Democracy or Insurrection?

Let’s face facts. Democracy is a messy business, and competing stakeholders do not always get everything they want. Ours is a system of government designed to accommodate change – gradual or radical - through an orderly and prescribed process. We have elections; we have a balance of power shared between three branches of government; and we have a Constitutional amendment process. 

Although these structures are ensconced in Law, there are also unwritten courtesies, customs, and traditions that smooth the legislative process and keep governance a relatively civilized matter. Thomas Jefferson prescribed these rules of order in his Manual of Parliamentary Practice.

Pending bills originate in the House, move to Senate, are signed into law by the President, and - if highly controversial - are affirmed or overturned by the Supreme Court.  ObamaCare has passed all these benchmarks. Those who wish to modify, replace, or repeal ObamaCare must follow this path in accordance with democratic rules and procedures.

Frankly, the current impasse and government shutdown is NOT ABOUT OBAMACARE, or the Keystone Pipeline, or abortion, or contraception, or ANY OTHER PARTISAN CAUSE.  The government shutdown represents a despoliation of democracy by an unruly rabble.

Do we practice governance as prescribed by Law - according to time-honored traditions of parliamentary procedure - or do we conduct our affairs by ultimatum, blackmail, deception and demagoguery, defamation and vilification, fear mongering, extortion and hostage taking? Do we honor democracy, or do we conduct the nation’s business by insurrection?

Here is what the Constitution states:

The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned [Amendment 14, Section 4].

"Shall not be questioned"  ... how do these words confer a right to surrender the validity of public debt to negotiation? To blackmail? Extortion? Hostage taking?

All presidents have a statutory obligation to preserve and protect the constitution, as do all office holders in Congress. If this or any president capitulates, our traditions of governance will be dealt a mortal blow; and the nation will suffer a slow and painful decline.  All citizens of all persuasions share this responsibility - and an obligation to pass down these traditions of representative democracy intact to future generations.

As far as I am concerned, the GOP is no longer a partner in participatory democracy. As Hannah Arendt states:

“A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.”

By this definition, I consider the government shutdown an act of sedition and treason.

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Monday morning update:  On September 30, 2013, in the stealth of night, behind closed doors and hidden from public scrutiny, House Republicans changed the rules of the house and stacked the deck:

"The Rules Committee, under the rules of the House, changed the standing rules of the House to take away the right of any member to move to vote to open the government, and gave that right exclusively to the Republican Leader," said Van Hollen. "Is that right?"

"The House adopted that resolution," replied Chaffetz.

"I make my motion, Mr. Speaker," said Van Hollen. "I renew my motion that under the regular standing rules of the House... that the house take up the Senate amendments and open the government now."

"Under section 2 of H.R. 368, that motion may be offered only by the majority leader or his designee," Chaffetz said.

"Mr. Speaker, why were the rules rigged to keep the government shut down?" Van Hollen asked.

"The gentleman will suspend," Chaffetz interjected.

"Democracy has been suspended, Mr. Speaker."

Video here:

Suppressing Voters' Rights in the Fascist Republic of Wisconsin

In follow-up to my last post, A Damning Indictment of the GOP by a Former GOP Staffer, I quote Mike Lofgren again - this time on Republican efforts to suppress that most sacred and sacrosanct of American traditions - the right to vote:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote … This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy … was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican.  As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans.  Racial minorities.  Immigrants.  Muslims.  Gays.  Intellectuals.  Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base … 

Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful:   Subversives.  Commies.  Socialists.  Ragheads.  Secular humanists. Blacks.  Fags.  Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

In the Fascist Republic of Wisconsin, voter suppression has entered the execution phase. Under a new law, all citizens are required to show a form of photo ID to exercise their right to vote, and the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has been tasked with issuing the new cards.

However, the DMV instructed all employees, in this memo, to provide free ID cards only if people ask for the fee to be waived.  If citizens don’t ask, the charge is $28.  Why keep secrets from the public? To charge a fee is tantamount to …

A POLL TAX

… which is a violation of Federal voting rights laws. To avoid having their precious Jim Crow knockoff struck down in Federal court, state officials have decreed: “Let there be subterfuge!”  More than a scam, the new law is designed to place extra burdens on seniors, minorities, and students - those who vote for Democrats more often than Republicans - to suppress turnout.  Furthermore, the new law gives GOP snakes more wiggle room to game the system, as Lofgren explains:

… in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies …

At least one honest and forthright state employee was not about to let a good con job go unpublished. Chris Larson, an employee in the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS), sent an email to all DSPS personnel notifying them of the fee waiver.  Here is the actual email sent by Larson:

Do you know someone who votes that does not have a State ID that meets requirements to vote? Tell them they can go to the DMV/DOT and get a free ID card. However they must ask for the free ID.  [A] memo was sent out by the 3rd in command of the DMV/DOT. The memo specifically told the employees at the DMV/DOT not to inform individuals that the ID’s are free. So if the individuals seeking to get the free ID does not ask for a free ID, they will have to pay for it!!  Just wanted everyone to be informed!! 

REMEMBER TO TELL ANYONE YOU KNOW!!  ANYONE!!  EVEN IF THEY DON’T NEED THE FREE ID, THEY MAY KNOW SOMEONE THAT DOES!!  SO TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!”

Hours later, Larson was fired.

A Damning Indictment of the GOP by a Former GOP Staffer (What the GOP Gains by Sabotaging Government)

First, a special hat tip to Libby Spenser of The Impolitic for focusing attention on this article:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

by Mike Lofgren (Truthout, Saturday 3 September 2011)

If a Democrat, a pundit, or anyone else had written this article, it might have been dismissed as just another partisan polemic. As the work of a veteran GOP operative, it has authenticity and credibility, and it demands our attention. Here are some highlights:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe …

Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The Debt Debate as an Act of Political Terrorism:

I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages …

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care …

In recent polls, public opinion of Congress has sunk to a historic low: only 14% approve while an overwhelming 82% disapprove. Despite these dismal public approval numbers, Lofgren explains why the GOP always wins an incremental advantage from its own obstructive tactics:

By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner  (...)  A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters … [their] confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn …

How does our incompetent news media serve as a willing accomplice? Lofgren explains:

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.

Lofgren attributes the failings of our news media to right wing bullying, claiming: “the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias.” In my opinion, the problem goes far beyond timidity.

We know the script: A dispute makes headlines; there are competing claims of truth behind the headlines; a reporter reports the conflict but makes no attempt to check the veracity of either claim; the symmetry of talking heads creates an appearance of false balance. Meanwhile, liars and prevaricators gain an advantage when their deceits are legitimized before a national audience. Talking heads journalism yields what Jay Rosen calls a regression toward a phony mean.  Thus, our news media is deeply flawed to the point of gross incompetence, which the GOP leverages to maximum advantage.

Who are these low-information voters so easily suckered by demagogues and legitimized by our news media? Again, here is Lofgren …

Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file (…) The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

(...)

It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis … where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

I hope this liberal sprinkling of quotations will stimulate your interest. Although liberal writers have covered similar ground for years (writers of the Swash Zone have certainly touched on many of his points), his essay is comprehensive, brings the most important ideas under one heading, and minces no words. By no means comforting, it is at least helpful to have a GOP veteran of 28 years confirm our worst suspicions. Please have a look and share your thoughts.