I Don’t Get It

Politics makes strange bedfellows to be sure. The act of successfully striking deals to move the needle and get what you want can indeed make temporary friendships of the most ardent foes. It should seem the most basic lesson to learn for all those who live in a democracy that not everyone believes exactly the same way you do and to accomplish anything meaningful, sometimes it means working with those whose beliefs in general are abhorrent to you in the hopes of getting something done that is at least tolerable if not desirable to both of you. This is why I understand how someone like Bernie Sanders can work with someone like John McCain, despite the rather large gulf between them on most issues, to pass legislation on something they both agree on, i.e. taking care of veterans. I get that; it makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense to me is the seemingly unending ways to be cognitively dissonant on the Far Right.

Let’s start at the most basic part of democratic government, the idea that we need a government at all. I don’t get how someone can vote for a representative whose fundamental argument boils down to the contention that government does not work and can never work. Sure, it has made conservatives positively ecstatic since the time of Reagan to repeat the phrase “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” but that doesn’t make it the basis of a political philosophy. Is government imperfect? You better believe it is, but does government serve some useful and downright necessary purposes? If you don’t believe that it does than I cannot comprehend why you would ever vote in any election.

The occupation of federal land in Oregon is now coming to an end. Yet another armed insurrection in the history of America’s failed insurrections from the Whiskey Rebellion, through the Civil War, to this pathetic stunt is on its way to a final resolution. These are people who have only the vaguest understanding of a nebulous concept they call “common law,” but they are at least consistent with their belief that government is altogether bad by not participating in the democratic process. It is misguided, it is uninformed, it is outright seditious and frankly a little disturbing, but it does make sense if your fundamental argument precludes government as a potential good in all circumstances.

Nevertheless, every election cycle I am faced with the reality that a great many people in this country do not see this fairly rudimentary flaw in the argument and support politicians who proudly declare that if elected they will be horrible at their job. That really is the crux of it. The best that any of these politicians can hope for is that they are completely wrong about their whole worldview, because otherwise they are getting into a profession that is intrinsically harmful to this country. Which leads me to the more likely scenario for many of them, that they’re lying. I know in this day and age it’s not exactly shocking to hear someone proclaim that politicians lie, but this would have to be one of the most duplicitous lies imaginable, because it assumes that the electorate is really so ignorant as to be able to fall for such a transparent lie. Of course they think that government can do good with the right people in charge, why else would they want to get involved?

Yet this either ignorant or deceptive line is bandied about in a way that it gets people elected, who have a vested interest in proving that government can be evil. I’m not going to claim that Governor Rick Snyder’s inability to keep lead out of drinking water was a deliberate attempt to prove that governments can fail at their most basic functions, but I must say I won’t find it at all surprising when, in the next election cycle, some conservative politician claims that this was yet another example of why more power should be wrested from government at all levels, so that private companies can be the ones neglecting the drinking water.

I have referred to the downright bigoted anger that is hurled constantly at president Obama by many on the Far Right of American politics, but I still don’t get the obliviousness of the people who claim that they are the ones being wronged by him. In nearly every debate the GOP has had this cycle, someone has made the claim that Obama is one of the most divisive forces on the political spectrum. In his own State of the Union Address, President Obama alluded to this and even shouldered some of the blame, which is frankly more than I could do in his situation. Why? Because you don’t get to claim that the president is the cause of political divisiveness at the same time that you crucify people in your own party for working with Obama or merely touching him. One of the easiest arguments the Right makes to tear down their own is to say that their opponent has been too cooperative with the President. This is why Ted Cruz uses Marco Rubio’s involvement with the “Gang of Eight” Immigration bill as evidence of not being a good candidate. As I began with, politics is in some ways the art of dealing with despicable people to get something done, but to the Right anyone who tries to work with the government is a traitor. And supposedly it’s still the Obama government that is the source of divisiveness. Needless to say, I don’t get it.

What’s more I don’t get how any of the Republican candidates get off claiming that they are for religious liberty at the same time they are for the revocation of the Supreme Court decision that ruled that states do not have the right to block the marriages of same sex couples. Why? Because there is still no law on the books saying the Catholic Church must embrace marriage equality, but the attempt to shut down marriage equality in the government would mean that the Episcopal Church would be denied their right to ordain such marriages. The Episcopal Church has just encountered some truly discouraging treatment from the larger Anglican Communion because they followed the teachings of god as they saw fit by ordaining gay clergy and officiating gay marriages. And as much as it does pain me to say it, the Anglican Communion does indeed have that right to tend to their flock as they see fit, but the US government is not entitled to stop those ordinations or preclude those marriages.

Yet this is the exact power that conservatives wish to use against religious people who actually treat their whole flock as people, not to mention those of us who lack certain religious convictions and might rather have a civil ceremony instead. They do not care about religious liberty at all, they care only about maintaining a homophobic policy of putting only the most abhorrent religious sects in a position of supremacy. And still they claim the mantle of religious liberty as they decry the way that teachers are no longer allowed to force their entire classes to pray. What of the religious liberty of the Muslim teacher? Would they claim that she has the right to require student to face Mecca during school hours? Would they deny the right of atheist students to not pray at all? Perhaps more importantly, would they deny Christians the right to actually observe the teachings of the bible and not pray in public as the hypocrites do? (Matthew 6:5) And on that note, I don’t get why none of the Democratic candidates are willing to point this out.

I am by no means an oblivious person. I do understand quite well why politicians find it expedient to support ethanol even though the subsidies that make its production possible cost the taxpayer to produce crops that do not feed anyone or anything, but instead create a dirty fuel and excesses of corn byproducts that in many demonstrable ways cause poorer health in Americans, who are fed the surplus corn in the form of oils and syrup, all the while profiting only the few giant agro-businesses at the expense of the small farmer they’re supposed to protect. I understand why they support it, it’s a matter of getting past the first contest in the primary season. I get it, I really do, but I refuse to believe that the American people, who supposedly love democracy are so easily misled to believe these readily apparent examples of political bullshit.

On Hypocrisy

Let’s be honest, there is a large number of Americans in this country who, for one reason or another, do not like President Obama. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that in the abstract, and heck every citizen should be sufficiently skeptical of the people who are chosen to represent them politically, including the president. What’s more, this is a free country and although it would be nice if people actually thought through their opinions, everyone is free to hold any opinion they want on any subject. Leaving aside the consequences of certain beliefs that may carry certain legal repercussions, e.g. the belief that certain human lives are worth less than an individual’s desire to cause harm, every person is free to believe as he or she wants. That includes the belief that Barack Obama is an Atheist, Muslim, fascist, communist, totalitarian tyrant who was born in Kenya, despite the fact that Obama is a practicing Christian, pragmatic, maybe just slightly Left of the American center, moderate who was born in Hawaii. All of these accusations are, to borrow a term used by a GOP frontrunner, stupid and demonstrably false, but none of them get me as angry as the claim that he, President Obama, is the one who wants to radically change the country.

Yes we can all enjoy the easy, self-satisfied, righteous indignation of calling out the Rightwing pundits who are seemingly incapable of understanding why the thought of dead elementary school students might make someone cry, but that’s not the worst of it. We can all point out the ridiculous insincerity of these pundits claiming they wish he’d cry more in other circumstances like the San Bernardino shooting, as if they wouldn’t take and haven’t taken every opportunity to accuse the president of weakness, but that too would rather miss the point. The point is that for all the theatrics about how Obama’s executive action is the worst affront to the Constitution, the last straw of tyrannical rule, this just highlights that even the smallest attempts to work in and around the system from the president are considered part and parcel of radical change he has attempted to shove down our throats, while ignoring that every plank of every conservative platform would make any of these measures seem like inaction by comparison.

Governor Greg Abbot of Texas recently outlined nine new amendments he would like the Congress to pass and they are every bit as destructive to American law, tradition, and government as one could imagine. Constitutional amendments being changes to the Constitution itself, it should be no great surprise that these proposed changes are rather a break from the status quo, but whereas something like the Section 1 of the 20th amendment only serves to change the date of inauguration, some of these proposals are the end to checks and balances and American legalism as we know it. Above all, I want to talk about the one that he put smack dab in the middle, perhaps hoping that no one would notice it there. “Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.”

When I talked about the Supreme Court decision that effectively made marriage equality the law of the land in the US, I made the case for why certain matters are best left to the courts and specifically not the will of the majority or legislature, particularly as concerns rights of minorities. This is in part because there are always going to be times when a minority of one stripe or another is not particularly liked and it becomes all too tempting for us to want to do something about that, which may include curtailing the rights of that minority. It’s an unfortunate part of human nature. And it’s at that time, in a Constitutional Republic, you want a serious body of legal representatives who are not concerned with poll numbers because they aren’t up for election. Say what you will about any of the individual justices, and believe you me I have plenty of less than flattering words to describe some of them, they are better able to deal with the nuances of legal matters as concerns constitutionality and fairness than a noisy majority of people. It is perhaps because of this that Article Three of the Constitution begins “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

The Supreme Court is the end all be all of judicial power in the United States, not the legislature, not the executive, not the states, and not strictly speaking the majority of the people. This is why it would be a fatuous position to believe that even a 2/3 majority of people would or should have supremacy over the Supreme Court on defining constitutionality or legality. But let’s be clear, even that isn’t what Mr Abbot is calling for. He’s not calling for 2/3 of the people, he’s calling for 2/3 of the states to have that power in the United States. I bring that up because in the United States more than half the population lives in just nine states, which is decidedly less than 1/3 of the states. So although he may be calling for 2/3 of the states, in reality he could be calling for the will of less than a majority of Americans. Actually it’s even worse than that, because presumably one would only need majorities in each of these 2/3 of states to agree to it, meaning that the will of just over 16% of all Americans could theoretically invalidate the decision of the Supreme Court. That is not justice, that is not even the tyranny of the majority; however, that would be a radical change to the United States, and part of a vision that would like to see us much less united in general.

I understand that there are some who are really into the whole states’ rights argument, but let’s be completely clear here, we had that discussion and it’s over, the federal government won and the states are below it. When was this decided? In a great Civil War that tested whether this nation, or any nation so dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure, to borrow a few particularly well chosen words on the topic. Actually I’m mistaken still, because this matter was settled with the ratification of the Constitution itself.

I do not understand why I am hearing so much discussion from conservatives about a Constitutional Convention, even more so under the delusion that it can be in some way limited. The last time the US had a Constitutional Convention, it was supposed to patch up the problems with the Articles of Confederation which, like the Confederate States that would follow less than a century later, had failed miserably in being an effective way to govern a country. That “limited” convention led to a complete rewrite that pushed aside the notion that we could be simply a collection of independent states, not unlike the current European Union. And still people like Senators Rubio and Cruz think that it’s a simple matter of just telling people to stay within the lines. No, the problem is that when you open the floodgates of radical change, you shouldn’t be surprised when it happens. But now I am starting to veer off from my main point.

Despite the impression that you may have gotten from my rather impatient view of the radical changes to the constitution these conservative extremists have in mind, I do not think change is a bad thing, even dramatic change. I do think that the Constitution needs to evolve with the times and does need the occasional update with amendments, and seeing as we have a couple dozen of them it doesn’t strike me as particularly radical to do so in the abstract. My contention here is that the only people calling for massive overhauls of everything that is American, are the people claiming to stand steadfast on the rock of tradition in opposition to a tyrant who is currently giving America the most violent facelift in history.

President Obama has many laudable achievements under his administration’s belt, and to be fair a couple of serious, unresolved issues as well. But his administration is a prime example of what moderate progress can be made even with the most dogged, inflammatory, vitriolic, and often simply racist opposition. Despite a court of fairly conservative justices, some meaningful social progress has been made in the same time and because we have taken even one step forward, the most unhinged in our society see this as a tyrannical great leap, and so their only prescription is an even greater leap in the opposite direction. It is a leap so far that it would surely break us, and that much should be clear to a person who understands history, law, and politics. But those are the kinds of subjects of ivory tower elitists and not those of red-blooded anti-American, American patriots. Or to put it more succinctly, hypocrites.