Yesterday, Barack Obama had some fine words for the people he’s chosen to serve in his administration.  No surprise there; Barack Obama always has fine words.  I particularly appreciate this:

The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they’re being made, and whether their interests are being well served.The directives I am giving my administration today on how to interpret the Freedom of Information Act will do just that. For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known. . . .Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.

Fine words, indeed, and a noble aim—but fine words only mean something if people take them seriously, and a noble aim is little but moonbeams if not pursued with determination.  So the question is, how are we seeing this realized?  The answer, unfortunately, is that President Obama’s senior appointees have already begun to betray their boss on this point.  Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary-designee, first offered the Senate dubious excuses for his failure to pay his taxes, then finally seems to have lied to them about it; Eric Holder, meanwhile, the nominee for Attorney General, has already been caught in a bald-faced lie.  Whatever your opinion about President Obama’s ability to deliver the change he promised, I think we can all agree this isn’t it.

who has this to say about the GOP’s mood (it’s the last item in the post):

Conservatives I’ve met in D.C. so far have been near-ebullient, not downcast or bitter. Why? a) They know how unhappy they’d be now if McCain had won; b) Obama has not fulfilled their worst fears, or even second-to-worst fears; c) now they can be an honest, straight-up opposition.

Oddly enough, b) might be the least important of the three.  a) and c) go together, really; the shots from Democrats that John McCain represented “a Bush third term” weren’t fair on the whole, but there is one respect in which he would have been a continuation of the Bush administration:  it would have been four more years, for conservatives, of gritting teeth and biting tongues on a great many policies (more than with President Bush, I’m sure) so as not to undermine him on the few key ones on which we agree.  Valued commenter and colleague Doug Hagler has argued repeatedly in his comments here that Republicans don’t believe in free markets any more than the Democrats do, and that there is no party of small government; that isn’t true on a grassroots level, or among the more junior leaders of the party, but it’s been true on a national level for quite some time, and this is a lot of the reason.  The GOP hasn’t put up an economic conservative as its presidential candidate since Reagan (though George H. W. Bush talked the talk long enough to get elected); and while the party won both houses of Congress on a conservative platform in 1994, power and its seductions bent the congressional GOP leadership away from that in time.  Conservatives in the party, in order to hold fast to conservative positions, would have had to go into opposition en masse to their own party—which probably would have looked severely counterproductive at the time, since it would undoubtedly have swung the federal government as a whole to the left.  In the long run, I’m not sure it would have been counterproductive at all, but that would have been a pretty long gamble to play . . . and might very likely have cost those conservatives their seats.  Would it have been worth it anyway to preserve a greater integrity to a conservative opposition?  Perhaps, but I doubt we’ll ever be able to say for sure.In any case, as Kaus notes, that particular problem has now been solved (in the most drastic fashion possible); the party has been purged to a considerable extent, and exiled to the outer darkness for its misdeeds.  That means it’s a long road back, but as conservatives, we can be glad simply to be on the road back—it has at least turned around—and to have a new generation of leaders rising up, folks like Governors Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, and Representatives Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, to guide us on the way.  It means it’s the ideal time to begin to make the GOP a conservative party once again—and perhaps, this time, to learn from the mistakes of the last time, and keep it one.

Last August, I wrote this:

When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don’t believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.

Now, Speaker Pelosi—and Harry Reid, her Senate counterpart—are taking parliamentary dictatorship to the next level.  Indeed, they’ve pushed it so far that even the Washington Post is expressing disapproval.  As the D.C. Examiner put it,

We know Democratic lawmakers have taken their bully-boy tactics too far when even The Washington Post worries about the lack of civility in the 111th Congress. As the Post notes, during the 110th Congress “Democrats brought more measures to the House floor under closed rules—permitting no amendments—than any of the six previous Republican-controlled congresses.” Barring amendments to proposed legislation, of course, means take it or leave it, which renders floor debate all but meaningless. . . .Considering how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are treating Republicans in the new Congress, the brazen muzzling of minority rights will continue. Take the pork-laden $10 billion public lands bill Reid ram-rodded over the weekend. It combined more than 160 discrete bills in one omnibus monstrosity, with no amendments permitted. In fact, it’s been six months since Reid permitted Senate GOPers to offer amendments to any Democratic proposal in the Senate. By stifling GOP amendments, Reid is robbing millions of Americans of their right to be heard in the Senate. As Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, says: “Offering amendments is a right and responsibility of senators, not a special privilege or scheduling inconvenience.”On the House side, in addition to severely limiting the GOP’s right to propose amendments from the floor, Pelosi has even gone after the hallowed minority prerogative of offering a motion to recommit a bill before a final vote on passage. Recommiting a bill sends it back to committee, which usually kills it. During their dozens years as a majority, House Republicans only rarely limited Democrats’ ability to offer recommit motions. Unless Pelosi relents, House Republicans and dissident Democrats will be all but shut out of the legislative process in 2009.

I suspect that “dissident Democrats” are the real target here, and that the chief “dissident” they have in their sights is Barack Obama.  It’s pretty clear that Speaker Pelosi et al. want to govern from the hard left, and so far, with his appointments, statements, and actions, the president-elect has been sending strong signals that aside from abortion, he has no intention of cooperating with that agenda; it looks to me like Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are marshaling their forces to try to force him to do so.  In order to set the agenda, they have to be sure that if they need to override a veto, they can whip the necessary votes into line; these sorts of measures, combined with the signals they’ve sent that they’re willing to remove committee chairs from their positions for reasons other than death or gross malfeasance, give them at least some ability to do so, and prepare the ground for any further moves they might need to make toward that end.