Even liberal Jews getting disgusted with the Democratic Party's repeated capitulation to Bush and the neo-cons.
What Could the Democrats DO?
Michael Lerner
It’s no surprise that public approval of Congress has dropped since the Democrats failed to stop the war or pass immigration reform.
While friendly media frames the issue as an inevitable result of Republican control, they never ask the obvious question: Why were the Republicans able to pass legislation and fund the war when the Democrats were in the minority?
The answer, in short, is the Democrats’ wimpiness. A quality that, we’ve argued in the past, stems from their lack of a shared worldview in which they believe. The Democrats fear being challenged for lack of civility, because it is civility and commitment to “the process” that is their only shared value. They put that above saving the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans who will die as the Democrats dither.
So, what could they do?
The Speaker of the House has the power to decide what pieces of legislation get taken up by the House, and when. She could have announced that once the President vetoed the House authorization for his surge (because it contained wording requiring a gradual withdrawal from Iraq by early 2008), that she would simply not bring to the floor new authorizations for the war or any other Defense Department authorizations until the President presented and publicly committed to a full withdrawal by early 2008. Republicans and some Democrats would have screamed about abandoning our troops, and the liberal Dems could have screamed right back that “Bush lost Iraq, and now wants to kill American soldiers right into 2009 so as to cover up for his own failure, but we care about the troops, and the only way to care about the troops is to stop using them for Bush’s cover-up and bring them home immediately!”
Instead, Pelosi and the liberal Dems rolled over and gave Bush $100 billion to continue his war and his cover-up. Similarly, on August 4, 2007, the Democratic leadership capitulated to Bush’s charge that they were “soft on homeland security” and allowed passage of an extension of his authority to wiretap phones in the U.S and abroad, sacrificing our civil liberties instead of putting forward a different notion of how best to provide safety to Americans.
There are Congressional liberals with more guts, and they have begun to issue subpoenas to Administration officials involved in the cover-up of Bush’s deceit in starting the war and wrecking the careers of officials who sought to tell the truth, and his cover-up of the political purge of U.S. attorneys who would not use their office to play politics in accord with the desires of Rove–Cheney. Bush’s response: if the Congress issues contempt-citations and asks the Justice Department to enforce them, the Administration will simply ignore those requests.
What could the Congress do? Pelosi and the Democratic leadership could announce that ignoring Congressional contempt citations would be adequate grounds for impeachment of the President.
But what did she do? She announced that “impeachment is not on the table.” In so doing, in the face of Bush Administration contempt for Congress, she might just as well have said, “Don’t bother paying attention to anything we do or say. Bush and his Republican supporters can do whatever they want, and all we can hope for is that in the 2008 election the American people will be so fed up that they will give Democrats an overwhelming landslide control of both houses of Congress.”
And what is the American people’s response to Pelosi? “No way. You guys lack backbone and principles. We have more respect for those Republicans even when we disagree with them, because they actually stand behind what they say they believe in, whereas you, Nancy Pelosi and your weak–kneed liberal majority in the Democratic caucus, don’t believe in anything except your own desire to stay in power. And that gives us so little inspiration, we might not even bother to vote in 2008.”
The same story repeats in the Senate. When the Republicans were the majority, they dealt with the threat of a filibuster by Democrats in a powerful way: they threatened to change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster rule (it’s not in the Constitution, and it could be changed at any time by a majority vote). They threatened this “nuclear option,” so the Democratic minority backed down and voted approval of their reactionary choices for the Supreme Court (who have gone full-speed ahead to dismantle the desegregation decisions of the Warren Court of the 1950 and 1967).
But when Senator Harry Reid faces the same situation, there’s no talk about eliminating the filibuster. Instead, the most dramatic move he could think of was to keep the Senate in session all night for one night and then capitulate to the Republican threat of filibuster the next day! In the days when people actually cared about the issues as matters of principle, and Southern Democrats joined with Republicans to oppose civil rights legislation, then Senate Majority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson kept the Senate in session day and night for weeks, thereby demonstrating to the country how a minority of racists were managing to keep the Senate from doing any other business. But don’t expect that from the wimps who now fill the position of U.S. Senators.
The Democratic leadership fears that standing by principles would split the Democratic Party, which has no shared principles but is only a loose coalition of interests. “To go to the mat would win nothing,” they claim, “because the right wing of the Democratic Party would follow the lead of people like Senator Lieberman who regularly votes with the Republicans on foreign affairs issues.”
Let’s play out their fear scenario. Imagine if the majority of the House Democratic Caucus agreed to prevent the House from considering authorization of funds for the Defense Department until the President agreed to end the war at an early date in 2008 . The minority of Democrats,in the worst–case scenario, would vote to overturn the House leadership and give the House back to the Republicans to control. A unlikely a scenario as this is, because they themselves might lose positions of influence on the committees on which they now serve, you can “understand” why Pelosi would not want to lose her position as Speaker of the House. And yet, precisely the willingness to take personal risks on behalf of principle is what we mean when we talk about “courage.” In that light, we can imagine a best–seller starring the current Democrats in the Congress: we’d call it “Profiles in Cowardice.”
But wait, you say, this is a terrible time to risk losing the Presidential elections by becoming principled fighters for an end to the war. What if, with the split that occurred among Dems, the Democratic party became a minority party? And wouldn’t that happen if the Dems really stood for something and were willing to “play hardball” to get it? Well, what happened when the Republicans acted in the same way? Sure, the media was filled with stories of how moderate Republicans were being offended by the “radicals” like Gingrich and DeLay and Hastert and others who took control and acted with neither civility nor respect for tradition as they advanced their agenda. But because they had an agenda and a clear vision, they were soon able to win over majority support, first taking the Congress, and then the White House, and arguably that is where they would have remained but for the unbelievable incompetence and stupidity of George Bush and Dick Cheney’s particular strategy for advancing the American empire. In short, fighting, breaking tradition, and showing that you are committed to your principles more than to your immediate victory, is usually a winning ticket.
Again, take the worst–case scenario: the liberals are left with a Democratic Party that is “shattered” because it has taken a principled stand. De facto, they would be creating a new party. That party would appear on the scene as the contemporary version of what happened in 1860 when the Republican Party suddenly emerged on the scene with a commitment to end slavery. Just as that upstart party suddenly became the majority party, so a principled peace and justice party committed not only to ending the war, but to the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan, and to a global plan for saving the environment, would become the winning party in 2008 and for many decades to come.
Why won’t that happen? Because the Democrats, even many of the liberal Democrats, don’t have a vision and a set of principles for which they are willing to fight, and even to lose. And if you don’t care enough about your principles to lose with them, you won’t be able to convince anybody that you are principled enough to deserve their respect.
This fear that traumatizes liberals is the one and only reason why they could still lose both the
presidential and Congressional elections in 2008.
Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, and chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives |
