By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva
If it's a day ending in y, some bloviating hack named Dan or David is pontificating in a deep reporting media outlet about What Ails Our Republic.
On Thursday, it was the turn of venerable conventional wisdom dispenser Dan Balz in The Washington Post. As usual, he missed pretty much every important point, beginning with his statement of the problem:
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| The good old days of bipartisan compromise |
In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.
They aren’t wrong.
Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise.
Is that the problem? Of course in a time of political gridlock, little gets done and people become frustrated.
But not all frustrations are created equal.
We know that about 40% of the electorate, comprising a large majority of white voters, is frustrated that it can no longer protect white privilege on a national level by majority vote. (They can still impose cruel white-majority rule in a large swath of southern and midwestern states, including the nation's second and third largest ones)
We also know that progressive voters are frustrated by the failure of government to address unmet human needs, protect the rights of women and minorities, and save the planet from boiling to death.
But the frustrations of racists are not an argument against the current political system. Rather the opposite. Government should not represent and advance the interests of white racists and bigots. That's how American government worked from 1791 to 1964, with a brief intermission from 1863 to 1877. It was very bad, despite what Prager “U's” cartoon version of Frederick Douglass tells you.
And that's not the only howler contained in three short paragraphs. Balz like his fellow third wayers seems to think that in American democracy, progress arises out of bipartisan compromise.
Let's look at the moderate's worst enemy: the historical record.
The era from 1861 to 1876 saw enormous progress. Slavery ended. The rights of all persons were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The South was reconstructed, albeit imperfectly. And that wasn't all. We had a progressive income tax, a huge railroad infrastructure plan, a mammoth higher education construction scheme of “land-grant” universities that brought academic and research excellence out of the Northeast and across the nation, and fiat currency that permitted robust economic growth and provided the foundation for the economy we know today.
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| Bipartisan consensus at work! |
None of this happened because all sides came together and compromised. It came about because the Slave Power tried to destroy the nation and, after four years of war and 600,000 deaths, failed. If the bloody ground of Antietam and Gettysburg was compromise, we'd hate to see Balz's idea of open warfare.
How about 1933, when the Republic almost ground to a halt after four years of disastrous Republican inaction to combat the Depression? Did Roosevelt and Hoover sit down and hash out a bipartisan compromise? Of course not. FDR and the Democrats won smashing victories in1932 and 1936, leading to huge Democratic majorities willing to enact the greatest program of social welfare legislation in American history.
(By the way, whatever bipartisan compromises were required were terrible, like exempting domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security to protect the purses of Southern white supremacists.)
In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats achieved another smashing victory, LBJ pushed through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid. And we don't want to hear about all the Republicans who voted for civil rights – on that issue, the partisan split was between white racists, then mostly Democratic, and everyone else. The good guys won not because of consensus but because the power of Southern Democrats was broken. Don't worry; they got it back.
In 2008, after eight disastrous years of needless war followed by economic disaster, Barack Obama and the Democrats won big, and delivered at least some version of national health insurance, over implacable Republican opposition. As was the case with previous bipartisan deals, the concessions made were uniformly terrible. Imagine how much money we could have saved with a public option, but thanks to lovable bipartisan “Holy Joe” Lieberman, we can't have it.
So the two premises that underpin the piece are utter bollocks. How about the execution? It's a little better, but not by much.
Our bloviator goes on to examine what he believes are structural or Constitutional impediments to a functional government. Let's see if we can find any common thread that connects them!
1. The Electoral College frustrates majority rule. That's hard to argue with:
The Constitution created an unusual mechanism for electing the president — an electoral college. It was built on assumptions that over the years have proved to be faulty.
If only anyone had noticed this.
Oh, wait, they have: “More than 700 proposals to reform or abolish it have been introduced in Congress since 1800.”
So why can't we fix this flaw, either by Constitutional amendment or widespread adoption by states of commitments to award electors based on the winner of the national popular vote? Here's a clue, courtesy of NBC News:
Republicans want to keep the Electoral College because they don't like the results obtained with direct democracy. They dress it up a little with some community-college word salad about the purple mountain majesties and fruited plains, like this classic from George Will:
Furthermore, choosing presidents by electoral votes is an incentive for candidates to wage truly national campaigns, building majorities that are geographically as well as ideologically broad. Consider: Were it not for electoral votes allocated winner-take-all, would candidates campaign in, say, West Virginia? In 1996 Bill Clinton decisively defeated Bob Dole there 52 percent to 37 percent. But that involved a margin of just 93,866 votes (327,812 to 233,946), a trivial amount compared to what can be harvested in large cities. However, for a 5-0 electoral vote sweep, West Virginia is worth a trip or two.
Like everything else spewed out by this long-time Republican hack, this is ass-backwards. Thanks to the Electoral College, the 2024 Presidential election will be decided by voters in five states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and maybe North Carolina. Voters in the rest of the country can just stay home. Without an Electoral College, candidates would have to appeal to voters everywhere, not just in a few swing states.
In short, the problem is not the Electoral College; it is the refusal of Republicans to unrig a system that has worked in their favor twice in this century. Elect more Democrats either to Congress or state legislatures and the problem goes away. No consensus needed or wanted.
2. Gerrymandering has produced fewer competitive Congressional districts. Also irrefutable. And also caused by relentless Republican assaults on fair districts in Republican-run states, like Ohio, where the Republican-dominated legislature has defied not only the will of the voters expressed in a referendum but also multiple decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court enforcing the results of that vote.
Such blatantly unfair gerrymanders were made possible by a Republican-bent Supreme Court which concluded such anti-democratic vote rigging was A-OK, because...what were they supposed to do about it?
Which brings Balz and us to...
3. The Republican-bent Supreme Court. The Post finally reaches a third major cause of democratic dysfunction: a Republican-rigged anti-democratic Supreme Court that has arrogated for itself the right to decide what it will let the President do in implementing laws passed by Congress, which it calls the Major Questions Doctrine. (Capitalized to show that six Republicans didn't pull it out of their a**es.)
Even the Post had to note that
Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections. But during that time, Republican presidents have nominated six of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices, including the three nominated by Trump, were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
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| The Supreme Court...is a problem |
No s***, Sherlock. It also didn't help that Senate Republicans wouldn't even grant a hearing to President Biden's nominee a year before the election while filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat less than a month before the next one.
There are fixes to the problem of Supreme Court tyranny, aggravated by their habit of deciding things in the absence of Constitutional power to do so under Article III, as noted last month in these pages.
Congress and the President could expand the Court by adding new Justices or they could limit the Court's jurisdiction to prevent them from for example stopping the actions of the democratic branches until after a full trial or only by unanimous vote.
There are such proposals before Congress. Guess who's blocking them? Hint: it's the same law and order party that has lined up behind a tangerine-faced Russian agent with 91 criminal charges pending against him.
To sum up, there are solutions to these supposedly intractable structural problems that cripple our democracy. The Post can't quite bring itself to admit that these solutions require only 56 things: a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and 54 Democratic Senators willing to abolish the idiotic filibuster.
It turns out that the crisis of democratic government in these United States isn't caused by “partisan gridlock,” as both-sides hacks like Balz have been telling us for years. It's caused by Republicans. And the solution is Democrats.
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