Who is Minding the Store?

The problem is not the system. It’s us—our “got mine”
culture of entitlement.— Evan Thomas in Newsweek

In an article to appear in Newsweek magazine’s March 8 issue, Evan Thomas examines the gridlock over major issues in Washington:

The Founders got it right, more or less, some 220 years ago, when they created a system of checks and balances that permits the exercise of power while protecting the rights of individuals and political minorities.

Thomas goes on to place the blame for congressional partisanship, burgeoning budgets and unwillingness to make hard decisions squarely on the voters who put them in office and keep them there:

Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They’d get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.

I keep seeing references by commentators to polls showing that voters hate Washington but are satisfied with their Representatives and Senators. Politicians have learned to bring home the pork to win reelection, but who is representing the country’s long-term interests and stability?

Every time I see someone calling for term limits, I want to point out that elections exist for just that purpose. This year one-third of the Senate and all of the House seats will be up for grabs. If all the two parties care about is which party ends up with the most seats, they both deserve to lose incumbents in considerable numbers.

Who’s minding the store?

Uncivil Discourse

Unlike a number of parliamentary governments in the democratic societies, the Congress of the United States almost always preserves orderly and mostly polite behavior on the floors of the House and the Senate. There was that rasslin’ match forty or so years ago between Texas’s Ralph Yarbrough and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. Thurmond, a fitness wonk, whipped Yarbrough’s ass. That was all in fun, however, and occurred in the doorway of a committee room. Both senators laughed and went on about their business.

Another  South Carolinian, Representative Joe Wilson, last night engaged in verbal assault, this time on the floor of the Congress, targeting the President of the United States, calling out in the middle of President Obama’s speech on health care reform, “You lie!” Pressured by his leadership, Wilson apologized promptly, while maintaining the untruth of assertions by the President regarding illegal aliens being excluded from receiving health care.

While the leadership of the Republican Party acted promptly to correct a faux pas by Wilson, I suspect that Wilson is now the darling of the right-wing blogs and talk radio militants who have so influenced political debate in the past thirty years. After all, Joe Wilson was just showing solidarity with the town hall shouters who have dominated the debate on health care over the past month or two.

The fight over health care reform, like most every issue dividing the parties in Congress, appears to me to be advance campaigning for the elections of 2010 and 2012, especially on the side of the party that is “out” at the moment. The business of politics is getting and keeping electoral dominance, a power search far more absorbing than seeking solutions to issues that affect all the voters, not just those who can be counted on as one party or another’s “base.” It’s all about the patronage and PAC funds, baby.

Political Venom

The outpouring of sympathy and expressions of loss on the death of Edward Moore Kennedy this week have been much in evidence on the news networks, newspapers and magazines. In the blogosphere, there have been many similar expressions of admiration and regret. There have also been appallingly nasty, vitriolic and apoplectic rants against Teddy, Jack, Bobby, their father, and all “Dems,” “leftists,” “socialists,” “Marxists” and “libs,” in an orgy of hatred.

I am not surprised. The past twenty years have marked the ascendancy of scorched earth commentary, sometimes even spilling over from the internet to more mainstream venues. There have certainly been such excesses from both ends of the political spectrum. But the electoral success of the Republican Party in relying on the most extreme elements in the body politic has been much more pronounced.

The campaign for reform of health care has seen such disregard for the truth and pandering to town hall bullies on the part of the Republicans that even overly partisan Democrats like Nancy Pelosi look statesmanlike. The Obama administration seems mired in defensive rhetoric which does nothing to advance their causes, on health care or anything else.

Among the other journalistic memoirs of Ted Kennedy is a Newsweek article by Elsa Walsh, telling of Kennedy’s counsel helping Bill Clinton come back from the debacle of the 1994 mid-term elections. Kennedy successfully urged  Clinton to stick to his basic political agenda, especially raising the minimum wage and a scaled-down partial reform of health care. The Senator urged the President to carry the fight to the Republicans, hammering them on insensitivity to the poor and working class  citizens. The strategy worked, Clinton won re-election and some seats were regained in the 1996 elections, although the Republicans retained legislative dominance.

It seems to me that attacking the Republicans on the same points would be effective this time, as it was in 1995-6

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 26, 2009 is:
dead hand • \DED-HAND\ • noun

1 : an inalienable possession of property by a church or corporation

*2 : the oppressive influence of the past

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The spread of mass media available to individuals, on the internet and on talk radio, has again made heavy the dead hand of bigotries past, from racism to religious extremism

Did you know?

Does “dead hand” make you picture a pale dismembered hand creeping slowly toward its next unsuspecting victim? If so, you’re in for a surprise — but not a scary one. “Dead hand” is a literal translation of the etymology of an older English word, “mortmain,” which comes from the Old French words “morte” (meaning “dead”) and “main” (meaning “hand”). In very unspooky terms, the words describe property that is left to a company, church, or charity in perpetuity. The “oppressive past influence” sense of both “mortmain” and “dead hand” developed from the idea of the dead exercising posthumous control over their property by dictating how it must be used after they die.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Partisan Libels

News programs the past few days have covered the misuse of history for partisan purposes by political and media figures. As the contentious debates on health care, the budget and other matters become ever more vitriolic, the dead hand of Nazism is with us still. From both extremes of the political landscape, enemies identify each other with the most monstrous criminals ever to persecute humanity.

One broadcast bloviator discerns Nazi symbols in a White House logo for the proposed health care overhaul. Another airwaves ranter finds parallels with the Nazis in a New York Times story on tracking terrorist financing. The Speaker of the House – second in line of succession to the Presidency, alas – accuses critics at town hall meetings of being un-American for disrupting exchanges of information. Those who shouted down speakers, and carried tombstones with names of legislators involved in the meetings, are extreme and uncouth and undermine their own arguments, but they are not un-American.

Nasty things happen in this country in times of political upheaval. Look up the events around the Presidential elections of 1796-1800, and this recent fury seems almost tepid. Once George Washington retired from the scene, the other Founding Fathers engaged in libels and dirty tricks that would make talk radio hosts blanch.

Are there any leaders of our country willing to put the country first, over party? A rhetorical question at the moment, but I have hopes.

Republicans Face “Birthers”

Buried among ranting comments, mostly from obsessive bloggers, this piece from the New York Times summarizes the anti-Obama “birther” conspiracy fringe movement, and the problem it presents to Republicans:

The group who keep insisting that Obama was born not in Hawaii, but Kenya, and is thus ineligible to be president — were a consistent side plot to the 2008 election. But even with Mr. Obama firmly ensconced in the Oval Office — and even with copies of Mr. Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate in circulation — the birthers’ passion does not seem to be fading away. Just ask Delaware Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican who faced an angry town hall meeting full of people who insisted Mr. Obama was Kenyan-born. MSNBC posted the video on its “Hardball” program.

Legislation has already been introduced in the House that would compel presidential candidates to prove their American citizenship; Chris Matthews recently interviewed Representative John Campbell, one of the legislation’s sponsors. (For his part, Mr. Campbell said that the bill was not about Mr. Obama, and pressed by Mr. Matthews, said he believed the president was a U.S. citizen.)

Now, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh are getting behind the birthers. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder takes a look at the Republican party’s choices when it comes to the group: “If they give credence to the birthers, they’re (not only advancing ignorance but also) betraying the narrowness of their base. If they dismiss this growing movement, they might drive birthers to find more extreme candidates, which will fragment a Republican political coalition.”

Those who cannot accept, for whatever reason, the fact of a convincing electoral victory last November by Barack Hussein Obama continue to pursue what amounts to a conspiracy theory

Politically Pure Justice?

U.S. Senator Roman Hruska (Republican, Nebraska) stated, “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” Comment on rejection of Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court, 1970. (Wikipedia.)

Questions on the competency of Supreme Court Justices, especially regarding their constitutional knowledge and interpretation, are always a part of the appointment and confirmation process. The above quotation came to mind when I read some of the early attacks by Republicans on Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination by President Obama to the vacancy on the high court to be filled after the retirement of Justice Souter. Some of the Republican criticism is directed at Judge Sotomayor’s record as a federal judge, especially at her reversal rate and her decisions based, in the Republican view, on matters of ideology rather than constitutional principles, especially in the case of a fireman denied promotion based on test results which did not favor minorities, in the view of the New Haven, CT department.

Political convictions of a justice should have no bearing on such decisions, the criticism went, only constitutional principles count. If the assertion by her critics is that Sotomayor is a political appointee, that particular train left the station at least as long ago as the Carswell nomination. Supreme Court nominations are always influenced by politics.

The case often cited by conservatives as an example of unjustified rejection of a nomination is that of Robert Bork by President Reagan. Democrats immediately went on the attack against Bork citing his rulings and comments on issues from abortion to civil rights. After lengthy hearings and debate, Bork was rejected by the Senate. This event has become a touchstone for criticism of “liberal” appointments to the Supreme Court, “look how the Democrats attacked Bork,” a cry that is being raised again now that Sotomayor is coming into the same arena.

Robert Bork, like Judge Carswell and Judge Haynsworth before him, was rejected for past statements or decisions which were interpreted as supportive of racial discrimination, among other things. That such criticisms were political was certainly true, but so were the decisions to nominate each man. How the ghosts of nomination fights past will play out with Sotomayor’s nomination process will be interesting to watch.

Trading Costs

The collapse of the economy in many areas has affected budgets private, corporate and governmental. Lack of money is an absolute, making cuts across all strata of society necessary, so hard choices and reduced standards are inevitable. All reductions in costs, especially in those levels of society with the fewest resources and greatest needs, are not necessarily actual reductions. Sometimes cuts in services by government simply shift the costs into areas not as recognizable as taxes or fees.

Caring for the Country

After almost nine months of economic decay, collapse of large financial institutions, continuing job losses, foreclosures, bankruptcies and oh, yes, war in Afghanistan threatening Pakistan, a nuclear power, the key issues for Republicans and Democrats to debate are torture and the closing of the Guantanamo mini-Gulag.

Although President Obama and former Vice-President Cheney were not on the same platform, their television addresses last night covered those issues as though they were point-counterpoint.

The Myopia of Power

The past week has been  dominated in the news media nationally by the question of “What did Nancy Pelosi know, and when did she know it?” regarding the briefings or non-briefings in 2002 on water boarding and other torture methods in use by CIA and military operatives in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Speaker Pelosi’s denials, qualifications of denials, and re-explanations of her explanations have undermined her own credibility and distracted from the large domestic and foreign issues facing the country.