compromise

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Government by the Menacing

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.

 

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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.