partisanship

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Heeding Different Drummers

The House Republicans broke ranks on Wednesday in a vote to roll back the President’s immigrations reforms, including the legalization of children of illegal immigrants, the so-called “dreamers.” Twenty-six Republicans could not reconcile this attack on the dreamers with the majority’s intent to stand against the overreach of Presidential authority that allowed these young people to remain in the country legally.

When Republicans act without compassion, they always claim there is a higher cause at stake, such as Constitutional limitations on the President’s power. “Higher causes” have a way of disrupting millions of lives, but the principle is what matters to the Republican majority.

But the good news is that some Republicans are willing to separate themselves from the party in order to vote their conscience or at least to vote the way their constituents would want them to. Acts of conscience did not distinguish the previous Congress, in which Republicans voted as a mindless block to prevent the Democrats from having their way on critical issues.

Partisan voting has always seemed undemocratic to me. Even voting a straight ticket at the polls often seems like a mindless exercise in power-grabbing. The united stand takes precedence over the candidate or the issue at stake. Unified partisans have even lately been roused to keep things from getting done.

The same group-think has been deplored by Republicans in the context of organized labor. To most Republicans unions represent a coercive power, capturing the minds of laborers without respect for their individual voices. And Big Labor could be accused of bullying its membership into unity. They have nothing on the Republican Caucus, however. They don’t call their leaders “whips” for nothing.

There are unified stands for principle, and there are unified stands for obstinacy, but the difference has vaporized in Congress. Standing together against the rights of immigrant children seems obstinate to me, regardless of the “higher causes” invoked, and 26 Republicans agreed with me.

Those twenty-six are a sign of “hearing a different drummer,” as Henry David Thoreau eloquently declared. The drummer is not the Majority Leader or the Party Chairman, but the drummer of sincere conviction. We would have a different Congress if all listened to that drummer, both Republican and Democrat.

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Conviction and Passion

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

When have these words from Yeats had more relevance than today?  With the retirement of Olympia Snow, the parade of moderates leaving the U.S. Senate has become a stampede.  The voices of moderation are sounding fainter and fainter.

Barry Goldwater said famously, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.” And Barry Goldwater has begun to look very amiable in this political climate.  Goldwater could always work across the aisle to draft legislation he believed in. He was a surprisingly tolerant Senator, when there was work to be done.

Today’s Congress operates as a “take-it-or-leave-it showdown,” said the New York Times today (March 1), paraphrasing Senator Snowe.  The “showdown” has become a  grinding halt.  The work of legislating has become the work of posturing, taking an inflexible political stance to demonstrate the will to get one’s own way. In some quarters this is characterized as standing on principle.  In others it is the collapse of good will.

For some reason the voting public is not impressed with “standing on principle,” as the approval rating of Congress has plummeted to the single digits.  There are principles and there are demands, even as in the international arena there is terrorism and there are sanctions.  Terrorism is taking extreme actions on the basis of beliefs, while sanctions are mounting and unified pressure to oppose repugnant policies.  Which of these best characterize the standoff we currently see in Congress?

It is certainly hyperbole to call the Congressional stalemate “terrorism,” but it falls far short of “sanctions,” because the pressure is coming from a minority of representatives and their resistance to productive legislation is losing its support. The “principled” right certainly found its limits with the passage of the payroll tax relief and unemployment extension in the last month.  Didn’t they actually cave in to the suffering of their middle class constituents? Didn’t they abandon their principles in the face of dire need? So no need to label these legislators as “terrorists,” because they were willing to compromise to save their collective necks, if not for the good of their constituents.

With eight months to go before the general election, the candidates at all levels should be choosing between “passionate intensity” and “conviction.”  And the voters should be discerning who has conviction and who has only passion. There is plenty of rhetorical passion in the media stream, but there is less conviction. Convictions have to go deeper than partisanship. They have to be grounded in serving “the greatest good for the greatest number” (John Stuart Mill).  There should be no unequivocal promises or tax covenants that would compromise this conviction. There should be no one-issue candidates. There should be candidates who will stand up to the bullies, the ones who press their case to bitter stalemate.

If the moderates are leaving, then God bless them for their service. Now we should replace them with men and women of good will, a working majority that will take seriously its responsibility to govern and not to willfully obstruct.

 

 

 

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An Avoidable Crash

Watching the slow motion crash of the U.S. Government is not as entertaining as vehicular calamity in the movies.  In the movies we know that everything will be cleaned up by the next scene. In Washington, we know that even when the crash is over and government restarts its engines, the same manic drivers will be behind the wheels.

In the good old days, we could expect our representatives to stop at intersections and observe right of way. If they suffered a fender bender or two, we would expect them to pull over and politely exchange papers, respecting the rules of engagement. Today “compromise” is a dirty word.  Representatives who take the charge of the voters as a call to arms have come to Washington with a mission that disdains negotiation. And why shouldn’t they take their mandate seriously?

The insanity comes when a few drivers are allowed to terrorize the roads, and that is what the House majority has sanctioned in the final debacle over the budget.  A vocal minority, sometimes identified as the voice of the Tea Party, has been allowed to drive the vehicle of state, taking out every obstacle in its way.  Ruthlessness of this kind is admirable when citizens and their representatives campaign and debate their convictions; it is not respectable when actual work has to be done.  It is the kind of mania we witness in parliamentary forms of government when the formation of a coalition depends on the appeasement of a few strident interest groups. We shouldn’t suffer this fate in the House of Representatives.

There is a higher mandate than the causes that inspire men and women to run for office. It is the mandate to govern. Ultimately they represent all of us, not just the vocal few that elected them.  Most Americans appreciate this distinction between conviction and partisanship, but there are some who can only see “my way or the highway.” Unfortunately many of those are careening around the halls of Congress, wreaking havoc instead of consensus. Maybe they should take the “high way.”

It’s time for the traffic cops in Congress to take back the roads.