SECTION 1 & PERFECTION

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

650,000 people died so that these sacred words could have the opportunity to breathe life into a new nation; fulfilling the promises of an antecedent document that had been more or less discarded by the time of the Constitutional Convention. Tens of thousands of other people were forced to die before their time in addition to those lost on the battle fields just to add these two sentences to our Constitution.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal….

Oh, the great changes promised by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment were not immediately implemented.

Not like the dictates of the 13^th Amendment.

And the 15^th Amendment was immediately implemented upon its ratification and then, ten years later, all but ignored for almost a century.

Great changes take time, even when the blood of a large percentage of a population is shed in the historical blink of an eye.

The beauty of Section 1 is its simplicity. It is so short and soooooo very sweet; and so very hopeful.
And it includes the poetry of Jefferson molded by Radical Republicans into the most important Constitutional provision of all time; radicals who knew the importance of ratifying such poetry as soon as possible; as if those wise men knew that there was a window of opportunity that might slip away.


Oh our courts, pressured by less idealistic politicians and lobbyists were slow to apply the ideals present in Section 1.

Well the words never meant absolute equality, wrote the robed shamans who were chosen to implement this new ideal into their deliberations.

Well, due process is a little vague and might even be thought to be in the minds of the beholders said our shamans.

But beginning in the ‘30’s a new, more idealistic group of robed shamans came up with an idea; a new manner in which they could implement the ideals of Section 1.

Why not look to the list of Constitutional Protections created at the same time that our nation became a nation. Why not use the dictates contained in the Bill of Rights? Rights that only applied to the relationship between U.S. Citizens and the Federal Government but never to the relationship between U.S. Citizens and state governments.

And within 30 years, almost all of the promises contained in the Bill of Rights were adopted by our Supreme Court; and also with the necessary help of Congress and various Presidents.
Alabama could no longer maintain that the Bill of Rights applied only to Federal Law and had nothing to do with the citizens of Alabama.

And northern cities could no longer maintain that the Bill of Rights had nothing to do with property ownership.
And some local political group running some ‘machine’ could not cut off a person’s right to free speech in order to fend off competition in the voting booth.

There are thousands of pages containing some of the finest political and statesmanlike language ever written in those Supreme Court decisions.


However, those changes in our government’s perspective toward individual rights are always subject to attack. Individual rights might be written in a constitution, recited in court decisions and etched in stone but there has always been and will continue to be THE STRUGGLE to maintain those rights.
So it is written:

On Monday, Rand Paul announced that he is joining Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) in cosponsoring the Life at Conception Act. The law would declare that a person's life begins at conception. Paul and Wicker reason that by becoming legal persons protected under the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the laws, then it will override the constitutional right to an abortion that the Supreme Court found in Roe v. Wade.
Of course, if fetuses had all the rights of a person, it might lead to interpretations that—ironically, given that Paul campaigned on a strong commitment to privacy and liberty,—would vastly expand government power. For example, if a pregnant woman smokes or drinks alcohol, or simply eats unhealthily, could she face prosecution for reckless endangerment of a child? In any case, Paul confidently predicted that "passage of the Life at Conception Act would reverse Roe v. Wade without the need for a constitutional amendment."
But he is not averse to amending the Constitution when necessary. On Thursday, Paul and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) introduced a resolution that would amend the Constitution to prevent children born to illegal immigrants from gaining automatic citizenship. Under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which Paul and Vitter oppose, citizenship is given automatically to anyone born on U.S. soil. So Paul wants to expand the 14th Amendment to cover the fertilized embryos of American citizens while restricting it to exclude the babies of illegal immigrants. It's not clear where the fetus in an illegal immigrant's uterus would fit into this equation.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-28/rand-pauls-abortion-immigration-hypocrisy/

These fascist pricks wish to screw with perfection, the perfection contained in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

And you should never FUCK WITH PERFECTION.

Before I get into possible language that would be used by the likes of Curly Rand Paul and Steve King et. al., let us examine the consequences of their ideas concerning new definitions of ‘citizenship’.
First, what would be the consequences of declaring that citizenship does not begin with birth, but upon coitus leading to birth.

You know the Japanese add 9 months to the age of their citizens. So a Japanese baby born on the same day as an American baby is 9 months older according to this Asian perspective.

So if a baby is born in the United States (simplifying the possibilities here), the normal course is for the doctor and nurse/midwife to note the date and time of the birth on some form provided by the state. Within due course, the mother signs a form along with the father (hopefully) and these forms are sent to the state birth records department.

And Vwella, a birth certificate issues.

But if we have a constitutional mandate that the individual was ‘born’ at the time the mother’s egg split in two, we have a problem.

If a sperm can take as long as two weeks to fertilize an egg, how does one determine when the individual is born?


And what if mommy and daddy had coitus on May 2^nd in Mexico and they immigrated to the U.S. on May 9^th and the baby was birthed in Minneapolis on December 9^th two months ‘early’?


Was the baby ‘born’ in Mexico on May 2^nd, the date of coitus?

Now what if the other constitutional provision proposed by the fascists demanding that the child be born in the USA and that at least one of the parents is a naturalized citizen. And assume further that the naturalized citizen was not naturalized officially until after the mother bore the child; and assume further that the child was ‘created’ in the Bahamas on some moonlit night?

Like some of those Constitutional Lawyers, we could go on and on here with four hundred pages of ‘what-ifs’.

I can only conclude with one simple thought:

DO NOT FUCK WITH PERFECTION!!

LEAVE MY 14^TH AMENDMENT ALONE!!!

Tears

Maybe the Speaker started something. If men are now allowed to cry in public, the one writing these words have certainly availed himself of this new privilege in the past two weeks. From hearing that Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes and the heroism of so many who allowed her to live, and saved as many lives as possible when her fears were realized and a young man who was so easily able to purchase a gun to kill her, to hearing again the first words I can recall having been spoken as a president was inaugurated, the tears have flown very freely.

They came while praying for Congresswoman Gifford’s recovery, when I heard that the woman who wrote the music to the very words Reform Jews say in those circumstances, herself died of the pneumonia which resulted from a too brief lifetime filled with illness. They came when watching others sing songs of praise to that woman, Debbie Friedman, and then a few days later, when watching fourth graders in Washington D.C. read the famous words spoken there by Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr, in the summer of 1963. And it is completely impossible to stay dry eyed as the nation listened again the words that first entered the unformed mind of an eight year old who has felt for every minute since then the need to fulfill the President’s command that he ask what he can do for his country.

It was the first civil event which remains in my memory bank. I saw it because school was cancelled by the northeastern snow storm that day and there was nothing else on television. Much of what President Kennedy said that day meant nothing to me, but some it hit home in an unformed mind where its words, repeated so many times since then, are fully etched today.

The speech itself has been quoted under this name so many times, it seems pointless to do so in any great length here. The NBC News coverage anchored, of course, by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley has been posted for some time and is well worth the hour plus it takes to watch.

That coverage could cause a tear or two to be shed because of how long gone that hopeful time seems to be. A recent book about the speech by Thurston Clarke is fascinating particularly in what it says about President Kennedy himself and how foreign his approach to the speech, much less the presidency itself, is to today's way of thinking (or of avoiding thought).

In putting the speech and its crafting in context, Clarke returns the original meaning the President intended when he told the world that we would

pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty

was not a call to arms ("though arms we need") but a foreshadow of the signature line of the speech:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country

These words reached the people inspired by them, including this Public Servant, in a much different world than we live in today. It was a world of limitless possibilities, as "President Barlet" described it more recently and not a place where every new idea is met with skepticism and doubt.

No, Senator Lieberman: President Kennedy would not be a Republican today. He would be grossly disappointed, as was his recently departed brother, Sen Edward M Kennedy, with a Congress converted from an instrument of policy into a perpetual campaign for re-election. He would not be happy to see a country avoid its most serious problems and would never sit still while we poured our country's wealth into the coffers of foreign dictators in possession of a fossil fuel we have decided is worth forfeiting our soul for, rather than standing for

the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought...--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God....--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

President Kennedy, far more than his father, a member of the Roosevelt administration, believed in the New Deal and sought to expand it to what he called a New Frontier. He tried with all his power to convince Congress to enact some expanded health care at least for those who needed it most and for the end of the accepted roadblocks preventing some of our citizens to enjoy even the basic rights accorded to the majority of us.

And then he was murdered, and in some form or another, those bills were enacted by a Congress in shame. He died in an atmosphere of hate, as discussed here last week but, as also discussed last week, no literal connection could be made between his assassination and the noise of the day, just as none could be made of Congresswoman Gifford's would be assassin and the same drumbeat today.

All the words about the speech of fifty years past and the current President's beautiful address in Tuscon the other day present the antithesis of that darkness, which dominates our civic and economic lives today. And, yes, as President Kennedy said

civility is not a sign of weakness

but the selfish rants of those uninterested in what they can do for their country, but how much money they can make from its citizens, and their shrill defenders have all but shattered the dreams we all had as President Kennedy told us to "begin."

The university where our current president spoke the other day, houses a political science professor emeritus who wrote a book a few years back called “Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists.”

He sent this to the New York Times which published it earlier this week:

To the Editor:

Over a long academic career, I have researched and written about 21 American assassins, would-be assassins and domestic terrorists. It is pure nonsense to suggest, as some have, that the political environment has nothing to do with the actions of very disturbed individuals — as Jared L. Loughner appears to be — who plan and attack political figures in public venues.

James W. Clarke
Tucson, Jan. 14, 2011

And so we cry.

Glass Houses

Sheriff Dupnik

Let me say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences.

The Sheriff did not accuse anybody but the shooter of attempting to murder Congresswoman Giffords, a personal friend of his, and of the murder of Judge Roll, another friend of his, the nine year old Christina Taylor Green, and so many others while seriosuly wounding even still others. Some people did: they were wrong. Neither Gov Palin's obscene literature literally targeting Congresswoman Giffords, nor Sharron Angle's suggestions of impending "Second Amendment remedies" can be said to be a specific call to murder a congresswoman.

Bill O'Reilly's repeated description of a doctor who preformed legal abortions as "Tiller the killer" did not specifically call or his murder either and it one can do nothing more than speculate as to whether the person who did kill Dr. Tiller would have done so, without O'Reilly's repeated mantra.

But Sheriff Dupnik was not proposing government action against free speech either. He was asking people to control themselves: It may be "free" speech, but still it comes with a price.

That this is considered, in some quarters, incendiary, worthy of the Sheriff's impeachment or electoral defeat may be the worst thing, other than the physical pain and deaths, that has followed this horrible event.

In second place would be this:

Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?
TTL REP DEM IND APRIL 2010
Justified 16 28 11 11 16
Never justified 76 64 81 81 79
DK/NA 8 8 8 8 5

Over a quarter of a major political party think that violent action against the government might be justified?

Here's one of them, in a link from a post last weekend. This is an elected Republican--not some guy in the woods, on Meet the Press, commenting in August, 2009 about a person who flew a plane into an IRS office:

MR. GREGORY: ...I am talking about violence against the
government. That's what this is synonymous with.

SEN. COBURN: The, the--but the tone is based on fear of loss of control
of their own government. What, what is the genesis behind people going to
such extreme statements? What is it? We, we have lost the confidence, to a certain degree, and it's much worse than when Tom was the, the, the
leader of the Senate. We have, we have raised the question of whether or
not we're legitimately thinking about the American people and their
long-term best interests. And that's the question. The, the mail volume
of all the senators didn't go up based on the healthcare debate, the mail
volume went up when we started spending away our future indiscriminately.
And that's not Republican or Democrat, that has been a problem for years.
But it's exacerbated now that we're in the kind of financial situation
and economic situation.

This is not the kind of answer any elected official should give, much less a doctor. To say that it is understandable why a person would kill others is reprehensible, whether it has a direct connection to an act of violence. Yet, as E.J. Dionne and Rachel Maddow pointed out on Thursday, many of those who so strongly oppose any form of gun control no longer do so as sports enthusiasts or hunters, or even for protection against criminals, but to enable them to oppose a tyrannical government.

It is of course, very easy to talk about what others, who do not agree with oneself, should do or say. Censorship is, of course, wrong, aside from being unconstitutional. And we cannot be in fear of words with which we do not agree. This space
has found it quite incredible when people calling themselves progressives or liberal begin to froth at the mouth at some of the silliest "provocations". Moreover, we have our share of over the top commentary, especially in the pages of Daily Kos. (This is not a reason to condemn Daily Kos; quite the contrary, really. It is a basis for suggesting our side is not free of foolish and excessive commentaries on the motives and ideas of public servants with whom we do not always agree.)

Is, for instance, "Hillary...a Lunatic Right-Wing Hawk" or the "war monger" described with much approval in those pages during the 2007-2008 period? (9+ / 0-). Should the President of the United States be referred to as "slime"?

No suggestion of an equivalency, false or not, should be seen here. And, one---we surely learned this in first grade somewhere---hardly justifies the other. President Clinton was routinely referred to as a murderer, and the barely printable things that are said about the current president go well beyond name calling when, as noted here last weekend and previously, that include prayers for his death.

The line drawn between this kind of speech and people shooting politicians does not have to be explicit to be of concern. Just as we have no specific idea as to what made Congresswoman Giffords so important to her would be assassin, there was, in the Warren Commission's words:

no evidence that the extreme views expressed toward President Kennedy by some rightwing groups centered in Dallas or any other general atmosphere of hate or rightwing extremism which may have existed in the city of Dallas had any connection with Oswald's actions on November 22, 1963. There is, of course, no way to judge what the effect of the general political ferment present in that city might have been...

the Commission devoted a fair amount of space in their report, as linked above and here, in discussion of roughly the same extreme noise directed against a President of the United States elected as the nominee of the Democratic Party as we have seen since even before the current president was elected. Look at this thing being distributed in Dallas as President Kennedy arrived, and this full page advertisement which ran in a Dallas newspaper on the day of his murder.

And after all we have read about this week's murderer, the similarity of his nonsense to this, about President Kennedy' assassin, should make those who would, in Sheriff Dupnik's words, pooh-pooh the idea that a tolerance for craziness, and its encouragement by politicians eager for any vote, is a recipe for chaos, whether specific acts can be directly traced to specific statements. This is not about Loughner but Oswald, but it is hard to see much difference:

His wife testified that he compared himself with great readers of history. Such ideas of grandeur were apparently accompanied by notions of oppression. He had a great hostility toward his environment, whatever it happened to be

When those of us old enough to have seen this exact same story unfold over and over again, with little difference, but no change in policy because there is no way to specifically connect each event to precise legislative action or failures, we begin to wonder whether we are just lucky to have made it through the maelstrom.

------

One little postscript is required: We all loved the President's speech the other night, and most of us understood the somewhat odd reaction of an audience mourning the dead and supporting the injured but the idea that it is the President who has changed, rather than that the audience has decided in the aftermath of these events, to pay attention to him the way they did before his election requires a link to just two of his most sensational addresses of the past year, which apparently many have missed. Michigan commencement, Carnegie-Mellon Watching them will underscore the view, acceptable once again this week, that we are dealing with a quite extraordinary man serving as President. Sadly or not, he is neither a dictator or monarch, but he is the best there is in our nation's capitol. As President Kennedy told us almost exactly fifty years ago, though, whether we move forward as a nation depends on us, and not just the president. But that's next week's post.

November 22 (a repeat)

To try to repeat or somehow add to what Articleman posted last night or what Sheriff Dubnik, a hero way before yesterday, but his heroism renewed last night, told the nation, is an absurdity. They said it all. Yet, all of us with a keyboard need to vent, and to say what we all know to be so.

But, for me,time is precious today and, rather than write something new, I want to just republish something that appeared first on November 22, 2009. I post every year on that date: a searingly important one to so many of us of a certain age, but this one addressed the issue of today. I make no claims of special insight or eloquence, but linking to it does not seem sufficient since this diary says almost exactly what I want to say now after what happened yesterday. The Sheriff, a true hero and not just because of yesterday, said it all, but that won’t stop me from saying more.

This is what appeared here (well, TPM Cafe) in 2009:



It means only one thing to those of us of a certain age. It was the day of days, the event of our national lives. That it no longer is the focus of every succeeding November 22 tells us that one day even September 11 will pass without substantial notice. Yet whether cable television devotes every moment to reliving a national nightmare, its importance remains the same and, as Mad Men showed so well a few weeks back, any recollection of that day can trigger many floods, even among those who, unlike some of us, were very, very young that day.

Yes, I was called up short when Mad men's creator, Matt Weiner, mentioned that not everyone knows that Oswald was murdered only a few days after the President was killed, since there is no American who was over five years old at the time who doesn't remember that and the sense, at that very minute, that we had spun completely out of control exactly as Mad Men reminded us.

And, yes, Mad Men was also right in the sense that the world just ended that day and began again, with different values, different history, and different rules. The guilt and sadness over the death of our young President resulted, it is true, in the seminal legislation of our time, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, and medicaid and medicare also in 1965. But the spirit of the era was gone and gone, it seemed, forever.

Ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country.

That sense of obligation to our fellow citizens, the articulation of the underpinning of Roosevelt's New Deal but now in the hands of

a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world

President Kennedy's death marked the end of an era, not the beginning he had promised us and his hopeful ideals for the country were replaced, first, by the war in Vietnam, followed by the war on the Great Society and then of the New Deal itself. The election of President Obama is the first thing that has happened since then which provides even a hint that we can get back on the path President Kennedy set for us.

But as much as Matt Weiner offered a reminder of how many people have no recollection of November 22, 1963, a diary on Daily Kos the other day shows that the path to darkness remains before us as well. We live in a time when a person with a Jewish sounding last name who blogs about the limits of Sarah Palin's appeal receives an email about "Why People Like to Stuff People Like You into Ovens." This is the combustible atmosphere that existed in 1963. Deny that at your own peril.

The diarist advised that we not fear the people who are out there---the "crazies" as Regina Spektor calls them---and that advice is worth trying to heed, but it will not be easy.

Over and over the reminders take over this space.

We are living in a time when a doctor providing abortions is murdered and people cheer or try to justify it.

We are living in a time when elected officials can appear on Meet the Press and justify threats of violence and even the overthrow of our government and are not hooted into an apology or oblivion.

We live in a time when a man proudly brags about the gun he brought to a rally where the President of the United States was speaking and yet this incident gets less coverage than whether some guy tried to hoodwink cable tv (big woop) by claiming his boy was in a balloon.

We live in a time when people are "praying" for the President of the United States hoping for his death.

We live among hate.

Hate cost us a president and almost two generations of progress. It is countenanced today by people who should know better and there appear to be nobody or very few in the Republican Party willing to speak out against it, the way the otherwise racist William F. Buckley did against the John Birch Society
or even Sen Prescott Bush spoke out against, tepidly, the "methods" used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist crusades.

Part of this day, as every November 22 since 1963, will be spent mourning our late President, but the day should also be dedicated to never allowing this hatred to change our world again.

Politics

If, as seems reasonable, you read everything posted under this name and carefully consider all the biases expressed here, you would know how much Rachel Maddow has contributed to what gets regurgitated every week. Hers is the most significant broadcast there is, and the sanity she projects in this land of crazy may be all that keeps us from just running outside and screaming into the night.

It was Timothy Crouse and Hunter Thompson who first explained to this blogger the pack mentality of what used to be called "the press" although if I weren't s young when I read the Drury Advice and Consent series that education might have come earlier, albeit from the right hand side of our politics. Which is fine.

What Rachel Maddow has become is the antidote. Much like Jon Stewart does (sorry, Jon, we take you more seriously than you would like) she takes the Official Meme of the Moment and examines it critically to see whether there is anything to support it. Sometimes there is but never to the level the blow dried haircuts try to convey, and usually she, or Jon, or Keith Olbermann or Lawrence O'Donnell are able to put what passes for thought in the perspective it deserves, which is usually to say, none.

My favorite recent for instance is a line that has come at us fairly slowly but which seemed to pick up steam around 2007 which, not coincidentally was the most recent time when the Democratic Party won what might be called "organizational control" of both houses of Congress from the Republican Party. A little research tells us, indeed, it was Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in waiting following the 2006 election, who announced that, with that "everyone knows this" voice that almost always fools the beltway crowd:

the minority in the Senate is almost never irrelevant, particularly a robust minority of 49. The Senate was constructed by our founding fathers, and then the subsequent evolution of the filibuster rule has turned the Senate into an institution that really can only operate on a bipartisan basis. It takes 60 votes - not 51 - to do virtually everything in the Senate. Neither side has had 60 in the two decades that I've been in the Senate. So in order to accomplish something for America, we have to be able to put together deals that make sense. Otherwise, the minority party's in a position with a mere 41 votes to prevent passage of almost anything. The majority leader's job is much tougher. He has got to get 60.

So the pack described by Drury, Crouse and Thompson repeated that teaching, with the knowing, insider's wink, about how all the rest of us fools who think that legislation can pass the Senate if a majority favor it, hadn't a clue about the real world. Everyone knows it takes a supermajority: a vote for cloture, to pass anything in the Senate. Founding Fathers, y'know, and all that....

Never mind that only 3 years or so earlier, Vice President Cheney got to vote to break a 50-50 tie and remove taxes on dividends and in 2005 so that they could cut medicaid benefits. Everybody knows you need 60 votes, not 51.

Yes, yes, I know the Cheney votes were critical because of the budget reconciliation rules, or exception, or something about Senator Byrd, and will address that in a way, in the following few paragraphs. Moreover, we need here brief aside about researching the vote on historic legislation. Because of the way legislatures, including both houses of the federal Congress, operate, it is difficult in retrospect to figure out what vote, if any, was the reason something passes. Often the key vote is on an amendment and, when that passes, everybody jumps in and supports the bill so that their vote cannot be used against them in a subsequent election. This is known as the "I was for it, before I was against it" doctrine, named after Senator Kerry's well meaning, but ultimately wrongheaded attempt to explain this to a public which prefers slogans to reality.

The point is not whether 51 votes should be enough, or 60 or 67. The point is that it is not because "everybody knows" that 60 votes are needed. The point is that 60 votes are needed because somebody has demanded that. The first person with access to large numbers of people to notice this was, at least to the ear and eyes of this consumer of news, Rachel Maddow early in 2007:

Traditionally, constitutionally, you need a majority of votes to pass something in the U.S. Senate. In extraordinary circumstances, a weird rule called “the filibuster” could be used to block an upper down majority vote on something. Sixty senators would have to vote to shut down the filibuster—extraordinary circumstances. That‘s how these filibusters worked for—I don‘t know, say the entire existence of the United States Senate.

Through, say, the 1980s and 1990s, it was normal to have 20 or 30 cloture votes, 20 or 30 filibusters during a given session of Congress. That started to pick up a bit in the mid-90s to about -- 50 votes. When Democrats were in the minority in 2005/2006, there were 54 cloture votes, Republicans freaked out about that publicly. They threatened the nuclear option to end the filibuster rule to take away that power in the Senate.

Then what did the Republicans do in the very next Congress when they became the minority? One hundred and twelve cloture votes. That‘s 112 --

One-one-two.

Look, I am all for the Constitution, I‘m all for as being protected from the tyranny of the majority. I dig it. I like arcane rules that protect minority rights—duh. But this seems sort of anti-small “d” Democratic. It seems like this rule is not being used as intended.

Exactly. Perfect. Except she should have stopped there. She did not, and what she said next was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that in its wrongness she made the real point in issue. Here is what she said:

The Republicans search for meaning by the way of the filibuster threat is having a tangible effect. It‘s making the American people hate them. The approval rating for congressional Democrats, just that you know, it‘s up 25 points from a month ago. Independents, their approval rating is up 12 points. The approval rating for congressional Republicans is down, that‘s fallen four points over the past month.

The GOP‘s “obstruct at all costs” strategy is making them unpopular. The practical policy effect they‘re having is to essentially just water down things that the Democrats are passing anyway. And they are behaving in such a radical way that it‘s causing even constitutionalists minority rights dorks like me to seriously consider the wisdom of scrapping some of the rules that I would otherwise cherish because it turns out that those rules assume a level of good faith and keeping the country‘s interests at heart. That just isn‘t in evidence right now.

We know Rachel was wrong because, rather than make the Republicans unpopular, as it should have, the strategy actually worked. People on our side of the political fence jumped all over the President for compromising on legislation even though his party supposedly "controlled" both houses of Congress. People who flit back and forth between the various schools of what passes for political thought watched Congress' vacillation, its inability to get anything done and the weak tea it produced and cast a pox on anyone who has anything to do with it. By last November, it was out with the ins and in with the outs. Republicans take the House, and gain in the Senate.

And that is where the issue is. It is not the rules that need to be changed, even if they could be, something quite unlikely in any material sense, as will be discussed below. The reason for the rise in the use of the filibuster, the reason Senator McConnell's "everybody knows" moment was brilliant---as in Lex Luthor brilliant---was because if requiring 60 votes to do anything is accepted as a reasonable thing to do, then it is a reasonable thing to do, and the ploy becomes reality---you really do need 60 votes.

Reconciliation, and later, the so-called "Byrd rules" were, in a way, the cause of all of this, as it attempted to be, and is in some ways, a solution. But it is a band-aid placed out there, where it was agreed that a filibuster could not be used to prevent the passage of legislation that keeps the government in operation: budget reconciliation. The Byrd rule, named after Senator Byrd because he was the majority leader when this was all agreed to, meant that this no filibuster thing would be limited to bills that actually have something to do with the federal budget.

It is a good thing we have this exception, but it is a bad thing, too. It meant that filibusters would not be used in the way that the public would object to the most, and object to to the point of wanting the whole filibuster thing ended. It took the pressure off.

When the Senate was a collegial body, say, up until the Byrd rules, it often acted as a secret, somewhat bipartisan, club. Except on the big things, what was called senatorial courtesy kept the filibuster from being overused, but also prevented a federal judge from being confirmed if one of the Senators from the nominee's state objected to the nomination. The filibuster was limited to things that a vocal minority, not necessarily on partisan grounds, objected to.

The famous ones of my youth, 1958, 1962, and the failed 1964 and 1965 ones against the civil and voting rights acts, were largely the work of what were then called "southern Democrats" but largely against the interests of the national Democratic Party. The Senate Majority Leader in 1958, himself a nominal southerner, tried to stop that filibuster before the bill became worthless mush, because he had national ambitions. (Maybe that leader, his name was Lyndon Johnson, by the way, did not have his heart in that fruitless exercise as some have charged. Maybe he did. No matter. It was not to be broken, and really took the murder of President Kennedy and a nation's feeling of guilt and remorse over that, to finally get these bills passed, to be signed, ironically, by President Johnson whose work, and speeches made up for any failures in 1958.)

But that clinches the argument. It is the public that needs to stop this. Rules changes will not do it, since there are always other ways to stall and tie up the Senate which requires "unanimous consent" to do anything at least one hundred times a day. The public needs to see what Senator McConnell has accomplished and revolt in the way Rachel Maddow thought they were doing in 2009.

Some blogger expressed the idea in late 2009 that Senator Reid could stop what Senator Byrd had agreed to:
the idea that the threat of a filibuster was the same as the filibuster itself.

The blogger said:

If Republicans want to keep suggesting the absence of a quorum, to prevent the Senate from voting on a good health care insurance reform bill (preferably a medicaid for all bill, but one with at least some government agency which will provide competitive insurance for those unwilling to accept the gouging of a private money making company with a ballpark named after it) then let them do it. No, it will not be covered on live tv except C-SPAN (the cable nets have flying balloons to cover and would not have time to show quorum call after quorum call, but the fact that the Senate is unable to do any business for this reason will be reported, and, from time to time in this ordeal, perhaps over 50 some odd Democratic Senators could sit in the chamber so that the absurdity of the suggestion of the absence of a quorum was illustrated in a way the fools we live with could understand and the American people would see why they are being denied what a majority of them want.

A House of Representatives that spends its first days reading, a sentence at a time, the parts of the Constitution that seem biblical in tone, and then devote a week to passing a bill with a name that shows its political intent as much as anything, which cannot pass the Senate and would be vetoed if it could, is not interested in governing as much as it is in politics. That is what the Senate has been about since 2006. If the answer to that is a pox on all their houses we are sunk. If the truth be told---that one party has abdicated any interest in the the fate of the nation and cares only about elections (witness, for instance, the obscene number of Senators who voted against the nuclear arms treaty with Russia---including much of the Republican leadership), then maybe we are on to something.

Those of us who have worked in government, as appointees of politicians, have a firm idea of what is government and what are politics. A politician who briefly was a boss, misunderstood the constant line drawing that is done and asked what we had against politics. Your blogger said he had nothing against it---loves it, as a matter of fact---but that is not what he is paid to do. That line seems almost quaint today, though most of us appointee types still follow it. The electeds, at least those in legislative bodies, federal and, at least where I live, state as well, seem to no longer recognize that there is a time for politics, but a time for governing.

So, that brings us back to the filibuster and the need for the public to curb it by showing disgust for its misuse. Changing the rules will not end it---there is always a loophole and a trick around a rules change. Moreover, my beloved Ms. Maddow, her fellow traveller, Keith Olbermann and their frequent replacement, Chris Hayes, three real heroes to me without qualification keep saying something about the Senate's right to change its rules on the "first day" of the "session" as if this is some clearly expressed thing in the Constitution.

It is not. All the Constitution says, as relevant here is that

"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings..."

ART 1, SEC 5.

It doesn't say anything about the beginning of a "session" but only that that "The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year" art 1, sec 4, and, under the 20th Amendment "such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day."

So while someone might say the "first day" of the Senate is that day, that would be
so if the Senate stopped existing every two years, but the Constitution does not say that. And "the rules" which the Constitution says each house may adopt, include this rule which the Senate (or "a Senate," if you insist), adopted:

"The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules."

Rule 5.

Some may not like this rule and there is an argument that it violates at least the spirit of the Constitution in that it allows dead people to bind the Senate forever, but laws passed by dead people continue, and there is not hard and fast answer to this question. All there is an argument. And given the fact that the Supreme Court is quite unlikely to intrude on the Senate's view of its own rules, that's all we have: an argument.

And, just so we don't get further confused there's this: If the Senate rules continue from Congress to Congress, without being adopted anew (the House has a different approach), those rules include this little kicker in the Mondale amendment of 1975, in Rule 22 about how to invoke cloture:

"if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn -- except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting -- then said measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of."

Sen Mondale agreed to this. It means that rules changes go by the old rule: not 2/3rds or even 3/5ths of the body as a whole, but 2/3rds of the Senators in the room at the time of the cloture vote.

It is a great disservice to all those who fought against filibusters to make it sound so easy to change the rules. If that was so, the Senate Majority
Leader Johnson of Texas, would absolutely have done the deed in 1958. He was no fool, and knew what had to be done to break the Southern filibusters of civil rights legislation. He wanted to run for President two years later and knew that he had to do something to distance himself from the deep south, but this was something he
could not do. Neither could his successor Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, another strong leader, who would have done what you suggest if it were that easy.

There is one way that comes to my mind, and it is the so-called "nuclear option" dreamed up by Vice President Cheney. It would have Vice President Biden rule
that the Senate ruled need to be readopted from scratch every two years and cannot be subject to unlimited debate (though the second half of that flies in the face of 240 years of precedent). But he is the president of the Senate. The Senate parliamentarian would certainly disagree, but his determination is not binding. It can be upheld by a majority vote under Rule 20 which requires that it be
decided "without debate."

We win that one, but the precedent that any Vice President can make ad hoc rulings where his party controls the Senate is a very dangerous precedent, I think, which is why most liberals opposed it when Vice President Cheney floated it.

Don't let anybody fool you. This is a very tricky issue and not one easily resolvable. The only solution is, as always, citizen action and that, when against the money that disguised as campaign contributions is where the heart of Congress lies, and the pretend news that doesn't have a clue about how to report on any of this, is a daunting task, to be sure, but it is the only way.

Facing the Music

It was observed in passing yesterday, and probably not just here, that as a day of reckoning, today---New Year's Day---is a bit scary and never painless. The Jewish version of the new year adds the little "book of life contest"---who gets to be in it, and, ummmm, who not, but the secular version, with its resolutions and such, could drive a person to drink, which explains a few things. At least it is not the occasion a decade ago when we all had to consider how we managed to waste a whole millennium.

Rather than look backward, then, it might be a good time to look ahead. Loudon Wainwright III, singing about the beginning of the school year as summer ends described a time when

the hiatus is ending
the lax living has to stop
get rid of that beer belly
do wind sprints til you drop

and this seems to be as good a time as any for us to follow the President's invocation as he took office almost two years ago

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history;

To do that, we need to face facts, yes the actual things themselves, not to pretty pictures painted for us. We need to understand this

And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

is what inevitably leads to this where streets remained unplowed in a major city two days after a storm:



or bridges begin to collapse near another metropolis



or coal mines, no longer subject to rigorous inspection or regulation, explode.

By the way, how did that whole deregulation of the financial industry work?

While we are at it, did you hear this one? You can cut taxes without any cost to our government:

Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to -- if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

An entire political movement has been built on pretend, and its purveyors make no secret of that. Indeed, as frequently mentioned in these parts, it was some senior member of the Bush II administration who explained to Ron Suskind, writing for the New York Times Magazine that those in what he called

the reality-based community, [defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from ... judicious study of discernible reality' don't understand that t]hat's not the way the world really works anymore...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do

But now it is 2011, and we need to get back to reality and put away our fantasies. Let's start with some truths, not subject to serious debate:

1. Nothing is cost free.

2. Taxes are how government has the means to do what only government can do. Yes, there is some sense of community in this process: we pool our resources to most effectively do what needs to be done, whether it be picking up the garbage (or the snow) or educating our children.

3. The progressive income tax, where the tax rate increases for those with the highest incomes does have a little Robin Hood aspect to it, but it is hardly a radical idea eighty years after its inception and reflects an ingrained view that the better off one is, the more he or she can be expected to help the community which allows them to make all that money.

Of the many falsehoods we have been sold (the estate tax as a crushing burden on our citizens, for instance, when it effects only the most wealthy among us), the idea that taxes are bad and cutting them the true calling of any decent politician, as well as the answer to every problem, is, perhaps the most pernicious. It sounds good to everyone---who doesn't want to pay smaller amounts of tax---but is simply a way for the wealthy to allow everyone else to fend for themselves. It is a foolish goal even for the rich, since the economy that feeds their wealth cannot survive on solely what they have, but depends on as many people as possible having as much as possible to spend, but there are no slogans or sound bytes to capture that idea.

It is so much easier to just rail at things which inanities such as a pox on both their houses, as if there are forces beyond control that makes our lives so miserable. But the easy answers, the ones that tell us it is not our fault, are almost always wrong.

For instance, we were sold a bill of goods all summer long in the form of a movie called Waiting for Superman, which apparently said (according blather that surrounds it) that it is not that we have chronically underfunded our public schools that we have all but given up educating broad swaths of children, it is ust that malicious bureaucrats and unions have protected poor teachers at the expense of great ones.

These unions do their dirty deeds, apparently, only in districts where the poor live since everyone else's children seem to get educated. And, the only way to tell whether children have been educated well is how they do on standardized tests.

It's magic. Sell education to private forces which call what they do "charter schools" and all our problems go away.

A career teacher, one whose insight on historical moments frequently inspires some of the scribbling that appears under the name Barth, does his own blogging under the name Teacherken. He is just one person---a teacher, and a defender of teacher's unions to be sure----(though he quotes Michael Martin at length, which makes two people) and maybe all that is wrong. What
Teacherken and Mr. Martin say, though, seems to make more sense than any hill of beans for a beanstock and what it amounts to is this:

The American people are being sold a bill of goods about educational policy. The media is complicit, as anyone who paid attention to the atrocity of NBC's education summit learned.

So let's try to make 2011 the year we grew up.