Tom DeLay, God And Original Intent-- Happy Halloween

George Orwell wrote that "religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel," a take on Alfred North Whitehead's "religion is the last refuge of human savagery" and Samuel Johnson's "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." All three adages fit Tom DeLay, who claims to be on a mission from God, equally well. Samuel Johnson, Boswell assures us, was referring only to "false patriotism."

DeLay's egregious corruption drove him out of his leadership role in the House GOP and then out of the House entirely. Until he was rescued by a corrupt Republican appeals judge, his guilty convictions, seemed sure to send him to prison. Last week he told a bunch of teabaggers in Burleson, Texas that God has told him to lead a constitutional revival.

"He believes that he is being led to encourage, or promote, or participate in sort of a new a new revolution for the country-- not armed battles and muskets and all that stuff, but in terms of ideals," said Barry Schlech, the vice-chairman for the Texas Patriots PAC.

DeLay said the best way to start this revolution is for conservative tea party candidates to lay claim to the U.S. House. DeLay spent part of his time detailing how faith helped him through his criminal trial that involved charges of laundering money from his congressional campaign funds-- DeLay’s conviction was overturned earlier this month.

But Schlech said he doesn’t see DeLay returning to Congress.

"I didn’t get the sense-- with what he said-- that he wants to ever be in office again," Schlech said. "He’s going to be an advocate, not in the background but maybe in the forefront."

Or maybe the storefront, figuratively speaking. DeLay hasn't just been dancing with the stars since being driven out of Congress; his lobbying firm, First Principles, is as sleazy and shady as he has always been, although he does claim everything he does is countenanced from Above. "God has spoken to me… I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn’t be underestimated."

According to the Dallas Morning News what DeLay claims God told him to do is to “shut down” every part of federal government that is not specifically based on the Constitution. “It’s time for a constitutional renewal, a constitutional revival,” DeLay said in Burleson, adding that this revival is inherently linked to a “spiritual awakening” he sees happening across the country. He said conservatives have allowed “the left to intimidate us, cut off our heads, put us in prison… It’s time for a revolution,” DeLay said. “I am not advocating for revolution in the streets. But if that’s what it takes … ”



That kind of palaver about original intent of the Founding Fathers is part of that last refuge crap we were referring to at the beginning of this post. I had it in my mind since reading David Simon's brilliant review of 12 Years A Slave, particularly these paragraphs:

[F]or those still desperate to mitigate our national reality at every possible cost, this film will be an affront. It is not intelligently assailable by anyone, though the racial divide and resentment that still occupies our national character a century and a half after abolition will prompt certain creatures to pull at threads, hoping against hope. Mostly, those who want to pretend to another American history will just avoid the film or the discussion that ensues.

The second screening did leave me with one additional thought, something distinctly political that could not fight its way through the more fundamental human reckoning produced by the first viewing.  It’s this: Anyone who acquires the narrative of 12 Years A Slave and finds it within his shrunken heart to continue any argument for the sanctity and perfection of our Founding Fathers, for the moral wisdom of their compromised document of national ideal that begins the American experience, or for their anachronistic, or understandable tolerance of slavery is  arguing from a desolate, amoral corner.

If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history. And for hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitutions under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool’s journey to decay and dishonor.

There is some considerable wisdom in the American Constitution, and more found within the 27 sanctioned efforts to amend and improve the weaknesses and moral lapses that were allowed to co-exist with the adoption of the original template. There is, at some key points in our history, even more wisdom in some of the liberalizing and rationalizing assessments of the U.S. Supreme Court in adopting the improved morality of a later age to constitutional language and code. We have journeyed far, and by many metrics, we have acquired a greater claim to our own humanity.

For anyone to stand in sight of this film and pretend to the infallibility or perfect intellectual or moral grandeur of a Washington, a Jefferson, or a Madison is to invite ignominy from anyone else sensate. Slavery was abomination, and we, in our birth of liberty, codified it and nurtured it.

It took Lincoln, and a great war, to hijack the American experiment from its original, cold intentions by falsely claiming, a century and a half ago, that the nation was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal.  It was founded on no such thing.  It required blood, a new birth of honor and a continuing battle for civil rights that is still being fought for this nation to be so founded.

In the echo of this film, the call for a strict construction of our national codes and a devotion to the original ideas of the long-dead men who crafted those codes in another human age, rings hollow and sick and shameful.