What the past several months have revealed, far more than the power of lobbyists (which we already knew) or the ability of senators to toss their ideology out the window for fun and profit (ditto), is the complete and total inability of the government to govern. Whatever your opinion of this health-care bill, whatever your opinion of Democrats or Republicans, put that aside for a moment and consider this: A charismatic president with a supposedly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a large majority in the House is completely incapable of enacting massively popular reform.
Now, before you go off and accuse me of health-care reform not being "massively popular," I'll grant you that, in its current form, that's true. In recent poll after recent poll, a plurality of people oppose the current health-care legislation. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about back in the beginning, when health-care legislation included a strong public option. In fact, a solid majority of Americans still support a government-run system that would compete with private insurers. Yet despite popular approval and all the apparatus of government being controlled by the political party that supposedly supports this agenda, it has failed utterly, unless the watered-down Senate bill is made stronger when it is combined with the House bill, sometime in early 2010.
How is that possible? How is it that a president with a mandate the size of Texas and majorities in both houses of Congress that are bigger still cannot get this done? Two reasons, mainly. The first is the filibuster. Sure, the filibuster has been around for years, but not in its current form. According to political scientist Barbara Sinclair, as quoted by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in the 1960s, just 8 percent of major legislation was affected by threatened or actual filibusters. By the 1980s, it stood at 27 percent, and in 2006, when Democrats regained control of Congress from the Republicans, it went up to 70 percent.
The huge jump from the 1980s till now can be blamed in large part on Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, the likely target of Sen. Coburn's plea for God's wrath. In answer to that slight, but still disturbing, upward trend of filibuster use in the late 1980s, then-Senate Majority Leader Byrd instituted an idea called dual tracking. Before that, a filibuster would halt all Senate business. But with dual tracking, the Senate could stop work on the filibustered legislation and get on with other things. Byrd hoped that this would decrease the power of the filibuster. Instead, it has only increased its use.
The second reason is that, quite simply, this is not your grandfather's Democratic Party. This is not the party that grew strong off the labor movement of the 1920s, went leftward and instituted the New Deal. Back then, when discussing his first term's New Deal as he was running for a second, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said,
"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
"They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred.
"I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master."
Imagine Obama, or any modern Democrat, giving that speech. It's impossible. The truth is that the Democratic Party has been bought and sold a thousand times over since those days. Progressives who demand the re-inclusion of a public option in this legislation are like soldiers preparing to fight Gettysburg. The battle is long over. The "old enemies of peace" already own your party, and they own you.
Send used-up idealism to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com.
(A lengthier version of this column originally ran in this week's issue of City Link magazine and can be read in its entirety here.)
Follow Dan Sweeney on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Daniel_Sweeney
www.moveon.org
Dear MoveOn member,
Watching a conservative Republican replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate is simply devastating.
But as bad as the news is this morning, there's actually one reason to be hopeful.
For the last year, most Democrats in Washington have let lobbyists and corporate interests run roughshod over the people's business. Wall Street got bailouts. Bankers got bonuses. Big Insurance rewrote the health care bill. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet.
But now, finally, Democrats know they need to change course to win back voters' confidence. The question is, will they learn exactly the wrong lesson? Will they give up on change altogether? Drop health care reform? Follow the lead of conservatives like Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh and embrace "Republican-lite"?
We need to make sure Democrats don't get it wrong this time. It's time to demand that they start truly fighting for working families. Pass real health care reform. Rein in Wall street. Take on the banks and special interests that stand in the way of change.
Clicking here will add your name to the petition:
http://pol.moveon.org/timetofight/o.pl?id=18649-9193653-4RJimox&t=3
Obama imagined that he would go by way of JFK, MLK and anybody else who loudly opposed the corporate and IMC agenda.
We have been sold on the market place for pieces of gold. Our jobs and properties, savings and services that were carefully planned and protected over the years are claimed by others, because they can! Yesterday: the banks, today: health care, tomorrow:???
Which it probably is.
We should be striving for efficiency and transparency, something we can all believe in.
The simplest way for congresspeople to the get the most out of their votes?
List them on eBay.
Now we see that big business has accomplished just that, just not by a coup.
Government today is influenced by "principal", defined as "a capital sum, as distinguished from interest or profit."
(Definitions taken from Webster's Dictionary)
the answer is here: http://www.opensecrets.org
follow the money!
The ONLY hope for American politics is to form a new political party -- perhaps a new "Progressive Party" -- which does not take corporate campaign cash as a matter of principle -- who views the taking of corporation cash as a compromise of integrity.
I left the Democratic Party for the Greens. A new Progressive Party that brings together REAL progressives, liberals, the labor movement and the environmental movement and draws a line in the sand over any of its candidates taking corporate money is LONG overdue.
Do not be fooled by any Democratic Party hack who is solely focused on their position within the party who tells you that you have to vote for them as the lesser of two corporate funded evils and there is nothing you can do about it.
The Republicans replaced the Whigs 150 years ago. It's about time for a new major party to come on the scene. There is no point in electing a corporate funded Democrat if they are just going to shill for the same corporate power as the Republicans.
We need to find a symbology that is not so easily perverted.
I would suggest The Bull Moose Party but they would have a field day with that "Bull".
Let's face it: more than 14,000 people make it their full-time job to, ahh, "influence" Congress. And they spend more than $3 billion a year (just ABOVE the board) doing that. (About 650 members total... you do the math.)
Our Constitution, in Article 2 Section 4, proscribed "zero tolerance" for corruption like this ... but hey, who gives a damn, there's money in it right? "If they are about to die, then they had better do it, and rid the world of its surplus population ..."