Letter 63: a conservative apologia for the 112th Congress

Dear everyone (i.e., all three people aside me who will actually read this letter home),

This missive tries to answer, from my conservative bias, an interesting argument raised in a Washington Post article in support of the widely held notion that this current Congress, the 112th, has been the worst in American history.  On a housekeeping note, I assume the label of ‘conservative’ knowing that I am not a pure conservative. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/13/13-reasons-why-this-is-the-worst-congress-ever/

Additionally, I believe this Congress has had more than its fair share of Republicans focussed on bringing down President Obama.  Since I often write that the country is in need of a national renewal – starting from within each one of us – such personal animus has no place in the national discourse.  We need creative political ideation, not craven personal obliteration.  So, onto the response…

BLUF: our government, Congress and citizenry are in a time of intense debate, high uncertainty and unforeseeable consequences.  Perhaps this Congress represents a pause before a plunge into the new history of a previously untried political philosophy.

I.                    Number of bills passed.  This measure reflects more the bias of the author since many conservatives believe a fundamental problem for the U.S. is the passing of too many laws, reactive in nature, leading to regulations too restrictive in application, translating into fewer small businesses and increasingly suffocating beleagured middle class.

II.                 9-10% approval ratings.  Disheartening, to say the least, since these rock-bottom numbers indicate that people may no longer be exempting their own Representatives from the scorn formerly reserved for all of Congress.  Demagoguery by the Republicans certainly has played a part in this crisis of confidence in our legislature (e.g., the deliberate misnomer of the health-care bill, brokered by the President, as ‘ObamaCare’, especially as this compromise integrates findings from the Heritage Foundation).  Frankly, my countrymen are smart enough to squinch up their noses at such sophistry.

III.               Polarization.  A wise man once told me that ‘confusion’ is a high state just preceding creativity (i.e., call me a confused mad-Manet wannabe)…If this statement be true, this assertion and the one previous argue toward a time of change, perhaps radical change.  Such prospects are frightening and people tend to lean back on their basic beliefs while the source of discontent – the American people, particularly the middle class – demand something new and different aside from the same ‘threadbare’ prescriptions.

IV.              The G.O.P. has set back the recovery through the debt ceiling ‘bullying’.  I was a Democrat of many years in the mid-1990s.  I remember all my more liberal friends excoriating the Republicans for “shutting down” the government for a short period at that time.  Unstatesmanlike though this Republican action appeared to be, I privately thought that it was a good way to make the main point of the party’s ‘contract’ with America (i.e., by whacking the mule with a two-by-four).  It proved to be the main reason why President Clinton later produced historic surpluses (though based, at least in part, on convenient ‘J-curve’ assumptions on future revenue in-take on social security).  This Congress, unrepentant though it was, made crystal clear through this debt-ceiling spat, that we cannot spend-and-borrow our way out of national economic malaise.  Yes, President Bush (of whom I am a BIG fan) had a part in creating this challenge. 

V.                Lower Credit Rating.  I mean, really.  This assertion clarifies the bias of the author.  Mind you – bias in public disquisition is a good quality for it provokes debate.  In actuality, given explicit and implicit debt levels to G.D.P. – we look more like a single-A rated country than a triple-A one.  Call it a bigger credit bang for the excess military buck.  A end to cheap Chinese credit, imported by the same Treasury charged to protect the integrity of the national currency, will crash the global economy.  This ceiling and its offspring, sequestration, can be better viewed as a stand to preserve our national sovereignty than as some punishment imposed by the privileged.

VI.              Sequestration. Personally, I welcome this admittedly sledge-hammer form of fiscal discipline.  Sooner or later, the country will have to face up its fiscal profligacy.  Sequestration was the alternative to limiting the debt ceiling; a good compromise to enforce fiscal discipline while granting our lawmakers a final chance to do for us what they had previously failed to do by themselves.

VII.            Repeal  times thirty-three.  Got it.  I have previously decried the demagoguery by my fellow conservatives on this issue of the healthcare bill.  Nevertheless, the health-care law is not popular among a voting public that clearly believes, as I do, in a right to basic health-care.  My sense remains that my countrymen do not want that right extended through excessive government oversight.  That said, while I prefer a system that evolves up through the states organically (that is, constitutionally), based on federal minimum standards, this legislation should stay in place until a better alternative emerges. 

VIII.          Budget legerdemains of Senate Democrats.  In truth, I was not aware of this issue.  Good for the author for proving that bias stated in public disquisition, founded on integrity, improves the content of the larger political dicourse.

IX.              Zero appropriation bills passed.  Obviously not a wonderful statistic.  Yet I view this ‘reason’ more as evidence of the previous assertion, empirically supported, of polarization.

X.                The ‘infrastructure fiasco’.  As a fiscal conservative who viewed the stimulus bill as unaffordable and as a failure in its implementation, I am not surprised that my fellow Republicans would be loath toward giving more permission to squandered largesse.  These stop-gap measures are votes of no-confidence against what conservatives view as a failed discretionary spending policy, led by the President, that may have slowed growth over the medium term.  That is to say: the Republicans use this stop-gap approach to keep the President on a tight leash until the President changes or a new Administration is inaugurated.

XI.              The temporary suspension of F.A.A. operations.  I must confess my ignorance on this issue.  It seems to be a particularly powerful example of other assertions; namely, the polarization and absence of enacted legislation.

XII.            The blocking of the nomination of a qualified Governor for the Federal Reserve.  Unless the author has left something out, there is no justification for Senator Shelby’s actions nor the G.O.P. leadership’s tolerance of it.

XIII.          The experts agree.  Beyond my limited knowledge to comment on this point.  Such agreement is not surprising, since at least some Republicans and conservatives do appear to be more intent on curtailing President Obama’s career than in honestly trying to find ways to steer our country through a very challenging time now and yet to come.

XIV.          There are problems to solve.  “, Sherlock”; or, I think we all agree on that one.

Letter #62: a culture of violence and the second amendment

UPDATE: 25th of March 2017.
This essay was drafted four (4) months prior to the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Since the horrid night in Colorado, the United States have hosted twenty-five (25) multiple or mass shootings of innocents, killing 200+ people and injuring in excess of 175 others. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data 
The firearms industry and inattentive or unwilling family members or care-givers share responsibility for these crimes as many of the shooters are mentally ill and / or suicidal.
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/06/446348616/fact-check-are-gun-makers-totally-free-of-liability-for-their-behavior 
The industry can no longer fatten its bottom line by flooding cosmetically changed military weapons into civilian markets; lobbying for lax controls of weapons purchases; and, hiding behind a self-serving law that shields it from the liability of knowingly manufacturing weapons that lead to so many murders and even more suicides. 

ORIGINAL ESSAY 
(unchanged from August 2012, except for typographical corrections)
While the nation mourns, silently, the recent spate of shooting sprees in different regions, for different reasons, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of these unrelated but correlated crimes remains the absence of an assertive response by leaders in either of the two parties.  Such was not always the case.  The day following the murder of the right Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, Senator Robert Kennedy, himself in a heated political contest, gave one his finest of many great orations to an audience in Cleveland, Ohio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Vll-t0H6A  (excerpt)

In those five minutes of brave anguish for the country he loved forty-four years ago, Senator Kennedy addressed the growing endemic sickness engulfing the larger society: that of mindless violence.  His words surely resonate with the sadness of our own time.

With twenty years of violence, through terror, war and crime that kill ever more innocents, it is little wonder, then, that the national leadership – aside from the usual round of gun control bills that no one takes seriously – does not react or reacts sluggishly.  America is used to violence, inured to the harsh consequences for so many innocents, willing to forfeit for security those very liberties that many sacrificed so much for so long, asking for so little in return.  Truth is: we expect violence now because we are immersed in a culture of violence.  These days, much like the 1960s, much of the violence is motivated by overt and even covert hate.

Certain peoples – Arabs (or Sikhs mistaken as Arabs), gays, Mexicans -- often suffer the overt hatred of others who see them as different and vulnerable enough to bully.  Nevertheless, other crimes, like the shooting in Colorado, have no apparent motive other than bloodshed; such people cannot have charity in their hearts to be able to take the lives of others they do not know.  Tagging Saint Thomas Aquinas, such covert hate may be as simple as the absence of love.

What frightens and saddens me so is that this national sickness, under which we suffer today, was first decried by Senator Kennedy two generations ago.  A long time, two generations is; long enough to harden the fear and mistrust of 1968 into a culture of violence today.  Cultures take a long time to change – as Moses found after liberating his countrymen from slavery so long ago – and, perhaps, they take even longer to heal when they turn criminal.

Indeed, this perceived culture of violence, with apparently unchallenged depredations against the vulnerable, may be acclimating us toward a culture of hate.  Yet there is still time to avoid the self-same darkness that swept over what had been arguably the world’s most civilized country, Germany, during the first half of the last century.

That prospect points toward the necessity of a national renewal.  Events over the past six months have dizzied us – shooting of people and looting of power (in the name of security).  Indeed, Berlin, Munich and Nuremberg may be resurrecting themselves (in another, equally seductive, guises) as Boise, Milwaukee and North Carolina.  

This comparison may sound extreme and it no doubt is needlessly alarmist.  Yet we need to recognize that, while our society is far from hopelessly blood-drunk, we have a national sickness.  While the proliferation of guns has certainly aggravated the violence, neither guns nor the second amendment created this culture.  We did.  Likewise, we can undo it.

National renewal will require national dialogue on many levels.  Many of the diverse dimensions of this national gauntlet – cast at our feet by years of neglect of what really makes America great rather than what makes her mighty – lie well beyond the scope of this essay and the confines of my mind. Nevertheless, we can start this national dialogue, this national contemplation, with an open and free debate on the second amendment.

The question I would pose to us is: ¿is the right to bear arms unlimited as (at least I believe) the National Rifle Association argues?  The United States struggles within two dilemmas imposed by this menacing culture of mindless violence:

• theoretical in that two rights – one to life, liberty  and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., property) -- articulated in the Declaration of Independence and to be protected under the Constitution -- as opposed to the right to bear arms are currently in collision; as well as,
• existential in that the bad guys may already have the (often semi-)automatic weapons and so the decent people ought to be able to defend themselves with similar arms.

Even the dilemmas clash since they imply opposite policy outcomes.

As this long overdue debate begins, if in fact it ever does, for my part, I support a stricter view of the second amendment for the same reasons that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did: because that prescribed right enabled her family and their neighbors collectively to take to the streets with guns to forestall the rising retaliation of bullying bigots against the simple assertions by African Americans of their God-given rights in 1950s Birmingham.  In Baghdad, I fell off the fence on the conservatively constitutional side many years ago.

A guard at Adnan Palace, then the senior headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, had to go home each evening, wearing the uniform of his company.  Neither that private security contractor (i.e., his employer), nor the Coalition forces nor even his fellow Iraqis would permit him to carry a gun.  Yet he had to walk through a city sliding into a sectarian cleansing (primarily, Shi´ite on Sunni).  Not only would this fellow stick out as a ‘collaborator’, he could easily be mistaken as a Sunni by the Shi’ite death squads.  His name was Adnan – therefore, likely a Shi’ite – but who would know?

Mr Adnan supported his extended family. He had already been kidnapped once by corrupt police, tortured for sport and shaken down for months of his pay.  Such an attack may have been forestalled had Mr Adnan owned his pistol.  Bullies prey on the vulnerable; even a pistol can deter those wielding heavier weapons in favor of looking for easier pickings.  My Iraqi friend was a sitting duck and the sole breadwinner for a dozen or more relatives in those desperate times.  In that situation, his humble request for money for a small caliber pistol – permits be damned – seemed eminently reasonable.

After all, a man has a right to protect his family by protecting himself as the source of income.  Now America is not yet anywhere close to where Baghdad was seven years ago; hopefully, we shall never endure a time like that.  Nevertheless, those trying circumstances of Mr Adnan certainly vindicated in bold relief the natural right underlying the second amendment of protecting oneself against the tyranny of kings or the depredations of gangs.

LET THE SHOUTING BEGIN and go on and go on and so on until we approach a modus Vivendi, if not a full and proper consensus.