Month: January 2013

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“Slippery Slopes” Slide Both Ways

The “slippery slope” slides both ways: one protects our rights and the other bullies us with whining.

When an interest group declares that certain restrictions on their power is a “slippery slope” leading to dire consequences, we should hear desperation, rather than reasonable bargaining. The argument amounts to declaring that some remote cause will eventually lead to an undesirable effect, regardless of how remote the cause might be.

The first “slippery slope” argument may be the one where a squabbling brother and sister are sitting in the back seat, and sister calls out, “Bobby’s looking at me.”  Dad, realizing that this often ends in hand-to-hand combat, barks, “Bobby, stop looking at your sister.” Bobby throws his hands up in the air, feeling unjustly accused, but the “slippery slope” has been cut off with a warning.

There are countless “slippery slopes” in school, including certain kinds of dress (the logo of an opposing football team) or a book used in a class that portrays an authority figure in a bad light.  Usually the rationale for these restrictions on  clothing and reading is the potential effects on school decorum.  Indeed most anything new in a school can affect the decorum, so slippery slopes are everywhere.

The lesson of the “slippery slope” has been mastered by adults as well, including labor negotiators, politicians, and, most consummately, the National Rifle Association.  Apparently the NRA is so consumed with slippery slopes that it does not want gun use or ownership revealed to doctors, so that data about such ownership can be compiled with health records. As everyone knows, gun ownership is always compromised when someone actually knows you own a gun.

The NRA has vigorously opposed background checks on gun owners on the same “slippery slope” principle. Somehow information about the criminal record or mental health of a gun owner is a violation of the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms. In fact any restriction on gun ownership is by its very intent a violation of the Second Amendment.  Not allowing teachers to bring their handguns to school violates their Second Amendment rights.

What the proponents of the “slippery slope” should understand is that the slope goes both ways. In one direction are the onerous restrictions on our Constitutional rights. In the other direction is our loss of credibility, because we have pushed the balance of power over the peak of the hill. Ask the labor negotiators who kept expanding employee benefits until they drove their companies out of business. Ask the southern politicians who insisted that Civil Right legislation infringed on the rights of States to regulate their schools and businesses.  Ask the little brother or sister in the back seat after Dad says finally, ” I don’t want hear about anybody looking at anybody!”

Even if the Supreme Court has argued based on the principle of the “slippery slope,” it is probably the weakest argument in its arsenal.  When legislation directly causes a conflict with Constitutional rights, then it deserves censure, but if the connection is as remote as restricting gun ownership to sane, law-abiding citizens and the generic “right to bear arms,” then the “slippery slope” principle is sliding amuck.

Breaking with past tradition, the NRA should choose its battles.  If it continues to oppose innocent practices like background checks or gathering data on gun owners, the public will soon notice that we have slipped on this slope before. We don’t want to hear the plaintive “The government is looking at me” anymore.  We have reached the point where the power of the gun lobby is pushing us down the other side of the slope. We’re not going there.

 

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Governing for the People

The House of Representatives took the high road on the first day of 2013 by approving the fiscal package passed to them by the Senate earlier that day. 85 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with 172 Democrats for a progressive tax bill that would distribute the burden of paying for government more judiciously.  This was the first sign that the House would govern for of all the people, not just the most powerful, in their deliberations over the federal budget and the deficit in the next session.

Although the 167 who voted against the bill will claim they voted according to their fiscal principles, there is another principle, that of good faith negotiations, that they would have to ignore to vote “nay” on this bill.  Almost exactly a year ago the President extended the Bush tax cuts as a concession to keep government running, but declared that the taxes on the wealthy would have to be addressed when this bill came due again.  This principle was the cornerstone of the Obama Presidential campaign and resulted in a strong mandate in the President’s re-election.

When the election was over, Speaker John Boehner said the President would have to initiate tax legislation. When the President did so, the Speaker spurned the proposal. When the House failed to bring a tax bill to the floor, the Speaker declared it was in the Senate’s hands.  When the Senate sweated to produce a consensus bill, the House conservatives again spurned the bill.  Yet some Republicans seized the opportunity to show good faith, to compromise, notably Speaker Boehner and Budget Chairman Paul Ryan.  Clearly these men had to place governing above their budgetary scruples to vote this way.

Meanwhile the pattern of “my way or the highway” has been established in the past year by a stubborn minority in the House. We now know who these 157 representatives are, and some are Democrats.  Concessions made by their own colleagues in the Senate would not placate these “principled” representatives.  They have abandoned their responsibility to govern by standing on their principles.   Let them stand and prove their mettle, but let the majority move forward and govern for the people.

That agonized ripping sound is the shredding of alliances that have prevented Congress from acting productively for two years.  Whether these alliances are dead remains to be seen in the 113th Congress, but their dominion over the House of Representatives has momentarily weakened.  While ideology may continue to polarize the House, the spirit of collaboration, may yet transform this dysfunctional body.  Every bi-partisan consensus brings new hope that governing for all the people is still the highest principle in Washington.

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A Resolution: To collaborate

I can clearly remember when American citizens of a pinkish cast were referred to as “sympathizers,” “collaborators,” and “fellow travelers,” because of some left-leaning beliefs, such as pacifism, unionization, or integration of the races.  Those were the years that gave “patriotism” and “loyalty” a vindictive connotation. We remember the 1950’s as a cautionary tale about tolerance and respect.

We should be cautioned about the  functioning of Congress in its current incarnation, before the weighty deliberations of 2013 begin, because there are those in positions of power who have made “collaboration” and “compromise” dirty words. Because they are a minority, they treat their coalitions as cult-like societies that vote in lockstep and pledge loyalty to higher causes. They should remember that even the high cause of “democracy” was corruptible in 1954.

But wait, it is not the whole Congress, but the House of Representatives that is trying to force the will of a minority of duly elected representatives on the majority.  And it is not a particular bill, but an ideology that allows no compromise, so pure are its values.  It is a small number of representatives who are dictating to the rest of the country and who are branding their colleagues as “sympathizers,” “collaborators,” or “fellow-travelers.”

Some will counter that I am branding one political persuasion, as the McCarthy hearings attempted to do sixty years ago. But it is not particular political views  that deserve scrutiny, but the intractable opinions of politicians of all persuasions that should be singled out.  Those who deliberately sabotage the legislative process for not yielding to their will come from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

Most of these ideologues are in the House, and we need only observe the voting on the first day of 2013 to identify them.  They will be the ones who vote against the economic package passed overwhelmingly by the Senate and designed to raise revenue and cut costs to avoid plunging into another recession.  There were only eight U.S. Senators who could not support this bi-partisan package, hammered out by intense, but good-faith negotiations on the last day of 2012.  Not because 89 heartily endorsed the bill, but because 89 put the interests of the whole country before their cherished biases.

In the House such “biases” are known as “principles,” and we know you can not be asked to violate your principles. And yet that is what Congress is asked to do every day they try to pass a bill, in a word— to compromise.  The failure to compromise is more deadly than the relinquishing of principles when it comes to passing legislation.  This failure should be addressed by next Congress.

By the grace of God perhaps the House will pass this tortured bill today, but with more discord and defiance than we witnessed in the Senate.  The dysfunction of government clearly lies in the House and the most broken cogs of the process will be identified in the afternoon vote. Many of those representatives have already made up their mind to vote “nay,”and those votes can be written off for the rest of their terms in Congress.

May these ideologues hold true to their principles, but may the majority from both sides of the aisle vote without their ideological blessing. May the ethos of collaboration and sympathy sweep through the House of Representatives converting it back to the deliberative body it was intended to be. May those who whimper at the silencing of their voices understand the price of purism.  May those who care deeply about all of the people of this country be the ones who govern it.

Amen.