DownWithTyranny!: Road To Nowhere?

The new issue of New York magazine features a powerful call to action by former Senator Russ Feingold, one of the two most tragic losses of the 2010 teabagger tsunami-- the other we'll get to in a moment. It must always be an embarrassment to President Obama when someone starts talking about FDR. Keep in mind, of course, that Feingold has urged Democrats to close ranks behind Obama and stop talking about fantasy primaries against our disappointing, middle of the road president. But his story is called The Middle Road to Nowhere. The word "Obama" never appears in the story:

When I was growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, my parents had hung a painting of FDR with an inscription to the effect of “Never was one man loved by so many, and hated by so many.” I often puzzled over that inscription, but I am puzzling no more.

One of FDR’s enduring strengths was his rejection of ideological constraint. He sought solutions that could actually address problems, no matter where those solutions might sit on the political spectrum. But freeing oneself from ideological restrictions is not the same as seeking the middle ground. Today, many prominent elected officials, as well as a few prominent editorial pages, tend to celebrate the centrist path no matter the policy outcome and condescendingly reject ideas championed by those they believe occupy a less moderate position.

That is utter nonsense. The test of an idea is not whether it belongs to the political left, right, or center. The test of an idea is whether it will work. Yet too many of our nation’s current political leaders seem to be captives of a kind of political GPS system, programmed to seek either a specific set of principles laid down by a fervent base or, alternatively, a political middle ground whose inhabitants observe profoundly that “both sides dislike it, so it must be right.”

A favorite and related concept of these same sages is that of bipartisanship, but for them bipartisanship is not so much members of different parties’ hammering out meaningful solutions as it is a group of middle-grounders who can be relied upon to embrace impotent proposals. To many in the Beltway, bipartisanship itself has become its own hollow ideology.

True bipartisanship, of course, can be a powerful engine of pragmatic solutions. The campaign-finance reform I constructed with Senator John McCain was a classic, substantive measure that certainly did not adhere to any one ideology. And in my eighteen years in the Senate I was privileged to participate in several other serious bipartisan endeavors. But we shouldn’t confuse real efforts at cooperation with those that cloak the inadequacy of a middle road to nowhere with the label of bipartisanship. They may make some editorial boards happy, but they won’t get the job done.

The ideological descendants of Wisconsin voters who brought us Joe McCarthy saw fit to replace Russ Feingold with a senator who actually rivals McCarthy in terms of his perfidy against working people and against democracy itself, Ron Johnson. The other grotesque tragedy from the 2010 elections saw Orlando voters replacing Alan Grayson with Taliban Dan Webster, who's not as bad as Johnson only because he's so much stupider and less effective. Last week Grayson was up in DC and he wrote about visiting some of his old-- and, hopefully, future-- colleagues on the House floor. He asked one what she thought about the Republicans being in charge now.

"They want to do all these things that are unconstitutional. It's as though they've never heard of the Constitution."

I really hadn't thought of it that way. Cruel? Yes. Bigoted? Yes. But unconstitutional?

They claim to be the only patriots. They claim to own the flag. And they claim that the Constitution is theirs. Support our campaign, because we have the guts to tell them they are wrong.

I realized that she probably was referring to this gross obsession over what the federal deficit might or might not be in the year 2021, ten years from now.

Here is a simple fact, which seems to have eluded this tea-infused Congress. One Congress cannot dictate to any other Congress. Particularly when it comes to taxing and spending. So all of this gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over what the federal deficit might be in ten years is utterly-- utterly-- pointless. It's like trying to amend the law of gravity.

Under Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution, each Congress has the same right as another other Congress to legislate. This includes "raising Revenue" and "Appropriation of Money." (The Founding Fathers were pretty wacky when it came to initial caps, weren't they?) So our 112th Congress can "pass a Bill" setting the federal deficit for this year and next year, but that's about it. Anything that goes beyond the first week of January, 2013, when the 113th Congress will be sworn in, is subject to change by that Congress, and every subsequent Congress.

The Constitution also has this to say on the subject, in Article I, Section 8: "no Appropriation of Money [to raise and support Armies] shall be for a longer Term of two Years." (Which tells us precisely what the Founding Fathers would have thought about a 10-year war in Afghanistan and an 8-year war in Iraq, but that is another story.)

Way back in 1879, i.e., long before the U.S. Supreme Court became an extrusion of the Republican Party, the Supreme Court also weighed in, in this holding:

Every succeeding legislature possesses the same jurisdiction and power with respect to [public interests] as its predecessors. The latter have the same power of repeal and modification which the former had of enactment, neither more nor less. All occupy, in this respect, a footing of perfect equality. This must necessarily be so in the nature of things. It is vital to the public welfare that each one should be able at all times to do whatever the varying circumstances and present exigencies touching the subject involved may require. A different result would be fraught with evil.

Newton v. Commissioners, 100 U.S. 548, 559 (1879).

Politically, all this teabag deficit-mongering is a weapon on mass distraction. But constitutionally, it's a farce.

In a way, this shouldn't surprise anyone. They waive the Tenth Amendment around as if it were a magic wand. They want to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment because they don't like the idea that everyone born in America is American; in other words, they want the sins of the fathers to descend on the sons. They want to insert bookkeeping into the Constitution (the so-called "Balanced Budget Amendment"), but take a woman's right to choose out of it. And, of course, their hand-picked, litmus-tested, original-intented judges have thrown out over a century of constitutional precedent (e.g., Citizens United) whenever they've felt like it.

Instead of defiling the Constitution, I think that we should concentrate on the things that matter in our lives:

Jobs.

Health.

Peace.

Real problems, and how to solve them.

Hopefully Alan will be doing that in the House again after the next elections. (You can help that along here.) The Senate has always been a dicier place for people willing to abandon the middle of the road-- although on the extreme right, Ron Johnson has plenty of company considering his lockstep voting with fellow teabaggers Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, David Vitter, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Working families don't get much love-- beyond Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin and Jeff Merkley-- these days. That could change, quite drastically, is Elizabeth Warren wins her battle in Massachusetts against middle of the road nothing Scott Brown. Digby explained it to Al Jezeera readers yesterday, riffing off this now famous video of a recent house-party.

With those words, Elizabeth Warren cemented her reputation as a person who knows how to speak to Americans about progressive values in a way that seems to have eluded almost every other public figure in America. There's just something about the way she talks in plain prairie English that makes people listen-- and scares even the most hardened businessman and compromised politician into paying attention.

...That's how it was in America in the good old days, boom and bust, no security, no solid middle class, no upward mobility for those who lose on the downside of the cycle.

She points out that it was three specific laws that came out of the Great Depression that changed all of that and set the stage for the longest run of uninterrupted prosperity in the nation's history: FDIC Insurance, Glass-Steagel and the SEC.

And she points out that when those regulations began to erode, productivity and wages started their great divergence and the middle class began to fray around the edges. By 2011, that fraying has become a full blown unraveling. Here are just a few random statistics compiled by businessinsider.com:

- 61 per cent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 per cent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007

- 66 per cent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 per cent of Americans

- 43 per cent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement

- 24 per cent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age

- Only the top 5 per cent of US households earned enough to match the rise in housing costs since 1975

- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1; since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 and 500 to 1

- The bottom 50 per cent of income earners in the US now collectively own less than 1 per cent of the nation's wealth

- More than 40 per cent of Americans who are actually employed are now working in service jobs, which are often low paying.

...Win or lose the Senate seat, she is doing a service to the country by having the guts to face down the powerful and say what needs to be said. And it's inspiring progressives all over the country, including, some say, the president himself.