Here is what "The Reverend" thinks about California. Can you spell "hysterical?"
GOP sore losers use recall to circumvent democracy
Chicago "Sun Times"
BY JESSE JACKSON
Democracy offends reactionaries. The majority of Americans oppose their extreme agenda, so they plot ways to subvert democratic elections.
Now these Jacobins of reaction have increasing control over the Republican Party. In the French Revolution, the extremist Jacobins espoused liberty and the rights of the people, but used the guillotine to silence the opposition. Today's reactionary Jacobins call themselves conservatives but would overturn democracy to suppress the opposition.
That is what the recall effort against California Gov. Gray Davis is all about. Californians just re-elected Davis last fall, preferring even an unpopular incumbent to the extreme right-wing views of the GOP nominee, William Simon.
With California facing a staggering $28 billion deficit and conservatives blocking progress in the legislature, Davis' low approval ratings plummeted even further. Davis is guilty of no crime, no malfeasance in office, nothing that would warrant impeachment or removal. If anything, he is a victim of circumstance and of George W. Bush.
Virtually every state in the union is facing record deficits, a byproduct of the Bush recession. To get his country club tax program, Bush fought against offering the states any federal assistance to forestall devastating cuts in schools and police. California was plucked clean by the Enron energy price manipulations, while the Bush administration refused to intervene.
Republicans couldn't accept the election victory of the hapless governor, so loyal Republicans decided to overturn the election. A right-wing multimillionaire legislator, Rep. Darrell Issa, paid professional firms more than $1 million of his own money to gather the signatures necessary for a recall election.
Now on Oct. 7, Californians will vote whether to recall the governor, and then choose among some 200 candidates to succeed him. The election could be won with 20 percent of the vote or less--far fewer votes than Davis won last fall. This opens the door for a right-wing zealot to take office with views opposed by the vast majority of Californians.
But California is only the most recent example of the assault on democracy. The Gingrich-DeLay self-professed ''revolutionaries'' couldn't accept that the American people had elected Bill Clinton president. So they financed a relentless investigation into his personal life seeking to discredit him. When the American people re-elected him in 1996, they refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. Instead, they impeached him on vile charges that evaporated on inspection.
In the 2000 election, Bush put the right wing back in the closet, promising to be a compassionate conservative who would unite Americans, not divide them. But when he lost the popular vote and the vote in Florida, he went to the mat. U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay dispatched a swarm of operatives to intimidate election officials in Miami-Dade.
Now, out of the White House, political guru Karl Rove has joined with Republican House leader DeLay in campaigns to overturn redistricting plans they don't like. This outrage has turned into a pitched battle in Texas, as Texas Senate Democrats flee the state to deprive Republicans of a quorum. This partisan donnybrook will upend established procedures for settled and legitimate democratic elections.
This is a bad business. In the end, democracy depends upon widely shared agreement on the rules. We expect elections to be hard-fought, but when the people speak, all sides accept the verdict. After the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency, Al Gore reflected that democratic sensibility by calling on the country to rally behind the new president.
But Bush's ultras don't accept this consensus. ''Bipartisanship,'' says Grover Norquist, the Republican guerrilla leader, ''is a form of date rape.''
They will use any means necessary to enforce their views on the American people. But their extreme measures will beget an extreme reaction. They are eroding the ordered mechanisms of American democracy for reactionary ends that the public rejects.
The only hope is that the people put an end to this. Vote no on the recall in California, and punish Bush, DeLay and the anti-Democrats on Election Day.
If the people don't speak and the anti-Democrats get their way, they will turn American politics into an unending alley fight that could get very ugly very fast.
suntimes.com |
