So much for the image of Democrats in charge as being too bogged down in process arguments, and division in general, that nothing gets done.
Joe Biden, in partnership with congressional Democrats, have been in charge for just slightly over two months. In that time, he has had nearly all of his Cabinet appointments confirmed, he has signed a series of executive orders to undue much of the Trump administration's policy and regulatory damage, the Senate has completed Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, the nation has exceeded (with weeks to spare) the new Administration's goal of 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations within its first 100 days, and, to top it off, has enacted the largest and perhaps most radical revision of Federal spending in decades, while at the same time providing states and health care providers with the resources needed to turn the page of the Trump pandemic.
This latter accomplishment, the $1.9 trillion-dollar pandemic relief bill, has been the object of many laudatory articles and reports in the MSM and on the Internet. I have nothing to add to what others have said, but I'd like to take some space here to highlight some aspects of what has been said that I think are significant, especially going forward.
During the past four decades, Republicans have typically tried to frame the Federal spending debate as a clash between Democrats and their wasteful government programs, versus the alleged Republican desire to "put more money in your pocket." What they never said was that, by "your," they always meant the people who underwrite their campaigns. The 2017 tax-cutting bill that Paul Ryan masterminded on their behalf, with the help of Trump and Mitch McCONnell, is perhaps the most egregious example of this trend; the goodies provided for in that bill went straight into corporate treasuries and off-shore bank accounts. This is why the short-term value of the stock market increased, even while the job market showed, at best, negligible pre-pandemic growth compared to the final months of the Obama Administration.
And then came the pandemic, which Trump largely ignored for the sake of protecting his paper tiger of a recovery. What happened? The job market fell off of a cliff, while the billionaire class enjoyed an unexpected, undeserved boom.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 will probably not fix all of the damage that has been done in the past year, but it will go a long way toward leading the nation back to something resembling "normal." Perhaps even more significantly, it marks a change in Democratic thinking about how to enable economic growth, and how to use the power of the purse to help Americans at the bottom of the pyramid. Instead of focusing on aid to the investing class, or expanding the size of the national bureaucracy, it focuses on providing direct financial aid to people in need. It amounts to a progressive rebuttal of the more-money-in-your-pocket argument that Republicans have used to shift wealth from the bottom to the top of the American economic structure. It is founded on the principle that wealth creation is not a top-down process; if anything, it is a bottom-up process in which work produces goods and services that everyone is able to consume. As Paul Krugman has stated any number of times: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income.
Perhaps most significantly, Biden and the Democrats in and outside of Washington seem to be in the process of re-defining what bipartisanship means. Bipartisanship, the holy grail of inside-the-Beltway punditry, has always had had an inside-the-Beltway focus. That is, the existence or ability to achieve it is viewed entirely from the perspective of Washington-based actors: the President, members of Congress, and their various allies inside and outside of government. When it comes to approving the ARPA, however, the President and Congress did so without a single Republican vote, an achievement that has led to reportage of the bill as a purely partisan achievement. But that fails, however, to take into account the bill's popularity among Republican voters nationally, as well as Republican governors and mayors whom those voters support. And even in the world of op-eds, one can find conservatives who are, more or less, on board with the Democrats. This is, in other words, a governing party that has the courage of its convictions, and with good reason.
But that's not to say that all Republican office-holders are on board with the Democrats, and even their own voters. Far from it.
I have said, prior to last year's election, that the Republican Party was moving in a direction of defining itself solely by various forms of voter suppression--dark money, extreme gerrymandering, and, perhaps worst of all, blatant attempts at voter suppression that aim to target the ability of Democratic constituencies to get to the polls. Or to be actually able to vote, once they get there. But, in the wake of last year's Republican losses, the party and its allies in state legislatures have hit the accelerator on their suppression efforts.
In doing so, they have for the most part used the alleged existence of 2020 voting fraud, even though no actual evidence of such fraud has been produced. However, their anxiety about their political future is such that, every so often, they will--well, like it says here--say that quiet part out loud.
What is the quiet part?
In a word, racism. As well as its allied "isms": sexism, ableism, any form of hatred of those who are not white male Christian straight bigots, and the folks who love them.
Moreover, the struggle to suppress the vote has an analog in the current battle within the U.S. Senate over the fate of the filibuster, the rule that currently requires an absolute minimum--with the exception of budget-related bills like the ARPA--of 60 votes to end debate on a bill and proceed to a vote on it. Historically, up until the beginning of the Obama administration, the filibuster's use was almost entirely in opposition to civil rights legislation. This is why perhaps, in hindsight, no one should have been surprised to see it used in opposition to everything the first African-American President would want, even on policies and bills that reflect things Republicans allegedly want. And perhaps it should therefore not be surprising to see some real movement, at last, toward abolishing, or at least modifying, the use of the rule and/or the ways in which it can be used.
And, here again, Republicans are saying the quite part out loud: if the filibuster rule is at least modified, and the Democrats are enable to enact legislation that would end voter suppression once and for all, it might actually herald the end of the Republican Party as a political force in America. Let me be as clear as anyone can: this is not a Democratic prophesy. It is a Republican one.
Which brings us back, or should bring us back, to thinking about the seditious January 6th assault on the Capitol. For a very obvious reason. If a political movement is effectively reduced to a cause that has been repulsed not only by the majority of voters, but by the force of history that produced the Constitution and nearly 250 years of largely peaceful, democratic government--if, in other words, it stands for nothing except bigotry and suppression in the name of bigotry--it has no future in relying on due process of law.
It can only rely on a literal call to arms. To violence. And to death for all who stand in its way.
This is why I view the news about the removing of the protective fencing around the Capitol with a strong case of mixed emotions. As a symbol of returning to the America most of us want to see, it is more than welcome. Yet I find myself hoping and praying that it is not a premature step. Trump and the forces he has managed to channel for his personal use are far from disappearing in our collective rear-view mirror. And this should surprise no one. These forces have been organizing for decades, at least since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and likely even before then. They have been gathering strength. They even have allies withing the halls of Congress. And at least some of those allies may have had a direct hand in enabling the January 6th attack. The investigation of that attack by a now truly independent Justice Department has just begun; I would be genuinely surprised if it did not turn up evidence of infiltration from within.
This is not a new subject for me. Off and on, over the past seven years, I have written more than once in this space about what we now refer to as the Trump voters as tantamount to a fifth column in our midst, a movement that uses the language of patriotism to insidiously subvert and ultimately destroy the nation as we have known it. Facing up to that reality has not been easy for me, even while seeing the massive amount of evidence that has accumulated in that time in support of this view. If you love your country, if your family has sacrificed for it (as mine has), well, seeing it torn apart from within is heartbreaking. Denial can be an attractive remedy, under the circumstances. But it is no longer an acceptable one.
Consider, for example, the recent shootings of in Atlanta of Asian women working in massage parlors by an allegedly Christian white male shooter, whose alleged justification for his heinous actions was that the women were tempting him to act in a sexually immoral way. Never mind the fact that his attacks violated the Sixth Commandment, while he was in the process of trying to "uphold" the Seventh one. But, on top of that, an officer of the law openly accepted the shooter's assessment that his actions stemmed from having "a really bad day." One cannot help but thinking that his victims had an even worse one. All the more so, given that the officer's broadcasting of this assessment may very well have damaged the victims' chances of getting justice from an untainted jury. How is it possible to see this as anything except an official attempt to suppress the racism that screams out from the very focus of the attack?
Consider, focusing on a national level for a moment, the fact that we are just two months or so removed from having a President who was a paid agent of a foreign power--an agent whose agency was acknowledged by a senior member of his own party, and an agent whose agency was well repaid.
If you've made it this far, for which I thank you, and you are wondering what all of this has to do with the title of my post, fear not. I have a very controversial argument to make here, and I did not want to advance it without laying the groundwork to support it.
It involves habeas corpus. Or rather, the potential need to suspend it.
Simply put, habeas corpus refers to the common-law power, first recognized in British law and codified in Magna Carta, to obtain a writ justifying the lawful imprisonment of one or more individuals. The U.S. Constitution explicitly permits the suspension of the habeas corpus process (in article I, section 9) "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." In fact, during the Civil War, Congress did permit Abraham Lincoln to suspend it, under what constitutional scholars refer to as the Suspension Clause, for the duration of the war.
Obviously, this is not something to be done lightly. Ideally, we would not be discussing this at all, except perhaps as a purely academic exchange involving constitutional jurisprudence. And yet, in a very real sense, it's already been put on the table. And not just by the actions of Trump supporters, but by the words of Trump himself, as well as his allies in Congress.
You have probably by now heard a lot of foolish and dishonest rhetoric from the former President and congressional Republicans about the "Biden border crisis," in which the United States is once again being "invaded" along the Rio Grande by various unsavory elements in Central America determined to rape, pillage, and burn the countryside. The "invaders" in this case are unaccompanied minors, who are being admitted solely for the purpose of processing asylum claims.
This is deflection, a classic Republican tactic--for that matter, a classic Trump tactic--for dealing with harsh realities that might be embarrassing, politically or otherwise. It is an inherently dishonest tactic, and, in this case, is designed to conceal the fact that the Biden Administration has inherited an immigration disaster, one in which potential asylees, adults and children, were confined in cages without even the most basic human necessities, and with little or no hope of having their claims processed. Cleaning up this mess will take time and, in the absence of reliable information to the contrary, Biden's people should be given at least some benefit of the doubt.
But it's also worth remembering that, back in the day, Trump dragged the possible suspension of habeas corpus into the border control debate. Take a look.
So, no one on the right side of the political spectrum should have any objection to what I'm about to put on the table.
Maybe we need to consider a nation-wide suspension of habeas corpus.
Maybe that's what we need to get a handle of how extensive the fifth column is. Maybe that's the only way we'll find out how much of it is inside and outside of government. And Washington, for that matter. Maybe the web is so tightly and invisibly woven by design that we can only rip it apart in the most invasive way possible.
I'm not a huge fan of this idea. I'm an attorney. I'm an artist. That's two reasons why I am, at heart, a civil libertarian. I hate the idea of anything that infringes on individual liberty.
But I can think of something I hate as much: the use of violence to deprive anyone of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or the democracy that millions have sacrificed to preserve.
Do you have an alternative? Let me know. It's worth a discussion. Discussion, after all, is really at the heart of democracy in the first place. Let's sort this out together.
Let's stop taking shots at each other. Figuratively, and literally.
While we've still got a country worthy of sacrifices.
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