat sponsors? So, what gives with all this falderal?

The danger we face is that the Bush Cheney administration will compound the Iraq disaster with a much greater one. The ominous war drums beat (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Moreover, newspapers that not long ago issued mea culpas for their willful lack of critical reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war are once again breathlessly regurgitating administration ‘evidence’. Like the old adage, are not the generals of the opposition strategizing to fight the last war. Will they be left floundering like a sea birds mired in oil sludge, taken aback by the too late realization that the war we actually face is not what they thought it was.

In this context, the most important concern progressive democrats must face is our own party. While the prospective presidential candidates fall all over themselves on who has or has not apologized adequately about Iraq, few deal forthrightly with the fact that despite the lies of Bush and his cronies, the truth was understood by many right from the start. The failure for all was willful suppression of critical thinking for craven political considerations and there are indications that once again, the leading democrats are hedging the possibility of seeming weak kneed on Iraq by being tough on Iran. Hoping to one up John Kerry, they will be for and against war in the middle east at the same time rather than merely sequentially. We must demand that those who would be president provide real leadership in confronting the Washington junta on the looming Iran catastrophe.

It is a contention of this author that in order to plumb the actual proclivities of our congressman, it is necessary to look beyond the main votes and look at what happens in the arcane parliamentary procedure that precedes the main vote. Consistency of thought and action is a very powerful measure of the true intents of an individual.

Mr. McHugh has strong union backing even though in the past he as only voted 40% of the time with the interests of organized labor. This past Friday he voted for HR 800, the Employee Free Choice Act of 2007 that will authorize the creation of a union by merely gaining a majority of employees to sign “cards” – essentially a petition – to form a union. This will all be done out in the open without the mandate for a secret ballot.

It is therefore notable that before Mr. McHugh voted for the bill, he voted against it and by doing so tried to hand control of the debate over to those that vehemently oppose the bill. As noted before in these essays, voting against Ordering the Previous Question when voting on a Rule does just that. Mr. McHugh, as he so often does – being true to form – voted against Ordering the Previous Question (the vote to vote) and thus, buried in the arcane parliamentary procedure of the House, did all he could to obstruct the bill.

During his last campaign for Congress, Dr. Bob Johnson repeatedly faulted John McHugh for neglecting his responsibility to provide effective congressional oversight. Now that McHugh stands accused of bearing direct responsibility for permitting a military health care scandal that has been in the making ever since the invasion of Iraq, we know how right he was.

At the end of last week the Bush administration was forced to take pre-emptive action by a series of Washington Post exposes of the deplorable out-patient care of our wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bob Woodruff’s first-hand reporting on the Pentagon’s and VA’s failure to address the widespread incidence of brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, and imminent long overdue congressional oversight, now that the voters have returned Congress to Democratic control.

To his credit, Robert Gates, the new Secretary of Defense, fired the Secretary of the Army and promised to hold other ranking Pentagon officials accountable for conditions that President Bush belatedly called “unacceptable.” In addition to the Pentagon’s own internal inquiry, Bush announced the creation of a bi-partisan commission to investigate inadequacies in the health care system for active duty military personnel, reservists, and veterans.

Such a presidential commission is a waste of taxpayer’s money designed to deflect attention from the administration’s primary culpability, as happened with the 9/11 Commission report. Our constitutional system of checks and balances empowers Congress to pass laws that protect the health, morale and welfare of the nation’s military personnel and its veterans and to exercise investigative oversight to insure that the executive branch administers these laws responsibly and effectively.

The House and Senate share congressional oversight responsibility for military health care. In the House it is vested in the Armed Services Committee, specifically in its sub-committee with jurisdiction over military personnel matters. From 1999 to the end of 2006 Representative John McHugh chaired this sub-committee, known in succession as Special Oversight Panel on Morale, Welfare and Recreation, Military Personnel, Total Force, and again Military Personnel.

Responding to complaints that the military medical facilities were not up to the task of giving adequate care to the wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, especially the growing number of wounded reservists returning home for demobilization, McHugh’s Total Force sub-committee held a brief hearing one day after President Bush assured the troops in his January 2004 State of the Union address that the government “will give you the resources you need to fight and win the war on terror.” Accepting the assurances of military officials that the problems that had contributed to a suicide at Walter Reed were being addressed and that the medical health care system had the necessary resources, McHugh’s panel did not even issue a report. It allowed the situation to get worse as casualties mounted over the next three years.

McHugh still supports the President’s futile quest for “victory” in a war that should never have been started. His failure to exercise leadership in congressional oversight may be due to his unwillingness to expose facts that would embarrass the administration. After each one of his six short trips to Iraq he assured his constituents that steady progress was being made in an admittedly difficult war. He has attended funerals of fallen soldiers and visited the wounded in Walter Reed. But shows of compassion are a poor substitute for lack of action that could have helped the soldiers and their families who have sacrificed so much in a disastrous war.

McHugh has failed his constituents, the soldiers from Fort Drum, and the nation. He bears personal responsibility for the military health care scandal. It is high time for the voters to retire the affable ineffectual dandy to Pierrepont Manor.

Publius