A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
Charles Blow has a must-read column in the New York Times, in which he foregoes characterizing for quoting. That is, rather than attributing attitudes to political figures like Romney, Gingrich, Ryan, et al, he simply quotes them.
It’s devastating.
CommentsI believe today is the last day Governor Pence can veto the “Imperial Mayor” bill. (If he fails to either sign or veto it, it becomes law without his signature.)
Leaving aside the numerous problems with the bill itself (the provisions eliminating the At-Large Councilors have gotten most of the attention, but they are the least of it–as I’ve written previously, the provisions shifting powers to the Mayor are an invitation to serious corruption), the political calculus is interesting.
Pence has taken a lot of criticism for his less-than-vigorous performance in office thus far. In a number of situations, he’s done a pretty credible imitation of a potted plant. A veto of a bill sponsored and passed by his own party, accompanied by a defense of home rule and/or good-government principles, would begin to change the perception of indecision and floundering, and would look principled.
A veto would also take a potent issue off the table before the next Mayoral race. Indianapolis residents of both parties have expressed outrage over the legislature’s “we know better than you what’s good for you” attitude. The General Assembly’s refusal to let us decide for ourselves whether we want transit was bad enough, but most Indianapolis people I know–Republican or Democrat–see the Imperial Mayor bill as a giant “fuck you.” Paul Ogden has written what is probably the best analysis of why the bill is bad politically for the GOP. Indianapolis is getting bluer by the year, but resentment over this bill is likely to accelerate that process.
So a veto would make the Governor look statesmanlike, and would actually do his party a favor.
The question is: does he understand that? We’ll see today.
CommentsWhen I first began practicing law, there were still very few women in the profession. One of the very first to have broken the gender barrier was a local divorce lawyer who had become legendary (not in a good way) in the legal community. Whether she’d become embittered by barriers she’d faced, or was just a bit “off,” there were multiple stories of courtroom appearances and client clashes. My favorite arose during her representation of the husband in a nasty divorce, when she explained to the court that the wife’s personality was so unpleasant that it had finally caused her poor husband to stab her.
That old story came to mind because I’ve been reading various pundits’ assignments of blame for Congressional dysfunction. Evidently, it’s all Obama’s fault that members of the legislature are refusing to do much of anything. He hasn’t “played hardball” or “twisted arms,” or maybe he hasn’t “schmoozed” enough…but whatever the tactical deficiency, it’s clearly his fault that the Republicans hate him and refuse to pass any bill–no matter how reasonable or necessary, no matter that the measure was previously part of the GOP’s own agenda–lest it be seen as compromising with the White House.
The fact that current congressional intransigence stems not from philosophical differences but from petty politics, visceral antagonism and more than a little racism has hardly been a well-kept secret. Pat Toomey, the Republican Senator who cosponsored the recently defeated background check bill, confirmed this state of affairs when he admitted that a number of Republicans had voted against the bill purely out of animus toward the President, and unwillingness to give him a “win.”
Whatever Obama’s strengths and weaknesses, we send people to Congress to focus on sound policy and the common good of the American public. A certain amount of political game-playing is inevitable, but when partisanship dictates every action taken, when calculations of political advantage trump all else, the system is broken. Lawmakers may think they are beating Obama–but they are really betraying the American people.
Blaming the President for the childish behavior of the legislative branch is like blaming the wife whose flawed personality “made” her husband stab her.
CommentsThere is an old story–a fable, actually–about the most effective way to kill a frog. You just put that little creature in a pot of water and slowly but steadily increase the temperature of the water. Eventually, the frog is boiled to death, but because of the slow, incremental elevation of the heat, it doesn’t realize the danger until it’s too late.
I think that story is an uncomfortable analogy to contemporary America’s political situation.
Yesterday, several news outlets and blogs carried this story:
Republicans want to limit the number of bullets federal agencies can purchase so American gun owners can buy more. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas have introduced a bill that would prohibit every government agency — except the military — from buying more ammunition each month, than the monthly average it purchased from 2001 to 2009.
The purpose of this bill, according to the reports, is to prevent President Obama from making good on his plan to have government agencies buy up all the bullets so that patriotic gun-owning Americans won’t be able to buy them.
Think about that for a minute. And then think about that frog.
When I ran for Congress in 1980, I was pro-choice and pro-gay-rights, and I not only won a Republican primary in very Red Indiana, I was accused on several occasions of being far too conservative. In the years since, the GOP has moved steadily–to the Right, then to the far Right ,and then to the far far Right–and finally to paranoid conspiracy fantasy-land. The party of Bill Hudnut and Dick Lugar is now the party of James Inhofe and Ted Cruz.
In 1980, if any political figure had made the sorts of statements that our elected officials–mostly but not exclusively Republican–routinely issue these days, the media would have called for the men in the white coats. But the progression into delusion has been relatively incremental. Lawmakers have slowly but steadily progressed through the stages from ideological rigidity, to extremism, to bat-shit crazy.
The media and the electorate are the frogs who haven’t noticed that the water has gone from warm, to uncomfortably hot, to boiling.
CommentsI have posted previously about ends and means, about the fact that the American constitution is a prescription for process. The central premise of our system is a respect for individuals’ right to have different life goals, different ends–what the Greeks called telos. When citizens are expected to differ on fundamental questions of purpose and belief, what is needed is a set of rules governing their common lives, a process making peaceful and respectful coexistence possible.
The Constitution is thus a structure enabling a “live and let live” philosophy.
This emphasis on process, on means, has been widely acknowledged by political scientists. In the political theory literature, there has been a lively debate on the question whether this emphasis is sufficient to produce “thick” bonds between citizens, but that debate has rested on a shared recognition of the American approach as procedural. We are, as the saying goes, a nation of laws.
In that context, Rick Perlstein makes a point about today’s political parties that is well worth pondering.
CommentsWe Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon…
For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being “principled” means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being “principled” means. ..
as the late New Right founding father Paul Weyrich once put it, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Which was pretty damned brazen, considering he was co-founder of an organization called the Moral Majority.
Now, of course, for over a decade now, the brazenness is institutionalized within the very vitals of one of our two political parties. You just elect yourself a Republican attorney general, and he does his level best to squeeze as many minority voters from the roles as he can force the law to allow. And a conservative state legislature, so they can gerrymander the hell out of their state, such that, as a Texas Republican congressional aid close to Tom Delay wrote in a 2003 email, “This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.” Or you lose the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but win in the electoral college—then declare a mandate to privatize Social Security, like George Bush did.
Which only makes sense, if you’re trying to save civilization from hurtling toward Armageddon. That’s how conservatives think. To quote one Christian right leader, “We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means…If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.