When the Democrats took the legislative branch back, I did a little dance. For a good two weeks. When the first 100 hours yielded a number of great bills passed, I danced again. Over time, though, the good news stopped. AlterNet nailed it, writing on how the Dems blew it in only eight months.

The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it’s escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for “foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States.” Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t. The Democrats’ game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

That’s been one of my problems with the attorney scandal. It seems to be the only part of the current White House horror show that the Democrats will actually pursue. When it came time to stop Bush from expanding his warrantless surveillance program, they folded. They could have put their collective left foot down and put the pressure on Bush by refusing to fund the war unless he agreed to take steps to end it, but they didn’t.

The attorney scandal is, honestly, symbolic more than anything and the fact that it’s being doggedly pursued over all else tells me that the Democrats are more interested in making a big show out of fighting the largely meaningless fight because they don’t have the stones to fight the important issues.

At the end of the day, does anyone give a good damn about whether or not Alberto Gonzales gets impeached when the president now has further reaching privacy-intrusion powers, and the war is getting funded just as openly as it was a year ago? It’s nice to see that someone is getting smacked around, but it’s not going to end the war or give us our civil liberties back.

What really baffles me is that they learned absolutely no lesson from, well, anything over the past few years. Congress’s approval rating went down the shitter because of one simple principle: the neoconservatives have really, really bad ideas. Invading Iraq, repeated tax cuts for the wealthy, stem cell research, getting involved with Terri Schiavo, gay marriage amendments, expansion of presidential authority, each of these are exemplars of why the American people stopped trusting Congress.

Not coincidentally, each of these are strictly neocon ideals. Congress was more than happy to pander to their rightmost base and go right along with them. Then, when each of them later proved to be absolutely terrible ideas, the public started to realize that maybe the GOP didn’t have their best interests at heart. It took a while, but finally the left got motivated and bingo bango the Democrats pick up a few dozen seats in Congress.

Yet despite seeing what happened to the party before and the legislative branch’s approval thanks to rubber-stamping the President and his neocon base’s desires, the Democrats somehow determined that the best course of action was to not do a damn thing differently. So now the right is pissed off at Congress just for being blue, and the left is pissed off at Congress for not doing anything that they were elected to.

One of the oddest anomalies, and perhaps the only even mildly encouraging facet of all this, is that the reason the GOP-led Congress got reamed was that they went right along with the far right’s wishes, only to expose the fact that the far right’s wishes are disastrous. Meanwhile, the Democratic Congress is getting raked over the coals because they’re basically ignoring the liberal base. Once again, proof that the country is far more liberal than the media seems to think.

Polls bear us out, and as AlterNet noted it has little to do with any Democratic leadership. It’s the other way around. The people saw what happens when neoconservative ideology runs rampant in our government and elected people they hoped would fix things. That those people basically turned their backs on the populace that voted them in is simultaneously bad for the country and bad for Democracy.

The resigned attitude toward that which probably won’t succeed is probably the most problematic part. Until Reid forced an all-nighter, the Senate folded any time the Republicans wanted a veto, and both houses fall apart when it comes time to do anything that Bush won’t endorse. Then at the same time they avoid pushing for legislation that will get vetoed, they go right along with legislation that Bush wants in order to avoid being seen as “obstructionists”.

Remember how 2004 had a huge turnout because people cared about the outcome? The prospect of getting Bush out of office and Kerry in so he could reign the war in and put things back in the right direction. When that didn’t happen, 2006 had a huge voter turnout compared to 2002. The people were practically frothing at the mouth to get the Republicans out of power to put a stop to the catastrophic leadership that seemed hell-bent on leading us to military and economic ruin.

Now that we’ve finally put our party into power and they aren’t doing anything, the Democrats have potentially destroyed their prospects for 2008. Realize that these two years are going to be illustrative of what we could expect from a Democratic presidency, and without anything substantial to point to it’s going to be very difficult for any of the current crop of candidates to convince voters that they deserve even more power.

I love the Democratic candidates, I think we’ve definitely got a better selection that the GOP, but I’m not going to be particularly motivated if, come 2008, we’re not in any better position than we were in 2006 when we handed them the legislative branch. The right is going to be mad that their candidates are beholden to the far right and the last 8 years proved that’s a horrendous ideology, and the left is going to be mad that their candidates don’t have the backbone to do anything different.

As it stands, one of the big reasons the Democrats have a good chance in 2008 is the Republicans’ absolutely terrible pool of candidates. The scruple-less Giuliani, the batshit crazy McCain, the flip-floppy Romney, the general non-entity of Fred Thompson. Lord help the left if a really good Republican candidate shows up and Congress keeps shirking their duties like they are.

The only thing that the Democrats can hide behind is that Bush will veto whatever it is they want to do and that with their party in the White House then they’ll really be able to get to business. All that tells us is that they’re afraid to make any stands on principle and just go along with the political tides. While it’s always a good idea to be realistic and not to beat your head against a wall with impossible legislation, when you only stand behind what is guaranteed to succeed you don’t really represent anything, not your own principles and certainly not the people who elected you.

Besides, a Democratic Congress that actually stood by their beliefs as well as their voters’ wishes only to be blocked with vetoes would seal Bush’s legacy as a bullheaded obstructionist while proving that they themselves have the fortitude to stand strong for the right thing. Come the 2008 debates, “I co-sponsored a bill to legalize gay marriage” or “I voted to force the president to choose between funding the troops or continuing without an exit strategy” will sound a hell of a lot better than “I wanted to support that bill, but I didn’t think it would pass.”

There’s an old line of joking that Democrats are blessed with the ability to be handed opportunity and them proceed to shoot themselves in the foot with it. Let’s hope that this changes, and soon.