Forget cutting government spending. Forget ending the New Deal. Forget even about Iraq and Iran.

Those agenda items, in varying orders, bulked large at one time or another in the history of the second Bush administration. But none ranks first or second or really anywhere significant on the White House’s current to-do list.

For the White House today there’s just one item on the agenda: preventing the Democrats from taking control of either house of Congress. And the key issue is subpoena power.

So much of what the Bush administration has managed to accomplish in the past five years has been possible because there has been no other political institution in Washington — outside the direct control of the White House — with subpoena power.

Sure, the Democrats controlled the Senate from mid-2001 through the end of 2002, but it was a marginal majority and any oversight it might have enabled was quickly engulfed by the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Simply put, when it comes to having anyone seriously pry into how it does business, the Bush White House has had five-plus years of a free ride. And that freedom from accountability has created a vast backlog of wrongdoing. The White House — and the entire D.C. GOP, for that matter — is just sitting on too many secrets and bad acts.

Keeping control of the House and the Senate is less a matter of conventional ideological and even partisan politics than it is a simple matter of survival.

If the Democrats win back the House, a vocal minority may push for articles of impeachment. (The White House would actually welcome that, as it would polarize post-2006 politics along lines that might allow the president to claim the political center.) Some frivolous investigations will be pushed.

But there’s just no shortage of genuine scandals that have yet to get any serious public scrutiny.

Here are three that the White House is probably most concerned about:

• Item One — The Iraqi WMD Debacle. There have now been two major government investigations of the errors that went into the Iraq intelligence failure — one by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and another by the presidentially appointed Robb-Silbermann Commission. As White House critics are quick to point out, both investigations were specifically directed not to examine the ways in which Bush administration appointees distorted, cherry-picked or simply lied about the available intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But even with that limitation, both reports went out of their way to sanitize the record, exculpate the White House and focus blame on the intelligence community.

A hostile congressional investigation can turn up embarrassing details even about relatively blameless officials, but no one who has watched the steady stream of incriminating details about what the White House did in the lead-up to war believes that the president would emerge from a truly unfettered investigation without sustaining major damage. Without Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to carry the president’s water as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, all bets are off.

• Item Two — Abramoff, Executive Branch Edition. To date, the Jack Abramoff bribery and influence-peddling scandal has focused primarily on Congress. But when the game is bribing members of Congress to get budget earmarks and executive-branch favors, it takes two to tango. Why did the acting U.S. attorney in Guam, Frederick Black, get yanked from his position in 2002 the day after he issued subpoenas in an investigation of Abramoff? What else has yet to be revealed about the work of Abramoff cronies at the General Services Administration, Office of Management and Budget and Interior Department?

• Item Three — Dirty Tricks and Government Leaks. As I write this, the fate of presidential adviser Karl Rove still appears to hang in the balance in Patrick Fitzgerald’s CIA leak investigation. But what is most damaging about the Valerie Plame case has never been that this or that official may have violated a particular law. The case is a symbol and a confirmation of cynicism, mendacity and bad acting in the White House.

Recent revelations that the White House selectively leaked classified information to mislead the public or damage critics falls into the same category. Add to that other cases, like the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, government-sponsored propaganda and payoffs to journalists and there’s plenty to look into.

Justice Department lawyers have already taken a bit of a crack at items two and three, but criminal investigations aren’t designed to shed light on wrongdoing. They’re meant to find and prosecute federal crimes. Much of the story remains permanently hidden from the public. And in any case, the threshold of political accountability rests, rightly, far below that for criminal prosecution.

When opposition parties reclaim the legislative branch, investigations are always sure to follow. It happened during the brief Republican reign on Capitol Hill in the late 1940s. It happened with a vengeance after the GOP sweep in 1994.

The White House folks know they can’t give Democrats the chance to do the same because they’ve just got too much to hide.

Get ready for a wild ride from here to November.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it