Your column today focuses on the ‘betrayal” of President
Obama, and you cite the departure of his (expected) action on immigration from
“precedent or proportion or political normality.” You acknowledge the
“precedent” of President Bush’s signing statements, which were methods of
simultaneously making law while asserting his unwillingness to enforce the same
law. You might have added the “non-precedential” ruling of the Supreme Court in
Bush v. Gore, in which one branch of the government overrode both precedent and
the Constitution, not for some putatively greater good, but explicitly to
benefit one party and one individual.
How about the “proportion” involved where one house of
Congress votes over 50 times to repeal a law that the same house passed less than
5 years earlier? Or, to take that example, the “proportion” involved in one
party refusing to engage at all in crafting a piece of legislation that both
candidates in the then-recent presidential election had espoused and made a
centerpiece of the campaign, because that party’s guy lost? That refusal to
participate is then compounded by incessant attempts to sabotage the same law.
“Political normality?” Are you referring to the political
climate in which several Republican senators, including the majority leader,
voted against the bill they had sponsored, after hearing the President say that
he thought it was a good idea? Or perhaps the “political normality” of the
majority leader announcing that his primary objective for the new Congress
would be to make sure that the President serves only one term?
Well, surely, having captured the Senate earlier this month,
Mr. McConnell will make his first order of business the restoration of the
previous Senate rules concerning the filibuster –anti-democratic in the
extreme, by the way—that the treacherous Democrats had done away with? Well,
not exactly: overturning Obamacare appears to be the first, futile matter for
business in the Senate.
The Right warns Obama that any action he takes on
immigration will “poison the well” for any subsequent “politically normal”
compromise legislation. That is, the threat is that, having failed to negotiate
with the President on virtually anything for the past 5 years, the Republicans
really mean it, this time.
The popular will was enunciated in this election; sure.
Fifty-one percent of thirty-six percent of the voting public, after years of
actions aimed by the Republicans at depriving people of the right to vote,
expressed the overwhelming popular will. How about the popular will on gun
control? Environmental regulation? I could go on, but never mind.
The “political normality” you long for is one in which it
has become an article of faith for members of one party to refer to a
Democratic congressman as a “Democrat” congressman, a coinage developed
specifically as an attempt to belittle by Bob Dole, who is what passes for an
elder statesman in the Republican Party. You should acknowledge that, for much
of the Right, any Democratic President –heck, any Democrat at all-- is, essentially
(and, in the case of some celebrated Right spokespersons, explicitly) a
traitor. If the Democrat is also black … well, that speaks for itself.
You invite the President to avoid the immigration “power
grab,” ignoring the fact that, no matter what this President does, he will be
vilified for having done it, or for not having done it; and this demonization
will include simple lying –about him personally (his origins, religion, and the
notion that he “hates America,” all endorsed implicitly and in some cases
explicitly by members of Congress), or his policies (he’s a socialist who
refused to nationalize the banks when a lot of non-socialists were recommending
it), or his actions (he bailed out the banks, although this took place during
the Bush Administration) as well as dire threats and hollow predictions. Faced
with the unrelenting hostility of the Republican Party, why should he care
about some additional, theoretical “disgrace?”
Read what the Europeans are saying: Obama is popular, but America is exceptional
–exceptionally dysfunctional, with corrupt politics--, and so cannot be relied
upon to do even what is in its own interests.
The democracy is poisoned, all right. It is poisoned by
animus, by money, and by the rage of those whose way of life seems threatened.
But most of all it is poisoned by the attitudes of those in power, whose goal
is not the betterment of the country, but the possession of the power itself.
You are right about the “will to power.” The only question is, power to be used
for whose benefit? In this regard, I think the score is 99 to 1, and the
Republican “1” is the 1 percent.
