Dave told me he took a petition on these topics to Congressman Gerry Connolly's office and might want to do so again after his election. As long as I'm handing out unsolicited advice, I would respectfully submit that the time when these people are most likely to listen to us -- and even then it's not much -- is right before an election, not after. I have no idea why the proposal to go after the election, but a lot of people would calculate as follows. It's too late to beat Connolly with somebody better in a primary. The system is rigged to allow only two people to have a chance. The other choice is worse and Republican. So we should avoid criticizing Connolly for some months before each election, even if he only rarely, if ever, does anything we want him to.
But even if VA-11 is the wealthiest district in the country, I'm sure most people don't want elections corrupted by money. If Connolly wants people who would vote for him to actually turn out and vote, he should do something to give them some enthusiasm. So, asking him to do something popular is not guaranteed to hurt him. It's not criticizing him, and it's not necessarily bad for him to request that he do what people want done. When we have to self-censor such requests, as is becoming very common all over the country, the agenda for any governance between elections is damaged.
Our representatives strive to represent three groups of people: the ones who give them money, the ones who produce cable television news shows, radio shows, and newspapers, and the ones in charge of their political parties including especially the president when he is the leader of their party. In George Mason's view the president was to execute the will of the Congress, and no power of the Congress was more important than that of impeachment. Now Republicans will only impeach Democratic presidents, and Democrats will only impeach Democratic judges. And the executive is largely freed to tell the legislature how to do its job, rather than the reverse.
So Congress asked the Justice Department to enforce its subpoenas, and the Justice Department said no. So Congress took it to court and later won. But with one weird and partial exception, not a single one of those subpoenas has been reissued and enforced by either the new Justice Department or by the committees themselves. In fact, the House Committee on Oversight has been basically put out of its misery, and the judiciary and other committees have crawled out of sight beneath the emperor's throne. Congress just impeached and tried a judge for getting lap dances and frozen shrimp, and earlier this year impeached a judge for groping people, but it leaves a judge in a lifetime seat who wrote secret laws authorizing aggressive war and torture. Impeachment has been reserved for sex and Democrats, and the subpoena has gone the way of the dodo bird -- at least unless Republicans get Congress back.
Why don't we ever talk about the problem of Congress handing all power over to presidents? Because both political parties are happy about it, and anything they both want left alone is not news. We have a substantial right to free speech in this country, but a free press is another story altogether. A small cartel of mega media corporations has been given our public airwaves without compensation, and the more information we get from them the dumber we are. When Americans believed lies about the urgent need to attack Iraq, they believed them more depending which media outlet they got most of their news from. I'm not naming any names.
Well, OK, I'm naming names. Fox viewers believe the most falsehoods, but a lot of those falsehoods originated in the New York Times. And propaganda can't be undone any more easily than a war can be ended once it's begun. A study in 2005 found that among people who said they were on the right politically, if you informed them that Iraq really didn't have weapons, they responded by believing that lie more, rather than less, strongly. Facts had the opposite effect of what they are supposed to have.
We need the big media corporations broken up. We need public media with the funding walled off from annual political debate. We need community media. We need greater variety in sources of information. And we need high school and college courses for all students to learn resistance to propaganda, instead of teaching some students so-called public relations and leaving everyone else exposed to the horrors of, for example . . . the latest Adolf Hitler of the month who's sure to attack us any minute and whose nation is in desperate need of an altruistic and humanitarian war in which nobody's likely to get hurt by the time the whole thing raps up next Tuesday and pays for itself.
It's strange that I mentioned Mr. George Mason's concerns for our government without talking about political parties. Incredibly, parties don't show up in the Constitution, and our country seemed to get along pretty well without being dominated by them until about the time of Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Now the parties funnel much of the election money to those who know how to take orders. In addition to election money, by pleasing a party you can get earmarks and weapons factories, votes on your bills, your name on important bills, a seat in choice committees, etc. You also get your name on the ballot far more easily, get into debates far more easily, and get coverage in the media guaranteed. But even if one party tends to be better than the other, the 535 voices on Capitol Hill are often reduced to 2. The problem is not compromising and cooperating and forming coalitions. The problem is going against your constituents to please your party.
Forming a third party could be useful as a means of organizing activism. But it won't solve the problem. In our winner-take-all electoral system, a successful third party would displace another party and become a second party, instead of a third. And it would only do that through complete corruption. If every single person in the United States who does anything more than vote -- everyone who writes letters to the editor and puts up yard signs and marches in protests and collects signatures on petitions -- if all of those people devoted all of their work to the Green Party tomorrow, it would still get nowhere without the Wall Street and corporate funding that buys the television ads. And if we had free air time, public financing, ungerrymandered districts, hand counted paper ballots, and all the other desirable reforms, then the existing two parties would cease to be such horrors.
When we switched the majority in Congress from Republican to Democratic in 2006, a lot of people expected a big change. We even hoped the War on Iraq might be scaled back, and instead it was escalated. But there was an excuse: Bush had all the power, he was a Republican, and challenging his power was not a fair demand to make of people who nearly had heart attacks when they saw their own shadows. So, come 2008 we took the excuse away. We made sure the Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president. But there was still another excuse remaining for not legislating the priorities of we the people. It was a much weaker excuse, but they played it for all it was worth and are doing so to this day.
Can you guess what it was?
Here's a hint: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The filibuster. Now, the filibuster doesn't show up in the Constitution or even in the text that half our senators think the government was founded on, the Bible. It only shows up in the Senate's own rules, which it can change at any time by simple majority. The country got along fine for many years without the filibuster, and has changed it a number of times, including in 1975 in the middle of a session. The filibuster is a trick that allows 41 senators to block legislation, even though it takes 51 to make a majority. Senator Tom Udall has committed to raising the need to fix this problem at the start of the next session, operating under the pretense that the rules can only be changed at that time. But in the meantime, the Democrats have been able to blame any failure on Republican filibusters. And the Republicans have been able to filibuster and then blame the failure on the Democrats. That Republican account is a simpler message and one given more air-time, and one with some truth to it. The filibuster excuse is only there because the Democrats choose to leave it there. Of course, the Senate will not actually end the filibuster rule in January unless there is a huge public uproar, and polls suggest that people who know what the filibuster is tend to oppose it, but people don't tend to know what it is.
Last week on the 17th was Constitution Day, a day to celebrate a very short document that people are also unfamiliar with. I have a copy in my wallet. Raise your hand if you know what Article I of the U.S. Constitution is about.
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