George McClellan was in a snit.

The Commander in Chief of the Army (circa 1862) had just returned from a meeting with a Congressman who was urging him to get the army moving toward Richmond pronto. It had been more than 6 months since the disaster at Bull Run and everyone in Washington was getting antsy, not least the President who quipped morosely that if McClellan was not going to use the army, then perhaps he (the President) might borrow it for awhile.

McClellan was feeling persecuted. Everyone in Washington was an armchair general, telling him how to win the war. The President, in a pathetically amateurish attempt to remedy his lack of military knowledge, was reading treatises on war by night and writing long, chatty letters by day telling him:

And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Mannassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.

I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.

Lincoln wrote that letter as McClellan’s 100,000 man army sat in front of a Confederate battle line on the James Peninsula in Virginia that featured fake wooden guns and the theatrics of rebel General John Magruder who, in order to make his 15,000 man force appear to be a great host, continuously marched a brigade across the front of the Union lines, easily fooling the cautious McClellan into thinking he faced more than 100,000 men.

But that was in the future. The Congressman McClellan was so disgusted with was John Covode of Pennsylvania who sat on the most powerful Committee in the history of the United States Congress: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Covode had just informed Little Mac that he was in danger of losing his command unless he got the Army of the Potomac up and moving toward Richmond and the General was in a foul mood. He sat down and wrote a letter to his wife complaining bitterly about the interference of the “rascals” in Congress who seemed more interested in assessing an officer’s anti-slavery credentials than in their military abilities. Despite being given more power than any general since Washington, McClellan felt hemmed in and hamstrung by a group of amateurs who were looking over his shoulder and criticizing every move he made or, in the present case, didn’t make.

The Joint Committee was born out of the frustration in Congress with Union setbacks in the early days of the war and what the radicals saw as insufficient zeal for victory on the part of some officers. If, as Clemenceau said “War is too important a thing to be left to the generals,” then the Committee felt perfectly comfortable in making it their business to meddle in the affairs of the army. Woe betide the luckless officer who got into their sights. Because America was fighting a civil war, even the loyalty to the flag of officers could be and was questioned.

Nothing illustrated this salient fact more than the case of General Charles P. Stone whose attack on a small rebel encampment near Leesburg ended up an unmitigated disaster. Not only did he lose the battle, but the man most responsible for the loss, a former United States Senator Edward Baker, was killed in action. The Battle of Balls Bluff was a minor skirmish by Civil War standards but its impact would be felt for the rest of the war. In response to the defeat, the Congress decided that the executive branch needed guidance in the prosecution of the conflict and the Joint Committee was born. Their first target was General Stone himself who, while never accused outright of treason, was nevertheless tarred by innuendo and gossip to the point that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered his arrest. For 189 days, Stone sat in a cell without being charged with any specific crime. He was finally released without apology and was never able to live down the cloud placed over him by Congress.

Whether it was the Committee’s intent or not, Union officers got the message. Headquarters operators like General Joe Hooker and Benjamin Butler cultivated Committee members, taking them into their confidence and lavishing praise on their activities. Combat officers like General Phil Kearny complained that the Committee’s second guessing was having a deleterious effect on an officer’s ability to carry out their duties.

Indeed, that was almost a universal criticism of the Committee’s investigations:

The Committee on the Conduct of the War was feared during its lifetime. Army commanders saw what was happening to their predecessors and let this influence the decisions they made on the battlefield. General Ambrose Burnside most certainly let the phantom of McClellan’s non-aggressive behavior color his judgment when he continued to send the waves of Union soldiers to their deaths up the slopes of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, and again when he moved his army out of their winter camps into the Virginia quagmire in the infamous Mud March. How many other general officers made decisions based not strictly on what was best for their commands on a given field, but rather on what was “safe” conduct as far as the CCW was concerned? George Meade knew what was happening when he testified to committee members at Falmouth, after the Fredericksburg defeat. In a personal letter he wrote, “I sometimes feel very nervous about my position, [the committee is] knocking over generals at such a rate.”

In fact, the Committee did an enormous service to the Union cause. More often than not, they were able to weed out incompetent officers who were usually replaced by competent ones. They cared not a fig if an officer had West Point credentials, something that the President seemed over awed with at times. In fact, the Committee saw West Point as something of a bastion of Southern sympathizers, so many of the US trained officer corps leaving the army to fight for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. And while it is true their meddling sometimes caused problems for armies in the field, their investigation into medical treatment of wounded soldiers led to the formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission which forever changed the way the army cared for its wounded. And other investigations into corruption in the granting of military contracts as well as being out front in urging President Lincoln to recruit and train black soldiers proved to be tremendously helpful to securing victory.

Could such oversight by Congress have prevented Abu Ghraib and other prisoner abuses? Would such a Committee if in existence today insisted on more troops on the ground at the beginning of the occupation? Could Donald Rumsfeld have survived this long if Congress had been looking over his shoulder? Would 363 tons of $100 bills been flown into Baghdad – $12 billion dollars worth – and ended up with employees of the Coalition Provisional Authorities using the banded stacks as footballs?

The Republican Congress has failed. It is as dysfunctional a legislative body as has ever been elected in my lifetime. While individual members have shown brains, courage, and thoughtfulness, as a group – and especially its quiescent, arrogant, and clueless leadership – it has been a disaster. We on the right have acknowledged this fact in one way or another. There has been nary a commenter on this site (with the exception of the few hopeless partisans who still drop by now and again) who hasn’t pointed out with brutal clarity the shortcomings of our party’s elected representatives. We should now take the next step and set up the guillotine because its time for some heads to start rolling.

To the Republicans in Congress, I would say yes, investigating Administration shortcomings is a partisan undertaking and it is a given that Democrats will turn hearings on any wrongdoing involving the war be it corruption in contract letting or prisoner abuse into one long diatribe against George Bush and the war. But you are all big boys and girls and politics is a tough business. If you can’t take the heat, stand aside and let others take your place with more fortitude and a desire to do the job citizens elected you to do. The medicine will be strong. But not taking it will once again plunge Republicans into minority status and elevate people who, we all believe, would not do the job of protecting America in this critical hour.

If Congress had something like the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War today, I daresay not only Donald Rumsfeld, but also the self serving, ass covering Generals who have recently come out calling for his resignation would have been in the Committee’s sights from day one. Rumsfeld’s failures are their failures. The fact that they are too arrogant to see that says everything you need to know about their “confessions.”

I really am at a loss about what to do. Staying home on election day goes against everything I believe about Republicans and democracy. But I am coming around to the belief that if not voting is the only way to change the leadership dynamic of the Republican party so that honorable conservatives rise to positions of prominence, then so be it.