Just out, per a helpful alert from mcjoan at DailyKos, this journalistic work of art by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone lifts the curtain concealing the Democratic Party's manipulation of Congress to reveal some very ugly truths:

As the hedge-fund fiasco demonstrates, Democrats have turned the Senate into the chamber where good legislation goes to die. Since regaining the majority in 2006, the Democrats have granted the Bush administration and big telephone companies immunity for illegal wiretapping, declared a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization and...

[snip]

"We've lost the power to negotiate if Democrats use the 60 votes as a reason to tell us they can't take opposition to a bill," Rangel says. ..snip.. The message from Senate Democrats, he says, should be simple: "Damn it to hell, we stand for something. The Republicans are not going to hold us back."

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The bitter truth in the Senate is that it's not Republicans who are betraying the Democratic agenda — it's Democrats themselves.

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But when the conversation turns from 19th-century riverboating to 21st-century governance, Reid takes on a wearied slouch. He seems troubled by the responsibility of majority rule. After all, nobody really thought that the Senate Democrats were actually going to win in 2006. "The House was expected to get the majority, and we weren't," he says. "Surprised everyone."

Reid is not a "leader" in any traditional sense of the word. As speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can bend Democrats to her will — including the likes of Rep. John Dingell, the lifelong champion of automakers whom Pelosi has muzzled in the debate over global warming. She has even been able to bring conservative "blue dog" Democrats to heel, repeatedly garnering their support for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.

Reid, by contrast, is an enabler for Senate committee chairmen, whom he grants free rein over their fiefdoms. Indeed, he recently took to the Senate floor to criticize Pelosi for her "iron hand." His real strength, Reid says, is as the master of the Senate's arcane parliamentary protocols. "One reason I am the majority leader is people respect how I understand the procedures in the Senate," he says. "I don't mean to be boastful at all, but I know the rules really well." Which is perhaps why he is so adept at using them to shield himself from accountability for the Senate's failings.

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The Senate's mystifying refusal to stand and fight — even against the most unpopular lame-duck president of all time — has begun to spill over into the House. Nancy Pelosi may have become speaker of the House by promising an end to "blank checks" for Bush's war in Iraq, but she now says she has given up on her colleagues in the Senate. Although funding for the war is once again up for reauthorization, Pelosi is done asking her party to peg funding to a timeline for withdrawal.

"It's not going anyplace," she says sternly. "We know that. Every time we passed one of these bills with the conditions and the deadlines, the Senate did nothing. So I said to my members after the last time, 'I'm never going to ask you to vote for one of these bills again' — no matter how good it is."

Pelosi's surrender in the face of Reid's inaction means that President Bush will soon have another $170 billion to steer this war as he sees fit — perhaps even crashing it headlong into Iran — his course unchanged by a Democratic Congress that has meekly abdicated its constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on the executive branch. The simple truth is, the Senate's agenda is largely dictated by the Republican minority. ..snip.. ...the Democrats have backed down again and again without a fight. - Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20961789/the_senate_caves/print

Do not miss this article, in its entirety. It explains what's going on behind the scenes in Congress - at the top, in the party leadership - better than anything else to date. An incisive, enlightening, damning, and groundbreaking piece of journalism by Tim Dickinson - he deserves our gratitude for getting this down on the record this way for all to see. My hat is off to him; it was a joy to finally read the unvarnished truth and to confirm hidden motivations, which the actions we've witnessed certainly bear out.

Think of the implications of Pelosi's unchallenged, unilateral capitulation on Iraq. How many "progressive" (or otherwise) Members of Congress have come out and explained this party dynamic of 'surrender' regarding Iraq to the nation? None, as far as I know.

As Pelosi further makes clear, she's now waiting to follow a "leader" the same way the Republican Party-controlled Congress followed its "leader" for six straight years by way of turning our Congress into little more than a press release forum and presidential policy rubberstamp club. That Pelosi can't see the dangers, by now, in leaving the destroyed independence of Congress unrepaired, is unspeakably myopic and demonstrates, I think, a fundamental ignorance about our system of checks and balances, and the need to consciously maintain and respect those safeguards, rather than simply taking them for granted in the decayed state in which she found them.

Just as the Founders apparently didn't anticipate that the free press itself would be the source of censorship, and an agent for the suppression of truth about our government's actions, they certainly hoped that self-absorbed factions would not destroy the inherent prerogatives - as legislators for the nation and its Constitution - of our independent Legislative Branch of government, in the face of an imperial, autocratic, and secretive president, or otherwise. Yet both destructive developments are with us today, even as both institutions - the "free press" and the Congress (by way of the controlling Democratic Party) - still seem to think that the self-serving actions they take for their media and political careers will maintain our nation's Constitutional Republic. Their complacence is extremely damaging and increasingly dangerous.