January 2019 Archives

Dear America,

Everyone should understand what's happening.  We are headed for a Putin-Maduro, Russo-Venezuelan style democracy, that is, a kleptocratic autocracy.   Donald Trump thinks he has found the means of consolidating his power to effect such a conversion in the shut-down of our government.  He is pressuring 800,000 people into supporting his demands because they have--at least Donald Trump thinks they do--no choice but to condemn his opposition and cleave to his paternalistic, self-aggrandizing mantle.  I have heard politicians fulminate while crying crocodile tears about Trump's tactics, implying all the while that the support of the majority of the American people is almost guaranteed them, and they may be right.  The majority seems to see that this whole Trump-McConnell enterprise is just a power grab, and they are resolved to oppose it...now.  But what is going to happen when the sympathies of the American people are sufficiently stimulated on behalf of those 800,000 fellow citizens?  Will knowing resolve turn into submissive pragmatism?  Will people say to the Democrats, we think you are right, but it's just $5 billion to give cover to the bombastic bastard, which won't change our opinion of him, while it's the staff of life for those poor government workers who can't feed their families or pay their rent.

The problem at that point will be that we will have armed a tyrant with a weapon to use against us.  Putin has nefarious allies within the Russian government and without, and Maduro has the still-loyal army to suppress the mass's protests.  The end result is the same in both cases: assassination and imprisonment of political foes, stifling of the free press and other sources of factual information and worst of all, a self-perpetuating accretion of power that is nigh unto impossible to reverse.  I know that sounds far-fetched, but look at Putin in particular.  He rose to power out of a popular groundswell for another leader who promised to set the people free.  In pre-Putin Russia, he was first a KGB thug who managed to seduce his predecessor, a puerile drunkard lacking the sense to come in out of the rain.  But he was possessed of the impudence in the face of governmental power to capture the support of the public in a vacuum of governance competency created by a decades long deprivation of an opportunity for anyone among the masses to develop it.  Boris Yeltzin, Putin's patron, in essence handed Putin the keys to the kingdom and Putin has never looked back because his subjects have a history as long as they can remember of true believing.  Coincidentally, so do those in Trump's base.

The only question now is, can Trump use this tactic in successive cases to get what he wants.  Can he extort from the American people in the name of his base the capitulation of his political adversaries by threatening their personal solvency and well-being.  Can he harness his arrogance and the compassion of the American people to the extent that he can do this over and over again at will? Can he successfully coopt the many by menacing the few?  You've seen him in action, America.  What do you think?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The core of our political problems isn't policy.  There will always be differences between parties on issues and that, after all, is the reason for our political process: to resolve those differences in action.  It is the inertia that the current impasse exemplifies that is the problem.  It is the rules by which our parties operate our legislature in particular--which reflect an acceptance of the notion that form should be used to control substance--that are paralyzing us lately.  There has been almost no mention of the fact that the issue that has caused the current shut-down of portions of our government goes back to the George W. Bush administration, that is, immigration.  But the history of the issue aside, the stalemate that we are witnessing today in Washington illuminates the underlying problem perfectly.  Unfortunately, no one seems to be looking at the players who are in control.

It is true that this wall across the Mexico-US border is the central theme, and frankly, I don't care about it one way or the other.  I have said many times before that the real issue in immigration is whether we want to pay $5 for every tomato, clean our own bathrooms, work in our own factories for scandalously low wages, mow our own lawns, and in general do all the work that illegal immigrants are willing to do for us.  There are moral issues and legal ones involved, and whatever the majority wants I will live with, like it or not, without complaint.  But the issue now is much broader than immigration.  The issue that is confronting us today is, who is controlling our democracy.  Is it us or an oligarchy that has its own rules designed to perpetuate the partisan divide that is the embodiment of our political inertia.  It never gets discussed that the Speaker of The House and the Majority Leader of The Senate have kept this issue alive by preventing democracy from working in the very body that we created with our Constitution over two hundred years ago.  We call our system a democracy, but the two houses of congress go by very undemocratic rules, and the current stalemate demonstrates the problem clearly and indisputably.

The Senate, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, passed a "continuing resolution" to fund the government in 2018 and sent it to The House.  The House, led by then-Speaker Paul Ryan, killed it not by voting against it but by not voting on it at all because The Speaker prevented it.  Thus, no members of The House went on record by casting a vote with regard to keeping the government open while "the wall"--it was a better issue when Pink Floyd sang it--was reserved for future debate.  Paul Ryan kept that set of appropriations from being voted upon because, my bet is, most Republicans didn't want to go home just before the election and admit to shutting down the government so they would have to have passed it.  Well, the election is over and the issue has come around again, but this time, The House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi has passed the very same set of appropriations and sent it to Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate.  Once again, Republicans would have to explain themselves when they next went home if they voted to close down the various organs of our government that aren't working now because they have no funding without those appropriations.  So, in service to his fellow partisans, has done what Paul Ryan did and refused to allow The Senate to vote on the issue, and just think what that means.  If The Senate passed a bill that it passed just a couple of months ago, it would go to our illustrious president, and he would have to veto it if he didn't want it to pass without funding for what he unabashedly called "his wall" when he was in conference with congressional leaders.  He would have to put his ego first in front of everyone in order to get what he wants, and my guess is that even though he said that he would be proud to shut down the government, he wouldn't have dared with 800,000 government workers paychecks hanging in the balance, especially since he lost the popular election by nearly 3 million votes and won the electoral college by just about 40,000 popular votes strategically placed.

So in the end, this isn't Trump's shutdown after all.  It is Mitch McConnell's, and he has been enabled by anti-democratic rules approved by our representatives and senators to thwart us rather than serve us.  We sent them all to our congress, and they should cast their votes the way we want them to, not in the way that serves their hopes for re-election.  Next election, I think one of the issues...in fact the primary one...should be congressional rules that allow our surrogates in Washington to shirk their responsibility and hide behind them.  In 2020, we should demand that every issue be voted on no matter what the projected outcome might be.  That's how democracy works...out here AND in there.

Your friend,

Mike