Yesterday the New York Times noted that the vacationing men and women of Congress were holding fewer Town Hall Meetings to get the pulse of the people. Maybe it’s because the people are not well represented at these meetings. Increasingly the meetings are dominated by ruthless and menacing citizens zeroing in on a volatile issue like immigration or health care reform or the current anti-abortion legislation. The discourse on these issues has degenerated to threat and indignation with the intent to intimidate rather than inform.
Admittedly I have not attended such forums, and the media reports mostly on the sensational episodes of the Town Hall. But I am not likely attend as long as the occasion is hijacked by fanatical groups hoping to scare the wits out of their representative with the message that moderation will be summarily punished at the polls in 2014. And apparently our legislators have reached the same conclusion about Town Hall Meetings.
I don’t blame them. Our legislators and I would like to believe they vote their conscience or at least the will of their district in the Halls of Congress. If they have been bullied into concessions by our most strident citizens or at least intimidated enough to vote only with their Party, they give up their independence and their conscience. They become the lackeys of an outraged minority.
Most Congressional representatives will declare they are independent and unswayed by threats, but their lockstep voting with their Party and their 38 symbolic votes against Affordable Care indicate a certain suppleness in the spine. There are few courageous votes like those few who defied their Party to vote in favor of background checks for gun owners. In the House of Representatives there is hardly any legislation at all.
Washington is awash in currents of power, so there are multiple causes of the failure to legislate. But the uncivil interests of all stripes, from nativists to abortion rights radicals, can take some credit for the inertia, the sabotage of deliberation in Congress. Every vote has become fraught with risk.
To those who rule by the volume of their demands or threaten by criminalizing compromise, I would like to say, “Shut up!” But I won’t, because that would be uncivil.
But I would like to speak for the civil voices, who manage to express their political will by collecting signatures or writing a blog or peacefully protesting or with restrained debate. We are not intimidated by the volume of your campaign or the fire in your threats. We are not moved by your stubbornness and unwillingness to listen. We are not backing down in the face of your apoplexy. We are going to write and speak and vote our consciences as if you were mere static in the air waves.
And the government of the most vocal, by the most ruthless and for the most menacing shall perish from the earth.