| If you hadn't seen, Blue Dog Democrats claiming they care about the deficit - ie. the same Democrats who voted for the deficit exploding Iraq War and Bush tax cuts and corporate welfare bills and bloated defense budgets - are pushing the Obama administration to endorse legislation creating a commission that would propose cuts to Social Security. If that's not bad enough, the Wall Street Journal reports that that commission's edicts wouldn't be subject to any congressional debate. It would simply "present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote" (h/t FDL).
At today's "entitlements summit" at the White House, this "we must kill democracy to save the nation" ideology reared its ugly head in the form of George W. Bush appointee David Walker's coded comments to President Obama:
WALKER: You mentioned in January about the need to achieve a Grand Bargain involving budget process, social security, taxes, health care reform. You're 110% right to do that. Question is, how do we do it? Candidly, I think it takes an extraordinary process that engages the American people, provides for fast track consideration and with your leadership that can happen. But that's what it's going to take.
That term - "fast track" - is the very same term used to describe the process by which trade deals are brought to Congress only for an up or down vote with no democratic debate, no amendments, nothing.
Why is democracy such a threat to those who want to slash Social Security or pass corporate-written trade deals? Because those right-wing ideologues know that if any mildly democratic institution even vaguely accountable to the public is allowed to weigh in on those proposals, those proposals will be seriously amended to reflect the will of the people who, for instance, don't like the idea of Social Security cuts or more NAFTAs. Put another way, they know that the public intensely hates their ideas, and that thus, the only way to get their ideas enacted into law in the United States is to crush democracy before it is allowed to interfere.
What's funny, of course, is that democracy and checks and balances were set up specifically to prevent the kind of thing that the Blue Dog Democrats are now trying to impose on the country. The Founding Fathers set up the legislative process - with its debates and amendments and deliberations - so as to prevent a tiny minority of elites from enacting policies that the broad majority of the public opposes. They didn't want a government like there was in Britain - a dictatorship where whatever the king wanted was the law, regardless of whether it had popular support.
Now, in order to destroy the most popular program in history, America is seeing the revival of the Royalists - the people who are effectively insisting that their will should be imposed on the rest of us, regardless of what the rest of us want, regardless of whether the rest of us even get a say. |
