The current White House shakeup has raised the possibility of a new approach to Congress by the Bush-Cheney administration. Could this signal a new era--one of bipartisan communication, if not bipartisan cooperation? Don’t count on it.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

Consider this sentence from Jim VandeHei’s piece in The Washington Post on the appointment of former Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to head the Office of Management and Budget: “White House advisers said Bush picked Portman in part to send a clear signal that he is serious about working more cooperatively with disgruntled GOP lawmakers.”

In other words, President Bush did not pick Portman to work more cooperatively with Congress--that would have included Democrats--but rather to improve relations with dissidents in his own party.

Let me step back to say that I applaud the appointments of both Portman, who most recently served as U.S. trade representative, and Josh Bolten, who was recently named the White House chief of staff. Bolten is smart, savvy and decent. The beginning of disarray inside the Bush White House, in my judgment, came when Bolten left the position of deputy chief of staff for Policy, where he worked assiduously behind the scenes to make sure the White House was firing on all cylinders. And Portman is terrific--fully capable of developing a real and reasonable relationship with a broad range of Democrats and Republicans in Congress (except that on budget issues, there is essentially no prospect of finding common ground).

Even if the White House did want to find some broad-based consensus, there is no indication that Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) will deviate from his openly stated modus operandi of building majorities in the House from Republicans alone, and moving outside the family only if absolutely necessary. Of course, if the president, vice president and Speaker were to change their approach to governance and offer a new kind of partnership to Democrats, there is little if any chance that Democrats--after five years of frustration and impotence, mostly while dealing with a president using his robust post-Sept. 11, 2001, public approval to screw them--would bail him out when he is floundering, and when they can see a majority on the horizon.

There is actually a more interesting question: whether the overall dynamic of the relationship will change in this new and difficult political environment.

The relationship between Bush and Congress has been unusual, to say the least. In fact, I haven’t seen anything quite like it in my lifetime, with its odd blend of aggressiveness and passivity in each branch.

On the one hand, Bush, driven both by his own executive-centered mentality and by the ardent pro-executive worldview of Vice President Cheney, has moved to expand executive authority more than any modern president--including Richard Nixon. His actions have ranged from an attempt to control presidential papers to the extraordinary use of quasi-constitutional “presidential signing statements,” in which the president blithely says he’ll ignore provisions of law he does not like.

In the face of this assertive, even arrogant, display of executive power, the Republican Congress has responded--let’s be honest--pathetically. I have called it “the battered Congress syndrome.” The more the White House or executive branch officials defy Congress or slap Congress around, the more Congress submits. When executive officials testify, they frequently make clear that they have no intention of giving Congress what it wants. This has been true of Cabinet secretaries such as Donald Rumsfeld and top appointees at the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department.

If some committee chairmen such as Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), John Warner (R-Va.), Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and former Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) have been frustrated, their options have been curbed by party leaders who would never hold the defiant executive officials’ feet to the fire or demand meaningful oversight. This is a Congress that has no sense of its own heritage, or of its self-esteem as the first branch of American government.

At the same time, Congressional leaders have shown an astonishing aggressiveness at pushing the rules and norms of their respective chambers to accomplish their legislative goals, most (but not all) of which are shared by the president. The House leaders’ willingness to bend propriety in order to build majorities from within Republican ranks (and to protect their miscreants) has been amply described in these pages; their mantra is that the ends justify the means. The Senate leaders’ impulse to trigger the nuclear option, with all of its obvious and destructive fallout, without even beginning to exhaust the other alternatives, was sheer recklessness.

In the face of all this, however, we also have to add in the bizarre passivity of the president--his near-historic failure to veto a single measure during his entire presidency. Many of his predecessors had compatible Congresses, yet they vetoed bills. On many measures, this macho president left the details to the Hill and just signed whatever came his way. The failure of the president to veto anything in more than five years in office has made his threat of veto empty and will make his first veto, if he ever casts one, somewhat farcical. Why this one instead of all the others?

Of course, one could argue that this set of approaches by Republican leaders at both ends of the avenue has worked. Fueled by near-perfect party unity in the House, they got major bills such as tax cuts and a Medicare prescription drug plan passed, and they prevailed at the ballot box in 2002 and 2004. But now, the problems clearly are much greater. Their unity is gone, panic is setting in, the president’s approval is in the dumps and Democrats are more united in opposition.

Maybe Bolten and Portman will keep uneasy House and Senate Republicans from jumping too far off the reservation or stomping too much on the president when he is down. But lawmakers’ own political imperatives will trump any tough (or soothing) words from the White House. There is no sign that this nervous Congress is turning its unease into real oversight or a real sense of independence as a branch of government. At least until the 2006 elections clarify our politics a bit--and that remains an “if”--no change in personnel or in attitude will alter the odd, split-personality nature of the current relationship between the president and Congress.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.