Partisanship: it has been worse

            News flash: the country is politically polarized.  How polarized is it, you ask?  Apparently, the Pew Research Center has found that the gap between Republicans who approve of President Obama and of Democrats who approve of him is the largest gap “of any president in the modern era.”  This could be cause for concern; or it could be, more likely, a sign of business as usual: name-calling and stone-throwing between the rabid free-market partisans on the right and the rabid social conscience ideologues on the left.

            Putting aside all the ignorant references to socialism, this type of partisanship is not too unusual in the larger context of history.  Even George Washington, our country’s first hero and the man whom we would have gladly let become our first dictator, was hindered by partisanship in his administration.  Alexander Hamilton, a veteran of the Revolution who wanted a strong federal government with a central bank to establish credit for the country, was constantly assailed by Thomas Jefferson, who misconstrued fiscal strength as a “stepping stone to monarchy” and decried the “stock-jobbers” and “heretics” who were ruining the young republic.

            Jefferson famously declared in his inaugural address, “We are all Federalists. We are all Republicans.”  However, in his second term he prodded the House of Representatives to impeach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase—not because he was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but because he was a High Federalist who criticized Jefferson from the bench.  The trial was presided over by Vice President Aaron Burr, who himself had just killed Hamilton in a duel stemming from the partisan feud that deprived Burr of the presidency in 1800.  To my knowledge, these unusual circumstances are not in danger of being repeated today.

            Furthermore, there are numerous instances in the nineteenth century of American politicians frustrating progress because of sectional or ideological concerns.  Most notably, northerners feared that slavery would expand into each new piece of territory that the country acquired; southerners were wary of northerners who passed tariffs to slow cotton exports and attempt to deprive them of their [slave] property. 

I don’t believe that any issue is as explosive today as slavery was back then; differing views on stem cells and of government-sponsored health care are only skin-deep.  The fact that Obama was elected with a moderate majority in the popular vote but a huge majority in the electoral college means that his message was spread to communities throughout the country, not limited to enthusiastic support in just the predictable sections.  This Obama presidency has the opportunity to “refound” the nation on a more equitable set of principles just as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt did.  But the opposition that Obama faces is merely an impediment to progress, not a threat to it.

            Finally, here is an example of what we’re not seeing from our contemporary partisans, even from Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. This is a clip from senate race of Virginia of 1994; Democrat Chuck Robb slings some wicked mud against his opponent, Oliver North, who was charged with several felonies for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.  Enjoy.

Disenfranchisement in the District

            Should people of the District of Columbia be allowed a vote in Congress?  It may not be constitutional, but it is the morally right thing to do.

             To be clear, the Constitution makes it explicit in a number of sections that federal representatives are for states only, with the Twenty-third Amendment stating that the District is entitled to presidential electors, just as “if it were a State”; though clearly it is not.  Nevertheless, the half-million residents of the federal city do pay taxes, defend our country, contribute to American commerce, and are affected by federal policy, thus it is entirely within the spirit of the law that those people have a voting representative in Congress.

            In the absence of a constitutional amendment, the current compromise—bestowing full-blown-congressman status on Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton as well as establishing a new district in Republican-leaning Utah—will likely be challenged in the Supreme Court.  But until that time arrives, the legislation is part of a long tradition of political compromise.  After all, the District itself was the product of a compromise.

            The story behind that involves two members of George Washington’s Cabinet, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, as well as Virginia congressman James Madison.  In 1790 Hamilton was frustrated that Congress would not accept his plan for organizing the nation’s finances after the Revolutionary War left $90 million of debt between the national government and the states.  He called for complete federal assumption of the whole booty so as to establish a system of credit, something which the southern states did not support.  By Jefferson’s account, he invited Hamilton and Madison to his house for dinner, during which Madison agreed to push for federal debt assumption in return for the promise that the new capital would be located in the South—conveniently on the border of his state and Maryland.  (This is a slight romanticization of the truth, since the compromise had been worked out before Jefferson injected himself into the issue.)

            Beyond the relatively clear-cut issue of whether to give D.C. a vote, the question also arises: how many votes to give them?  I think that the city is entitled to their representative in the House; giving the District two senators is, however, not necessary.  In looking at how the system is set up currently, congressmen represent districts, whereas senators represent states.  Going back to the days of the Founding, Madison wanted each state to have a number of senators proportional to its population.  But he eventually had to compromise with himself on that issue, the reasoning being that whereas each citizen had equal representation in the House, each state must have equal representation in the Senate.  This was in an era when regional differences and state loyalties were pervasive and when people were suspicious of a strong national government.  In short, senators directly represented state legislatures, not people, until 1913.

            I realize that it takes a selective reading of the Constitution to ignore the “state” requirement for House representatives while honoring the “state” requirement for senators.  But in looking at history and in the long-standing importance placed on equality and voting rights, it is not so gratuitous to give voice to a city that is home to both the very wealthy and the very impoverished; the very powerful and the very meek.

            Important people, average people, and curious people come from all over the world to the District.  It is imperative that the people’s representative at the heart of national and international decision-making be as equally influential as the most distant representatives of Alaska or Hawaii.

Change the Founders couldn’t believe in?

            Barack Obama’s election to the presidency is understood to mean redemption for our country—not only for eight years of an administration that shunned science, derided international opinion, tortured its captives, and put a partisan glaze on the justice system, but also for the centuries of slavery and discrimination imposed upon American blacks.  In one sense, the people of 2008 have vindicated Thomas Jefferson’s universally-recognizable declaration that all men are created equal.  But in another sense, we proved Jefferson wrong.

            Obama will begin to serve in 2009, two hundred years exactly Jefferson’s successor.  Our most famous Founding Father was a Virginian (who was better known for creating the new government rather than serving in it), a philosopher of the human condition, as well as a slaveholder.  He was not a particularly cruel master of the type Frederick Douglass had to endure, but he also choose not to free his slaves when opportune.  Indeed, Jefferson advised a friend against manumission, maintaining that doing so would be like “abandoning children” (an admission that was made all the more a propos by the fact that a handful of Jefferson’s slaves actually were his children, although he never acknowledged it).  This was not an unreasonable comparison, considering that conditions for freed blacks in other parts of the Union could be as deplorable as enslavement.

            Jefferson’s outlook on the African race is easy to vilify, particularly his pseudo-science on the biological differences between the two peoples—using such ironclad evidence as noting that the black male prefers white women for mates in the same way that the male orangutan prefers black women—as he searched for an explanation of blacks’ inferiority.  But his other approach to analyzing race relations was more accurate: he understood that sociologically blacks would always be inferior to whites as long as Americans conferred value on skin color.  Blackness was a stigma, in the way that people who use welfare or illegal immigrants are stigmatized today.  Blackness meant servitude and whiteness signified mastery: it was an institution where your race defined your role, and as a regime it could not be changed easily without another value system taking its place.

            Now, that’s not to say that Jefferson loved the idea of holding human beings in servitude, particularly in a democracy.  Indeed, a sizeable portion of his draft of the Declaration of Independence harangued King George III for violating the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him” by imposing slavery on the colonies.  Of course, that sentiment would never be echoed by the Southern colonies, but Jefferson saw the problem of an “immovable veil of black” that slavery presented.  He employed the metaphor of a wolf being held by the ears—too dangerous to either keep or let go.  Blacks and whites could never leave peacefully on the same continent, he thought, without a race war of horrific proportions.  Less than a hundred years after the country was founded, of course, such a prediction came true.

            In the long run, though, our system has worked.  I don’t think that Jefferson were alive today he would be surprised to see that legacies of slavery still exist today: high incarceration rates for black males, impoverished black families forming the core of urban centers, and low numbers of black children living in two-parent households.  But I also doubt he would be necessarily surprised that educated men and women of all races have risen to the top echelons of society.  He always held out hope that a more enlightened generation would fix the problems that his could not. 

            That is what Obama has been charged with in the twenty-first century—how to promote freedom in the world without losing the faith of his countrymen and his allies; how to encourage spending and homeownership for each citizen without toppling the world’s credit markets; how to pledge energy independence but not be held back by the false allure of low oil prices; how to bring civil rights to all Americans regardless of sexuality without redefining a universal institution.  Those issues would possibly be beyond Jefferson’s comprehension, but for a man who founded the University of Virginia, who valued universal public education, and who put scientific curiosity before religious superstition, he would certainly urge us towards progress.

            Just like the progress we have made by electing a black president.

John Edwards: His Final Campaign

            On Friday, former Democratic Senator John Edwards went on the record as having had an affair with a 44-year-old campaign contractor in 2006.  While his interview with ABC’s Bob Woodruff was not an apology (which Edwards technically does not owe to the public anyway), but it offered a different twist from the approaches of Larry Craig (admitting to have a “wide stance”), Mark Foley (admitting to be an alcoholic), or Elliot Spitzer (admitting he was a douche with his wife standing right next to him).  Edwards turned into the defense attorney rather than the defendant; the “closing argument” basically admonished the public for not forgiving him when clearly his two higher authorities—God and Wife—had.  Furthermore, he blamed an adoring society for taking a small-town boy in North Carolina and turning him into a sex-starved egotist.  And besides, John McCain admitted to having made mistakes with his first wife.  So at the end of the Edwards press conference/confessional, the two take-away points were that 1.) his family is dealing with the matter appropriately and 2.) who’s to say that John McCain didn’t bang a whore or two also?

For all of his coolness, Edwards did make a slightly dubious claim.  When asked why his wife was not present for the interview, he responded:

“She’s here, she’s right here (points to heart).  I can promise you that.  She is all the time.” 

You know, if she were inside his heart all the time, she would probably have been screaming, “Hey asshole, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” when he was in the process of tapping his mistress.  But besides that, Edwards is right to insist that the details be kept in the family and that the occurrence is not without precedent.  Thomas Jefferson, after all, fathered a shadow family with one of his light-skinned slaves—a behavior which was actually not uncommon among slaveowning patriarchs in the South.  When a scandalous newspaper editor seeking a post office position was shunned by the president, the man revealed Jefferson’s affair with “Dusky Sally,” which Jefferson and his family knew to be absolutely true.  (But it was not, in fact taboo to engage in such a practice in the South; it was merely taboo to talk about it.)  Anyway, the newspaper editor got drunk and drowned two years later and the point became moot until the availability of DNA testing revived the tale.

The editor of the National Enquirer, which broke the story fully in December 2007, told Larry King that he still has more dirt left on Edwards.  I wonder if any of that entails the revelation that Edwards killed Kurt Cobain or that he is secretly an alien.  No offense to the Enquirer, but for every story of senatorial malfeasance they nail, there are thousands of totally craptastic features:

I don’t blame the mainstream media for not picking up the story for more than half a year simply because it appeared in the tabloids (akin to “the boy who cried wolf” scenario), but they also genuinely seemed to have a problem with pinning down the source.  After all, the informant to the Enquirer could have simply collected the tip reward and kept his/her lips shut to anyone else, knowing that the tabloid’s reputation would preclude a full scale investigation.  But now that the details are known, some questions are left unanswered.

For example, which monies were used to pay for Rielle Hunter’s video-editing service—public contributions or private funds?  Hunter is certainly entitled to compensation for the Edwards campaign, but $114,000 paid to a newly-founded company seems exorbitant for four YouTube segments that, frankly, look like they were made by a computer-savvy intern with a basic knowledge of camera work.  Then there is the issue over Hunter’s child’s sire.  Edwards seemed willing to take a paternity test, but since Hunter now refuses, it could have been merely a bluff.  So is the admitted father, Andrew Young (a campaign finance adviser and friend of Edwards), merely a fall guy for the chief?  Was Edwards the second sperm-shooter on the grassy knoll?

Who knows?  But it’s hardly important right now.  His career as a public figure is probably over, and in time America will have its senses shocked by another politician who preaches moral absolutism but then reneges on his principles.  Truth be told, crookedness in the style of Senator Ted Stevens is more worrisome to me because of the direct impact financial coziness can have on legislation and appropriation of the people’s money; if a congressman needs to bang his camera girl in order to better focus on fighting poverty, c’est la vie.  Let’s cast Edwards to moral irrelevance and focus on the escalating Russo-Georgian conflict and innumerable other issues. 

And say, isn’t it awfully convenient that war broke out in Eastern Europe right after Edwards made the announcement?  It’s almost as if he planned the Russian invasion to divert media attention…whether it’s true or not, I hope that the fine investigative journalists at the National Enquirer will explore the connection.

8/12

And Then There Were Nine

            Temperament: chances are, you have one.  No, it’s not down there.  Up a littttttllle higher…there! Stop, that’s it, right there.  In fact, it is probably the only thing that keeps you, a lucid, amicable person from becoming a disagreeable douchebag.  For a Supreme Court Justice, temperament can make or break a judge’s credibility.  Did you realize, for example, that Warren Burger was hated by his colleagues for changing his vote at the last minute in order to write the most important opinions for the Court?  Or that Earl Warren personally persuaded the dissenters in Brown v. Board of Education to join the majority’s condemnation of segregation in order to become the unanimous decision that we know today?  It should come as no surprise that judicial temperament—a combination of how a judge views the law and how effectively he is able to convince others to adopt a pragmatic solution—is key to building coalitions in a business where five votes can change everything from free speech limitations in wartime to who becomes president.

            In his book, The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America, law professor Jeffrey Rosen compared the stories of influential individuals during each of the defining moments in the Court’s history to not only show their outlook towards the law (we generally define this in terms of liberal or conservative), but to what degree they were able to mold their Court around that set of beliefs.  It should come as no surprise that the more friendly and persuasive a judge is, he will be able to earn the esteem of colleagues more often than by harsh criticism and unwillingness to consider others’ views.  Really, this is true of any job, but when these people are appointed from the ranks of legislatures, lobbying groups, the White House, and lower courts—each with different life experiences, agendas to push, and egos to stroke—coalitions can be valuable.

            Take our third Chief Justice, John Marshall, as a case study.  Before his tenure on the Court he was a minuteman in Washington’s army during the Valley Forge winter, John Adams’s Secretary of State, and a Federalist representative of Virginia to Congress.  Marshall was elected in a primarily Republican district but his personality won over voters and would continue to win over colleagues.  He was an unpretentious man who wore black robes to court rather than the customary crimson and who once, as Chief Justice, carried his own turkey through his hometown of Richmond, whereupon he was mistaken for a servant and was tossed a sympathetic coin for his troubles.  Marshall insisted that the Justices room together in Washington, D.C., and they would socialize over a box of his Madeira.  Starting with the Marbury v. Madison decision of 1803, Marshall sought to expand the power of the federal judiciary to review and deny congressional acts and executive orders that did not accord with the Constitution.

 His main rival was Thomas Jefferson, who, aside from being an elite philosophical loner, took very personally Marshall’s affronts against his administration.  Jefferson was horrified that, of the three Republican Justices he appointed to the Court, there were only nine dissents between them during their tenures.  He urged Congress to impeach Justice Samuel Chase for personal attacks against him.  He lauded Marshall’s “twistifications” of the law as the antithesis of majority rule.  And he hated that John Marshall issued only one opinion for the entire Court, for the purpose of giving the institution one mighty voice.  Jefferson called for the Court to issue opinions seriatim, or separately; which is strange considering that this was the practice of British courts and Jefferson was suspicious of all things British.  In the end, the Court came to reflect Marshall’s legal outlook more so than Jefferson’s because Jefferson, known more as a respected philosopher than an accommodating politician (the Declaration of Independence, proposal of secession, the “revolution” of 1800—all were products of Jefferson’s penchant for majority rule) whose personal ideology trumped the legitimacy of the institution.

A similar situation arises with the more recent pairing of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia.  Scalia is the longstanding punching bag of liberals, the media, and even his own colleagues because of a militantly linear conservative ideology.  Furthermore, he, unlike his colleagues, craves media attention and is not shy about making controversial statements in public, including a Sicilian gesture to a reporter that many interpreted as lewd.  His dissenting opinions are filled with apocalyptic and accusatory statements toward the majority, complaining that they dictate what “the political branches ought to do.”  The more he has hawked his philosophy of original intent the more vulnerable he is to criticism for hypocrisy, such as when he sided against congressional and state prerogative to decide the 2000 presidential election in order to install a Republican president, although in clear opposition to pure conservative ideology.

Rehnquist, by contrast, largely stayed out of the media’s eye except when discussing one of his books.  Like Marshall, he was unpretentious and, when attending a judges’ convention in New Orleans, stopped by a Lutheran church to join in the services.  When each person had to stand and introduce himself, Rehnquist merely described himself as a “government lawyer.”  He was not afraid of moderating his ideology to form consensus and his dissenting opinions showed no anger towards the majority.  Although as an associate justice under Warren Burger he was more independent minded and ideologically driven (and still reeling from criticism over a pro-segregation memo), as Chief Justice he built a coalition among the pragmatically-minded on the Court, Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O’Connor. 

Thus it is no surprise that the most effective judges are not the ones who make the most noise, but those who build the strongest coalitions.  That is not to say that one must compromise their beliefs, but rather do their best to persuade and convince others to adopt the point of view without being bombastic and apocalyptic.

7/22