As I wrote a few weeks back, when I sat down to write my book The Progressive Revolution on the history of the American political debate, I knew that the themes that animated our current political debate would be the same as in the past.
What I underestimated was that we would start to re-fight some of the exact same issues that have been fairly settled for the last 50 years or even longer. It is a sign of how radical conservatives in the last couple of years have become that they are raising issues that have seemed settled for so many decades. Republican nominees and elected officials for major offices have, over the last few months, made open arguments for:
-the repeal of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1914, allowing people to vote directly for their Senator rather than have them appointed by the state legislature
Now comes the most radically extreme proposal yet: Senate Majority Leader McConnell and other Republicans are now calling for amending or even outright repeal of the 14th amendment to the Constitution. To understand how profoundly reactionary this proposal is, let me refer to my book:
The 14th Amendment was passed at the height of the Radical Republican frustration at Johnson’s alliance with Southern conservatives on Reconstruction. Section 1 asserted that the federal government, not the states, decided who US citizens were and gave that citizenship to all those born in the United States or naturalized by the federal government. The states were prohibited from denying those citizens their civil rights and “the equal protection of the law.” It was the first time the Constitution created a definition of national citizenship as opposed to just leaving it to the states. Section 2 stated that any state denying the right to vote to any of its (male) citizens was to proportionally lose seats in Congress and the Electoral College. Sections 3 and 4 denied Southerners who had held federal office before the war and then served the rebel cause the right to run for federal office again, and ensured that the debts that the Confederacy had incurred would never be paid by either federal or state governments. The 14th Amendment was designed by progressives to be a long term stake in the heart of states’ rights and slave power by asserting that the federal government, not the states, had the right to guarantee American citizens their civil and political rights under the law. It literally extended the Bill of Rights to all American citizens, no matter what state they lived in, and gave the federal government the power to enforce those rights.
A little background: contrary to right wing hagiography, our founding fathers were not gods or perfect men. There were some brilliant and courageous people among them, but they were politicians not that dissimilar to the current crop. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and George Mason were more progressive minded thinkers, while some were more conservative, and all were products of the time and the white, male, privileged constituencies that elected them. The constitution that was written, like every other set of laws written by politicians, thus had flaws in it. Not only was slavery embedded into the document, but the authors of the constitution agreed to a series of compromises with the strongly pro-slavery politicians from the deep South that were designed to make slavery a permanent part of our nation rather then phasing it out as even some slaveholders (like Jefferson) proposed. These provisions – chief among them the notorious 3/5 of a man rule for counting slaves in the census for Congressional apportionment – combined with the constitutional conventioneers just punting on the issues around who gets to vote/have basic civil rights/be a citizen and leaving those crucial issues to the states left the country heading inexorably to a civil war. The compromises of 1820 and 1850 just delayed the inevitable. Lincoln was right, the country could not survive as half slave and half free.
I'm sure I've only seen a faint smattering of things people have said over the past few days. One of the best, which just grabbed this as part of a longer narrative arc, was Rachel Maddow:
"The Washington Times" reporting today, on the founder of TeaParty.org threatening Michael Steele and the Republican Party, saying, quote, "We are turning our guns on anyone who doesn't support constitutional conservative candidates. It's not going to be good for them. If they don't get that and their party chairmen don't get that, they are going to be ostracized."
It should be noted that the guy making that threat, the head of TeaParty.org, one of the founders of the tea party movement, is this guy, Dale Robertson. Take that in for a second. Yes, that is the "N" word, and yes, it's misspelled.
You know, it's usually ad hominem attack when you call someone an illiterate racist. But in this case, when the guy is both using and misspelling the "N" word, I think it's fair to say, just descriptively, without comment-you, sir, are an illiterate race. You are also the founder of TeaParty.org.
But even without exhaustive searching, I'm pretty darned sure that this point hasn't been made a whole lot: Slaveholders themselves are the origin of America's anti-tax/anti-government tradition. This history has been well documented by Robin Einhorn in her book, American Taxation, American Slavery, which is a penetrating look at what policies were actually implemented by which politicians.
Republicans were outraged, outraged that Harry Reid suggested they might be trying to obstruct progress in the health care debate- and that there was gambling in Reid's casino as well. Absurdly suggesting that Reid was "race baiting" when he compared their obstructionism on this issue to obstructionism on a variety of historic issues in the past, including civil rights, they were weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth about how mean Reid was to them.
The only thing I was impressed by in their argument was that they were able to make it with a straight face.
I wrote a book- The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be- about the historic fight between conservatives and progressives in American politics, so I feel like I know about this argument pretty well, and I can tell you this: in every major change in American political history, every single time, conservatives have used the same obstructionists tactics and employed the same arguments- over and over and over again. Sometimes it is hard to tell the quotes apart.
On tactics, they have always employed the filibuster as their number one weapon to stop change. They most famously filibustered the civil rights bills that finally ended Jim Crow, but they tried to use it or threatened it on every other major piece of legislation as well. On voting rights for the working class, on slavery, on anti-trust laws and food safety laws, on women's voting rights and civil rights, on ending child labor and passing minimum wage and the right to organize unions- on all of things, conservatives used every form of obstruction and delay known to man. (Sorry for the sexist language, but these conservatives were almost always men.)
And the arguments have always been the same too. The complaints about the role of government being "so vast, so powerful", about "business and industry...already operating under very heavy burdens" that it would cause more unemployment, are virtually identical today to what they were in the debate over Social Security.
It is sad that the Republican party has become such a lockstep party of no to any progress whatsoever. Some of the great progressives of American history- Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Teddy Roosevelt, George Norris- were Republicans. They understood how difficult it was to make big changes, how hard it was to fight the forces of retrenchment and obstruction. They persevered and won momentous struggles for progress. These Republicans would be appalled at the Republican party of today, at the fact that it has joined wholesale the forces against progress today.
Republicans, stop your whining about comparisons to past conservatives blocking big change: your tactics and arguments are identical to those forces in the past, and you know it.
In a move that caught the entire Democratic Party by surprise, the House and Senate Republican leadership unveiled what they called "the ultimate free market solution to health care reform."
"People who can't afford health care will simply sell themselves to people who can afford to buy it for them," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained.
"Of course, the purchasers will get a substantial tax break to encourage their public spiritedness," added House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Calling the proposal "brilliant," former Speaker Newt Gingrich said it was the sort of "outside the box thinking that the ultra-liberal Democratic Party leadership was utter incapable of grasping, much less providing for the nation." He went on to call for President Obama and the entire Democratic congressional leadership to resign "for the good of the country."
The punditalkcrazy was immediately impressed. "The Democrats had already clearly lost the momentum," wrote David Broder, "Now the Republicans are not just defining the debate, they're showing once again that they alone really know what it means to act like the party of governance."
"It's a no-brainer," said Chris Matthews. "I don't think the Democrats have an answer to this."
"This is what we've been waiting for," said Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus, in a prepared statement. "Many of my Democratic colleagues have been unfairly critical of my efforts to find common ground with Republicans, to forge a bipartisan bill. They didn't think Republicans were serious about health care reform. Now we see how wrong they all were."
Senator Kent Conrad, another Democrats who's been critical of his own party's approach, renewed his call for health care cooperatives. "There's no reason why cooperatives should be forbidden from purchasing those who would choose to sell themselves to a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy," Conrad said. "As long as it's not run by the government."
The White House has not responded. Sources say they are afraid that a quick rejection would play into perceptions that Obama is "the President of minorities, not the President of all Americans."
Meanwhile, in a virtually unheard-of move, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts told World Net Daily, "I really don't see a problem with this."
"Clearly, the authors of the 14th Amendment did not intend to deny people health care," Roberts explained. "So respecting their original intent, the 14th Amendment is not a problem for the Republican proposal."
"Well, of course it's insane," said a top Democratic strategist who refused to be named. "But that's why it's so brilliant. Going to war against Obama bin Laden's worst enemy after 9/11 was insane, too. But look how much that helped the Republicans in 2002 and '04. This makes that sort of insanity look like Little League. Put all those losers into slavery, and they lose the right to vote, right? How are the Democrats ever going to win an election again?"
"Thank God this proposal frees us from the specter of government tyranny," talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his audience. "Fascism will be defeated. Freedom will triumph. America is back!"
Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal, one of the topics was an amazing new book, Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. It's about the way in which virtual slavery was reimposed on the Southern black population, and lasted well into the lifetime of people still alive today.
This involved much, much more than legal segregation under Plessy, as Moyers describes, and Blackmon explains below. This is incredibly important not only in its own right, but because of the light it throws onto the strikingly similar way that drug laws and other punitive measures have been used in the last several decades to largely crush the promise of the Civil Rights movement for millions of poverty-struck black Americans, people who are, themselves, the descendents of generations who had their freedom stolen from them a second time after supposedly being freed by the Civil war.
Moyers begins:
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
....
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
STATE BLOGS
