What would Frank Church do?

(According to his campaigns, think of Idaho first and assert his independence from the national Democratic party.)

Assume = ass + u + me. But hey, Frank Church could still be alive today - he would be 84, I think. Just like many folks ask themselves "What would Jesus do?" Senate Democrats should ask "What would Frank Church do?"

Who would Frank Church endorse? We all remember the superdelegate fiasco of the primaries, and I think a Church endorsement would go to Obama, since he won the Idaho caucus with 80% or so. As a result, every Democratic superdelegate in Idaho endorsed Obama, as well as former 3.5 term Governor Cecil Andrus. Not just that, either - Idaho has something of an isolationist streak, and Church was definitely an opponent of dumb wars like Vietnam or the invasion of Grenada. (Not that the invasion of Grenada counts as a war.) We know Obama is not opposed to all wars, just to dumb wars. I don't know about Hillary's true views, but I am convinced she voted for war with Iraq (and for stuff like Kyl-Lieberman) because she believed she needed to appear hawkish when she ran for president. Church served on the Foreign Relations committee so he would have naturally been interested on the candidates' foreign policy views. (Obama also served on Foreign Relations, Hillary did not but served on Armed Services. See what I mean about appearing hawkish?)

Obama, Church, and Hillary all have something of a cultural conservative streak. Obama - if you read Audacity of Hope, it's pretty clear. I'm not saying that he's against gay folks or anything - I'm saying he's against a hypersexualized culture. Church - he was pretty surprised when he found out his son was sleeping in the same bed as his girlfriend in their hippie commune. Hillary - she sure hates violent video games. (Me - I'm a young white male, you figure it out.)

I have to mention Ron Paul here, because Church actually does remind me of Ron Paul a bit. Same isolationist foreign policy. Both have pro-life sympathies. Both are very principled. Both believe in the gold standard - haha, nope, Church was a proud New Deal Democrat, and Paul doesn't believe in the New Deal or its programs. (Random sidenote: And isn't it weird that Mike Gravel ended up in the Libertarian party? He was quite a liberal senator back in the day, and he even believes in socialized medicine.)

As for Bush - after Church left the Senate, he wrote plenty of articles criticizing Reagan's foreign policy. Bush makes Reagan look like Dennis Kucinich. Would Church have supported Bush's foreign policy? (No.)

The one time I've been disappointed in Obama was when he voted for those bullshit FISA amendments. Was that politically smart? No idea, because the election was about the economy. I don't think his vote on FISA would have mattered one way or another after September 15. What about Church? Well, the original FISA was a result of the Church Committee. Church would have abhorred the idea of giving the CIA more power.

You get the idea. Fight the good fight, Democrats! Frank Church always did.

(Yeah, I know this is a copout post. On the plus side, I bought a book about the Cheney vice-presidency today. Fun fun!)

Uncomfortable Parallels Entry

I've heard a lot of chatter recently wondering what Obama is going to do to expose Bush's misdeeds, or if he's going to do anything at all. And if the chatter is well-informed, it will mention Senator Church. So I figure now is the perfect time to revisit the Church Committee.

The Church Committee - properly the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities - was formed in 1975 to investigate the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. It was prompted in large part by the reports of Seymour Hersh, who disclosd that the CIA had investigated antiwar protesters and many others. You know, liberals. What the committee pursued at first was the CIA's attempted assassinations of foreign leaders. (Castro and Patrice Lumumba of the DR of the Congo) The CIA also encouraged dissidents to overthrow certain governments.

When the committee opened public hearings, Church brandished a gun at the first session. (Idahoans know how to kick ass.) If you're wondering what inspired my new profile pic, it is that gun. Specifically, this was a gun that could be used to fire poison darts. The CIA had plenty of deadly poisons on hand. (In my opinion, the CIA should have just gone to Australia and got box jellyfish.) The committee discovered other exciting stuff as well - for instance, communications companies provided the CIA with telegrams Americans sent abroad. (Today, the CIA routinely listens in on the calls of Americans abroad, or that Americans make to other countries.) The CIA often intercepted mail. You get the idea - lots of domestic surveillance, and the senators themselves were not exempt.

We should not forget something else: the pressure! Death threats! Bugs and wiretaps! Stonewalling! The relentless opposition of Ford and conservatives! Something more insidious arose as well - the idea that the Church committee was unpatriotic, that its very existence was aiding and abetting the Communists. The idea that "I don't have anything to hide, so go ahead and wiretap my phones! open my mail! etc." Now, these ideas did not suddenly arise with the Church committee, but they were encouraged by various right wing groups. You see the parallels, and I can promise you that Obama is under immense pressure to let bygones be bygones - the Bush administration left a big pile of doody, and Obama needs to clean it up. He - and Congress - have a big enough task before them as it is.

I actually have some sympathy for that idea, more than some of y'all might think. But, yanno, over the summer I read the entire report on the Columbia crash. (not the new report, the one that came out in 2004) When something important like the Columbia fails, you gotta find out why. If you don't, you risk another shuttle exploding. So - when prewar intelligence fails, or the economy fails, or (you can make your own list of Bush administration screwups here) - you gotta find out why. But the difference is that, with some of the Bush policies, our moral code failed. Torture is a moral issue to me. Spying on Americans is a moral issue to me. There should be inquiries, and we need to see how far the rot goes (all the way to Bush and Cheney, most likely) - but the more interesting question to me is, why is it perfectly reasonable to torture or to spy or whatever? Why do some people think that way? Are they right and am I totally off base - do we need to do whatever it takes to fight terrorism or communism?

Here's where I'm going - I want to look more deeply into the arguments against the Church committee. Sure, I think they're wrong. But those arguments sure are appealing to many people. Why? Also, I want to do a post on Church today. What would Frank Church think of our current mess? I have no idea, but I will enjoy speculating!

As kind of an amusing sidenote, the Church committee ran over schedule into 1976. That overrun was a problem, because Church ran for president that year. Really. He started his campaign really late, won a few primaries, lost the nomination, did not become Carter's VP. Carter faced a lot of problems in office, and it would have been interesting to see how Church would have handled those problems. Alas, Idaho has not had a presidential contender since then, and my main man Larry Craig is in no danger of becoming president.

Cooper-Church and Case-Church

I regret choosing Frank Church as a pseudonym now. For a liberal in George Bush's America to go by "Frank Church" is like a Catholic going by "Pope John Paul II" or a Latin scholar going by "A. E. Housman". I chose Frank Church as a pseudonym on a whim - how about choosing a little known senator that was a liberal champion and should be more remembered. Perhaps I should have chosen another name, like Charles Mathias, Clifford Case, John Sherman Cooper, or Mark Hatfield. All of those senators are remembered, at least by folks older than me, but none of them stood steadfastly against everything still president Bush stands for. (Interestingly, all four senators I just named were all Republicans. They cooperated with Church on various legislation or committees.)

I guess I wanted to start off by talking about Vietnam. The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq that I see mostly concern the secrecy and obscurity around the conduct of both wars. Why did we wage war in Iraq? Not for WMDs, and the real reason may be forever unknown. Vietnam? The event that started US involvement in earnest was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Turns out, that was a fraud too. BTW, Frank Church voted for that resolution. Not one of his finest moments, but he helped us get out of Vietnam later on.

I refer specifically to Cooper-Church and Case-Church, two defining amendments in the struggle to end that stupid war. As you recall, but the Vietnam War encompassed more than Vietnam. Nixon expanded it into Cambodia and Laos. Cooper-Church sought to end fighting in Cambodia and Laos by cutting off its funding. It failed in mid-1970 and passed at the end of 1970. Case-Church pretty well killed off the war. It ended funding for American forces in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. It passed in 1973 and US involvement ended, mostly, on August 15, 1973.

As far as expanding the Iraq war - I've always wondered about that and Bush. I think certain forces in his administration might have been pushing him to declare war on Iran. Cheney especially, a lot of Pentagon folks, perhaps the Israeli government. Iran doesn't particularly scare me - remember, it's a Third World country - but I can see how it would scare Israel. And pretty much everyone in government supports Israel. Some support Israel because they're Jewish. That's good. Some support Israel because it's our only democracy in the Middle East. (That's why I think Israel should absolutely exist, although calling Israel a democracy comes with troubling caveats.) And some, my favorite, support Israel because the existence of Israel is a precondition for the Rapture, Armageddon, Second Coming, etc.

Anyway! I wish Congress had been a little more forthright in talking about cutting off funding for the war. I think Iraq has been pretty eclipsed in our consciousness by our new depression - and before that the American public was pretty solidly against the war. Of course, it's an open question how much the American public would support cutting off funding for the Iraq war. But - Congress controls the purse strings. Congress finances the war. If you want to end a war, the best thing to do is stop the funding. Stop the money. And our Congress never had the testicular fortitude to do that. (Ironically, Frank Church had testicular cancer as a young man.)

Maybe I'll ramble my way into talking about Vietnam fallout tomorrow.

So who was Frank Church anyway?

For Christmas I got a biography about Frank Church, called Fighting the Odds. I finished it today. It's a pretty powerful book - Church was in the senate for 24 years, 1957-1980, and he was involved with all the important events of the time, most specifically Vietnam and its fallout.

Maybe I can start with my important thought: While reading the book, I perceived a lot of uncomfortable parallels between Nixon (to a lesser extent, Ford and Carter) and still president Bush. Perhaps the most clearcut one is between Vietnam and Iraq. Now, after Nixon resigned and the Vietnam clusterfuck ended, Congress reasserted its authority. Church, being a senior Democrat, was naturally involved in ferreting out the wrongdoing and numerous misdeeds of Nixon and more importantly the "Unitary Executive". Will the wrongdoing and numerous misdeeds of Bush be investigated by the new 111th Congress? Will there be any Churches ready to scavenge among the Bush detritus and chair special subcommittees?

(My answer: don't hold your breath.)

So that's Church! A brave courageous fellow, especially considering he was a liberal Democrat from Idaho. He was the only Democratic senator from Idaho to be elected to multiple terms. John McCain got 61.5% of the presidential vote, and the Republican percentages have been persistently high since 1960. Idaho elected its first Democrat to Congress since 1992 in 2008, and that man, Walt Minnick, is something of a fluke. (He was running against an extremely unpopular incumbent.) What I am trying to emphasize is that Frank Church was even more of a fluke, and it's amazing that he was a senator at all.

How did he do it?

Constituent service. Like most Western congressmen, he was on the Interior Committee. He had a fine grassroots organization during his elections. He went to a bunch of dinky little towns and gave many speeches. He was popular with the Mormons - he was a real straight arrow type. He was no Eliot Spitzer - much less Larry Craig. He was devoted to his wife. His wife was a pretty amazing political asset. He was willing to defend his stances, even when they were unpopular. Let's not forget misconceptions - a lot of Idahoans thought he was moderate or conservative. He was conservative on some issues. He opposed gun control, like any Western politician. He wasn't exactly pro-life, but he sided with the pro-life crowd on some issues. He was temperamentally conservative.

I guess that's my list of why he lasted four terms. He was defeated in 1980, the Reagan landslide year. Some conservative groups (analogous to today's 527's) spent a bunch of money softening him up, emphasizing all of his stands that were unpopular in Idaho. His most unpopular action was probably playing a key role in the Torrijos-Carter treaties, which returned the Panama Canal to Panama in 1999. His opponent was a fellow named Steve Symms, an extremely conservative congressman from Idaho's 1st district. He was up against a mighty tide, a conspiracy of circumstances. Amazingly, he lost by one percent.

(My analogy to this is pretty dreadful, but hey, it's my blog: Pennsylvania is a fairly moderate to liberal state. Rick Santorum was dreadfully conservative and a two term senator. In 2006, with a strong Democratic tide, he lost by 19 or so percent. That's why I think Church's narrow loss is quite amazing.)

But let us not dwell on Idaho politics! (Summary: Idaho's conservative.) Let us talk instead of Church's important legislation, of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, of Church's subcommittee on multinationals, of Church's memorial. Let us talk about that tomorrow.

Except for Church's memorial. Church is rightfully most famous for his efforts to uncover wrongdoing by the various intelligence agencies, but he was also a conservationist. Here is his memorial.