Mitch McConnell

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The Whirlwind of Trump

“For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7).

Republicans have no patience with consistency or token justice. They have even neglected the ancient art of political horse-trading, so obsessed are they with amassing power. And now they are reaping the whirlwind, as the prophet Hosea put it.

The prophet had seen a succession of corrupt and idolatrous kings in Israel in the eighth century BCE and wrote to warn of the coming implosion and overrunning of the nation by Assyria. 21st century American politicians might heed the ominous caricature of greed and lust for power embodied in the Trump campaign, as a sign of the gangrenous decay of political processes.

How blind with power can you be to miss that Donald Trump is the symbol of indignation of citizens and the refusal to consider a Supreme Court nominee is a prime example? Can’t Mitch McConnell see that American voters are sick of obstructionism, the dismembering of time-honored processes of electing, confirming and legislating?

Donald Trump is outrage personified. He boasts and blusters of his plans to bend a world to his will, and his followers resonate with that indignation. He cannot say anything to alienate his tribe, because he, alone, defies the absurdity of the politics as usual. Trump is the attack dog for one-third of the electorate.

If Republicans are dismayed by him, they should not be astonished. They have provoked a nation to wrath provoking the whirlwind of Trump. He will annihilate their Party, unless they perform their Constitutional duties. Each day that they obstruct the Supreme Court nomination they are sweeping toward chaos.

Perhaps this turn of phrase is too apocalyptic for the hardened souls of Washington, but they should consider that there are consequences for abusing power. The Trump whirlwind is storming the country and only the revival of reciprocity and integrity in the corridors of power can possibly abate its rage.

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Principles Be Damned!

A striking tableau on the front page of Friday’s New York Times: Jennifer Doudna, “an inventor of a new genome-editing technique,” sitting at her desk and “calling for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new method.” A scientist trying to regulate her own research? How responsible and elegant!

Move across the page and you will not fail to notice an article “McConnell Urges States to Help Thwart Obama’s ‘War on Coal'” A politician trying to perpetuate his own way of life (and the hand that feeds him)? How typical!

If you live in Kentucky Mitch McConnell is probably your hero, because he protects an industry that puts food on your table, but McConnell is now trying to recruit governors from other states to his cause, states where carbon pollution from coal-fired plants drift into their skies. In a letter to every governor in the United States he lays out a legal strategy for blocking the enactment of pollution controls from the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds of executive authority overstepping its Constitutional bounds.

Yesterday the National Governors Association announced that four states–Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Utah–“would take part in a program that would prepare to meet the climate-change regulations” (New York Times, March 20, 2015). Although these are states with Republican-controlled legislatures, they are within breathing distance of Kentucky’s coal fields (maybe not Utah), which produce coal for plants in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. This is clearly a breathing issue, not partisan politics.

So Mitch McConnell can rant all he wants about “Obama’s war on coal.” The issue is health, the nation’s health, not Kentucky’s. And if Mitch McConnell had an ounce of principle in his veins, he would be working to bring jobs to Kentucky that did not depend on fossil fuel and urging the passage of carbon tax laws to help coal-manufacturers face their inevitable future.

Anyone who remembers when cigarettes were unregulated knows how hard senators from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia lobbied to protect an industry that was killing Americans. How they defied scientific studies and drafted their own rogue scientists to try to disprove the carcinogenic effects of nicotine. The cost of American lives was secondary to the preservation of an industry. Yes, jobs were lost when cigarettes were heavily taxed and commercials were banned from television, but lives were saved and continue to be saved by allowing the mere truth about cigarettes to be acknowledged and publicized. Does anyone think that the jobs that were lost were more valuable than the lives that were saved?

The story foreshadows the life cycle of coal in the United States. Eventually more states than those bordering on the Rust Belt will admit their air is compromised by coal, and the health of our children is at stake. Eventually it will become prohibitively expensive to burn coal and new sources of clean energy will replace it. Eventually even Kentucky will diversify its economy and support clean energy industries.

In the meantime Mitch McConnell will campaign against America’s health to protect the private interests of his state. Surely that was what he was elected to do. And surely there are legal principles that could slow down the progress of the regulation of carbon fuels by the EPA. But there are higher principles that a true statesman would recognize– the greatest good for the greatest number. Genetic scientists recognize this principle so far as to limit their influence in the health care industry.

Mitch McConnell is not that kind of leader. His principles end at the borders of Kentucky and West Virginia. Hopefully his influence will end there, too.

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Angry Money

While we stand appalled at the outright usurpation of power by the military in Egypt, we are witnessing a more gradual wresting of power by the angry money of the world’s exemplar of democracy. We can shake our heads at the arrogance of the Egyptian generals, but we should not be surprised that the strongmen of American politics, those who write the checks, are assuming a similar take-no-prisoners approach to the elections of 2012.

Election-year politics usually takes the tone of “anything you can do I can do better,” but the intensity of the outrage has been building over the past year of budget wrangling in Congress. Last summer’s debacle over raising the deficit level showed the deadly resolve of conservatives to refuse any deal that hinted of raising revenue by any name.  Legislators have always declared their opposition to taxes on the threshold of an election, but their midterm show of principle extended beyond any campaign promises. It showed ruthless anger.

The anger is directed at a President who played his cards early by driving through Congress the Affordable Health Care Act, by bailing out the auto industry, and by welcoming Muslim peoples to the international discussion table.  These initiatives so alarmed the monied interests (activists like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Charles Simmons, Texas billionaire) that they have poured unprecedented millions into the legalized PAC campaigns unleashed by the Citizens United case.

It is remarkable how such potent financiers keep a low profile in this campaign. They shy away from public pronouncements, because they have sublimated their anger with money. They are joined by other ruthless campaign bank-rollers who are even more successful at dodging the press.  Their anonymity is their strength, because no one wants to believe that a few billionaires are selecting the next President. In fact, when the Obama campaign published a list of the top Republican donors, it sent Rep. Mitch McConnell into a frenzy, claiming that naming these donors was tantamount to an attack on free speech:

The Courts have said that Congress doesn’t have the authority to muzzle free speech, so the President himself will seek to go around it by attempting to change the First Amendment (New York Times, June 17, 2012).

Whereas the Egyptian military made a brazen grab for power in public, the American magnates want to keep their names out of the headlines. But their anger is projected onto their Congressional surrogates, the Mitch McConnells and the John Boehners, who make politics personal.   The anger of the campaign has been amplified by the relentless pressure of money flowing in from powers-behind-the-throne.

That politicians are complicit mouthpieces of the wealthy is evident by the fact that no one but John McCain is willing to stand up to them in an election year. Although McCain was less vocal about campaign financing during his run for the presidency, he has gone on the record against the disproportionate contributions of Sheldon Adelson, asserting that he is channeling money from his foreign enterprises into the Republican campaign.  Lately he has rehabilitated his conscience and returned to his role as gadfly of the Senate, but even his expedient return is refreshing.

Frankly there are a lot of reasons for anger when so many are unemployed and the economy proves so intractable or subject to the politics of Europe.  Perhaps finding a scapegoat for the interminable recession is what an election is all about. As President Truman eloquently acknowledged, “The buck stops here.”

But an election should not be about channeling the anger of the ruthless monied interests of this country.  The tidal wave of political advertising and the rising volume of political rhetoric should not be at the whim of the wealthy.  We should be entitled to our own anger, not the displaced fury of billionaires.

We can vote our anger, and we often do.  But when we hear the high-pitched indignation and the personal attacks that inevitably rise in the campaign, remember the “angry money,” and don’t let them usurp power by channeling their anger through you and their paid assassins.