Letter 2 America for March 15, 2013

Dear America,

While the filibuster by peculiar Senator Rand Paul made the national news, it shed light on one legitimate issue--not necessarily the one he was expressing perturbation over--but also somewhat obscured the procedural issue of the filibuster and its uses...more than just dilatory in nature.  Like many others whose political roots are in the sixties, I have been concerned about the expediency demonstrated by American political policies of the past twelve years or so, including the continued internment of prisoners at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, the accommodation of Pakistan as a political ally despite its ambivalence over the relationship and that country's willingness to harbor criminal conspiracies like Al Qaeda and the Haqani clan, the concept of American exceptionalism that permit's American intervention in the affairs of other sovereign nations, and certainly the use of deadly force to eliminate individual adversaries through assassination techniques, many of which I fear we don't even know about.  Drone use abroad does raise significant questions about the arrogation by the United States of not just the power to take action across our national borders, but also to use lethal force to kill people as if those killings had the impunity of execution rather than the moral taint of assassination.  But, not to diminish the issue's import, limiting objection to such tactics to their use on Americans when they are at home is just another form of the questionable moral fabric that goes with the issue and its many variations...all very profound, though barely broached by Paul's grandiose maneuver.  Nor did he ask whether we can imprison people on American soil, albeit non-Americans, without trial or the right to counsel as we are doing in Guantanamo Bay (while Guantanamo is in Cuba, it is a little piece of the United States just like a foreign embassy or an air force base).  In the end, Senator Paul's display made him more Mr. Deeds' epigone than his kindred spirit.  The act itself was a demonstration of what is wrong in Washington rather than what is right, regardless of the merits of the issue to which Paul attached it.

The filibuster has purportedly been tempered by modifications made over the past decade or two.  First, the requirement for cloture of debate was reduced from 67 votes to 60, but that didn't last long as a constraint, if it had any positive effect at all.   Then, there was the "Gang of 14" in The Senate during the administration of Bill Clinton, which made an agreement to use the filibuster with regard to political appointments only under heightened, unusual circumstances.  With Defense Secretary Chuck Hagle's, and then CIA Director Brennan's, nominations, that principle too seems to have been somewhat diminished in its effects by time, but there was at least an ostensible justification in each case.  Hagle seems to be an idiot and Brennan has presided over the aforementioned policy of assassination-by-drone abroad.  But what no one talks about is the filibuster of judicial appointments, some of them critical, in which the Republicans are indulging.  Those filibusters are not matters of conviction; they are sheer politics.  And what is worst of all about them is that they appear to be violations of even the most recent, half-hearted efforts to circumscribe the tactic while preserving it.  Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, the party leaders in The Senate, supposedly made an agreement while new rules were being considered at the beginning of this session of the congress to use the filibuster with restraint...a gentlemen's agreement, which is something on which senators pride, or should I say flatter themselves.  And the fact that it was mere self-flattery for Reid and McConnell to characterize their agreement as that of gentlemen is manifest in its lack of effect regarding those judicial appointments that are being held up by nothing but a head count relative to a cloture vote.  The fact is that The Senate is no better than The House, and the supposedly grayer heads of the former are just as petty and awash in conceit as to their political stature as are any other politicians, even on the local level.  It is amazing that there isn't a mushroom cloud over the congress caused by a critical mass of egotism under one roof: the Capital Dome.

Rand Paul's charade on the Senate floor may have shed some light on what Paul wants us to believe to be an important issue, but in reality, before our government started blowing up its political enemies with drones, we would have to have faced a far more overt usurpation of political power by whatever dictator could emerge to political power in this country, and individual assassinations would be the least of our problems.  What this filibuster actually did was to obfuscate a real problem...a real tyranny that has actually been institutionalized in order to take the will of the people out of government consideration.  Our capital is being populated by would-be national personalities who think that they are running a cult.  Congress, and The Senate in particular, is not the personal bailiwick of each of our politicians.  It is the hall in which The People's business is supposed to be conducted.  It is not supposed to be a place where parliamentary games are used in lieu of democratic practices to direct the course of a nation.  In our congress, our surrogates--not our betters--are supposed to do our bidding rather than obfuscating it or arbitrarily and capriciously overruling our desires.  Most Americans have had enough of this, and would throw them all out if there were a way to do so.  Oh wait; there is.

Your friend,

Mike