Sheldon Whitehouse

Sheldon Whitehouse has enjoyed more than his share of attention as a freshman US senator, due in part to his role in hearings on White House involvement in the hiring and firing of federal prosecutors. The Democrat — whose downtown Providence office is in the same space formerly used by Republican Lincoln Chafee — sat down with the Phoenix last week to discuss his work. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

How would you assess the performance of congress since the Democrats regained control in January?
Well, I think we have met the first standard, which is the Hippocratic oath — first do no harm — and stopped a lot the mischief that was going on under the Republican-controlled Congress. So that’s to the good. I think it’s been frustrating for us and for a lot of the progressive people who put us in place, and by us, I mean the entire freshman class, to see the pace of things move relatively slowly and to find significant frustrations on Iraq and on immigration, where the 60-vote margin that the Senate requires for action unless you have agreement is a significant barrier, particularly on Iraq, where we’re 51 ordinarily . . .
 
On the other hand, I think the ethics bill we passed is real, the minimum wage [increase], the first in a longtime, was long overdue, the funding for the troops was a significant improvement. There have been some good things done, but I think — the nicest way to put it — is our best days still lie ahead.

Even with some of the weakening republican support — Senator Domenici, Senator Lugar — the White House shows no sign of backing away from its strategy on Iraq. Do you see a point where us combat troops are withdrawn, and what will it take to bring that about?
This is one of those things like running the battering ram at the door. You don’t just do it once and give it up when the door doesn’t yield. You go back and you run again, and you run again, and you run again, until finally the gates crash down. We’ve taken three pretty considerable runs already at the Iraq strategy. I think that when we get back and the Defense Authorization Bill comes up, that will be the fourth charge. I think we got to 53 votes last time. With the Republican defections, and I think the public ones by Domenici, by Warner, by Lugar, and by others, are a sign of a very significant crumbling of Republican support for the war . . . I do see a constant crumbling of Republican legislative support and unremitting determination from the Democrats to keep banging until the gates come down, and good sense and rational foreign policy can begin to prevail once again.

Do you see “the surge” as a fundamentally flawed approach, since our own intelligence agencies have pointed to the war as the prime recruiting vehicle for violent Islamic extremists?
Yeah, the bigger your presence and the more pronounced your footprint, the more it provokes the opposition is the theory. I think there’s an element of truth to that.

I don’t know enough to know how that actually plays out. I think it probably is about even . . . My biggest problem with the surge is that fundamentally, it’s only a tactic, and a tactic is really only effective if it’s coordinated in a larger strategy. And the strategy is only effective in a larger dynamic, and this is an administration that doesn’t seem willing to think about strategy, let alone the larger dynamic that the Middle East presents to us, and I think we’re in this on our worst possible footing right now.

Your office recently put out a news release about the Bush administration’s warrant-less wiretapping program; you were quoted as saying, “At every turn, this administration has tried to evade its responsibility to tell the truth.” Why do you think more Americans aren’t visibly troubled about that kind of thing?
I don’t know. A lot of Americans are busy with their lives. They’re holding down busy jobs, or two, or three, and they’re trying to raise their families. The middle class is trying to get by on essentially stagnant wages while the costs of education, and health-care, and gas, and everything else have gone up through the roof. So there aren’t a whole lot of people who’ve got a lot of time to dig into what’s going on in Washington. And the way the news covers things, they give you the “on the one hand, on the other hand,” no matter how credible the two hands are relatively . . . You kind of figure . . . they’re still squabbling in Washington, and you go back to your job and try to take care of your family. It’s a hard environment for people who don’t have time on their hands to form their own carefully considered judgments about this, to get how bad things are in Washington and how completely at variance with the truth an enormous amount of what the Bush administration says with a straight face every day is.