Dear America,
A Pew research poll released this week evinced the will of the American people on what has become the cynosure of the conservative political movement. Pew found that by a margin of 60% to 40% we want any new budget deal to include funding for Planned Parenthood. Of course, that begs a question, but unfortunately, it is a different question for each of the factions in our politics, and still another for those of us who cast our votes every other November. The central question for us American democrats is, whose will are the members of congress supposed to be implementing. If you ask the forty or so hard-core conservatives in our House of Representatives, it is their will that counts because, after all, they are the righteous in our society...the values politicians...the modern apostles. For them, this issue is about Obamacare for one thing, but primarily about abortion, and their erroneous belief is that by forcing the defunding Planned Parenthood they can prevent the organization from providing abortions. But in reality, Planned Parenthood is about many more things than providing abortions, and besides, their private, charitable funding provides the funding of their abortion related activities, always has and always will, since it would be a violation of the "Hyde Amendment"--the federal statutory proscription of the use of federal funds for abortions--for Planned Parenthood to use federal funds to do so. In fact, the federal funding in question is primarily Medicaid and Medicare charges for health care services, primarily for women, and neither program pays for abortions anyway. So this recent scrum over the issue is a red herring intended to show the power of the small but vocal minority of the Republican party that would presume to tell us all how we should live on the basis of their own positivism and sanctimony...the secular majority be damned.
But speaking of the devil, the question for those ideological tyrants who managed to overthrow John Boehner is, how do we put this issue up on the board again, and their answer is that in their weakness, their party was unable to pass anything but a two month temporary budget agreement. So, they will take another shot at Planned Parenthood in December when the next budget deal is up for consideration and the next speaker of the house will have to deal with them. The question for the Republicans is, what are we going to do to protect our party from the internecine destruction that this small core of recalcitrant, would-be, self-appointed keepers of the American ethic are perpetrating. Personally, I don't care if the Republican Party survives given its current modus operandi of obstructionism and propagandistic prevarication. But it concerns me that Machiavellians like Ted Cruz have become the leaders-in-fact of this movement, and they are demagogues who seem to capture the imaginations of the weakest thinkers in our society. A motivated majority of fools is just as dangerous as the majority of fascists that they think they rightfully fear. The rest of us may constitute an electoral majority, but what if we don't? What if some blathering bombast like Donald Trump, or worse yet, a clever, facile ayatollah-like demagogue like Ted Cruz actually becomes president? With that in mind, I hope the Republicans find an answer to the question that they should be asking themselves now that there is data to demonstrate that their mainstream more closely represents the will of the American people than does the fanatical cabal that thinks itself entitled to control the Republican Party from the back bench minority position that they currently occupy. It may occur to the Republican mainstream that, for the first time, they should elect a Democrat for Speaker even though no majority party has ever allowed such an outcome, which brings us to the Democrats.
Speaking of the Democrats, thus far they have been consigned to the back room because they don't have sufficient votes to do anything in their chamber. But it may be that their plight is their advantage. With elections impending and campaigning in earnest about to begin, they can probably say next to nothing and take back at least The House, but will they use that advent to promulgate rules changes that will prevent the kind of stalemate that has paralyzed both houses of congress for more than a decade, and thus prevent the reiteration of the kind of tyranny of the minority that we are seeing right now. Maybe they will see that the democratic process in this country is the ideological analog to the free market in our capitalist society. If they can muster the courage...and the will...to get rid of the filibuster in The Senate and a raft of rules in The House that permit the Speaker, and therefore the ruling party to prevent votes on issues when they don't want to be known for the votes they would cast if they had to--in other words trust us Americans to re-elect those who do what we want and cast out those who don't--we might all get what we want, including the Democratic Party.
Your friend,
Mike
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