The GOP’s CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country To Sweep Back Into Power
Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.
Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.
To stop this spread of “socialism,” nearly anything goes. Take, for example, Chile in the early 1970s when socialist President Salvador Allende won an election and took steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.
Under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dispatched to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.”
U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher.
Worsening joblessness could then be spun by the CIA-financed news outlets as proof that Allende’s policies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social programs. When Allende compromised with the Right, that had the additional benefit of causing friction between him and some of his supporters who wanted even more radical change.
As Chile became increasingly ungovernable, the stage was set for the violent overthrow of Allende, the installation of a rightist dictatorship, and the imposition of “free-market” economics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their American corporate backers.
Though the Allende case in Chile is perhaps the best known example of this intelligence strategy (because it was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach frequently around the world. Sometimes the target government is removed without violence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.
Home to Roost
So, it is perhaps fitting that a comparable approach to politics would eventually come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the propaganda funding comes from outside sources (think of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)
Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).
But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.
Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.
Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.
This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.
When a Democrat somehow does manage to get into the White House, Republicans in Congress (and even in the Courts) are ready to do their part in the destabilization campaign. Rather than grant traditional “honeymoon” periods of cooperation with the president’s early policies, the battle lines are drawn immediately.
In late 1992, for instance, Bill Clinton complained that his “honeymoon” didn’t even last through the transition, the two-plus months before a new president takes office. He found himself facing especially harsh hazing from the Washington press corps, as the mainstream media – seeking to shed its “liberal” label and goaded by the right-wing media – tried to demonstrate that it would be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican.
The mainstream press hyped minor “scandals” about Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investment and Travel-gate, a flap about some routine firings at the White House travel office. Meanwhile, the Right’s rapidly growing media was spreading false stories implicating Clinton in the death of White House aide Vince Foster and other “mysterious deaths.”
Republicans in Congress did all they could to feed the press hysteria, holding hearings and demanding that special prosecutors be appointed. When the Clinton administration relented, the choice of prosecutors was handed over to right-wing Republican Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, who consciously picked political enemies of Clinton to oversee zealous investigations.
Finally Winning
The use of scandal-mongering to destabilize the Clinton administration finally peaked in late 1998 and early 1999 when the Republican-controlled House voted impeachment and Clinton had to endure (but survive) a humiliating trial in the Senate.
The Republican strategy, however, continued into Campaign 2000 with Vice President Al Gore facing attacks on his character and integrity. Gore was falsely painted as a delusional braggart, as both right-wing and mainstream media outlets freely misquoted him and subjected him to ridicule (while simultaneously bowing and scraping before Republican candidate George W. Bush).
When Gore managed to win the national popular vote anyway – and would have carried the key state of Florida if all legally cast ballots were counted – the Republicans and the Right rose up in fury demanding that the Florida count be stopped before Bush’s tiny lead completely disappeared. Starting a minor riot in Miami, the Republicans showed how far they would go to claim the White House again.
Five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court – wanting to ensure that the new president would keep their side in control of the courts and recognizing that their party was prepared to spread disorder if Gore prevailed – stopped the counting of votes and made Bush the “winner.” [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]
Despite this partisan ruling, Gore and the Democrats stepped back from the political confrontation. The right-wing press cheered and gloated, while the mainstream news media urged the people to accept Bush as “legitimate” for the good of the country.
For most of Bush’s disastrous presidency, this dynamic remained the same. Though barely able to complete a coherent sentence, Bush was treated with great deference, even when he failed to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks and led the nation into an unprovoked war with Iraq. There were no combative investigations of Bush like those that surrounded Clinton.
Even at the end of Bush’s presidency – when his policies of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and massive budget deficits combined to create the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression – the prevailing message from the Establishment was that it was unfair to lay too much blame on Bush.
Shortly after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Republican/right-wing talking point was to complain when anyone took note of the mess that Bush had left behind: “There you go again, blaming Bush.”
Getting Obama
Immediately, too, the Republicans and the Right set to work demonizing and destroying Obama’s presidency. Instead of allowing the Democrats to enact legislation aimed at addressing the financial and economic crisis, the Senate Republicans launched filibuster after filibuster.
When Obama and the Democrats did push through emergency legislation, such as the $787 billion stimulus package, they had to water it down to reach the 60-vote super-majority. The Republicans and the Right then quickly laid the blame for high unemployment on the “failed” stimulus.
There also were waves of propaganda pounding Obama’s legitimacy. The Right’s news media pressed bogus accusations that Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was not constitutionally eligible to be president. He was denounced as a socialist, a Muslim, a fascist, an enemy of Israel, and pretty much any other charge that might hit some American hot button.
When Obama welcomed American students back to school in 2009, the Right organized against his simple message – urging young people to work hard – as if it were some form of totalitarian mind control. His attempt to address the growing crisis in American health care was denounced as taking away freedoms and imposing “death panels.”
Soon, billionaires like oil man David Koch and media mogul Murdoch were promoting a “grassroots” rebellion against Obama called the Tea Party. Activists were showing up at presidential speeches with guns and brandishing weapons at rallies near Washington.
The high-decibel disruptions and the “screaming” economy created the impression of political chaos. Largely ignoring the role of the Republicans, the press faulted Obama for failing to live up to his campaign promise to bring greater bipartisanship to Washington.
Hearing the discord framed that way, many average Americans also blamed Obama; many of the President’s supporters grew demoralized; and, as happened with Allende in Chile, some on the Left turned against Obama for not doing more, faster.
By November 2010, the stage was set for a big Republican comeback. The party swept to victory in the House and fell just short in the Senate. But Congress was not the Republicans’ true goal. What they really want is the White House with all its executive powers.
However, following Obama’s success in killing Osama bin Laden on May 2 and with what is widely regarded as a weak Republican presidential field, the Right’s best hope for regaining complete control of the U.S. government in 2012 is to sink the U.S. economy.
Already, the Republican success in limiting the scope of the stimulus package and then labeling it a failure – combined with deep cuts in local, state and federal government spending – have helped push the economy back to the brink where a double-dip recession is now a serious concern.
Despite these worries – and a warning from Moody’s about a possible downgrade on U.S. debt if Congress delays action on raising the debt limit – the Republicans are vowing more brinksmanship over the debt-limit vote. Before acting, they are demanding major reductions in government spending (while refusing to raise taxes on the rich).
A Conundrum
So, Obama and the Democrats face another conundrum. If they slash spending too much, they will further stall the recovery. However, if they refuse to submit to this latest round of Republican blackmail, they risk a debt crisis that could have devastating consequences for the U.S. economy for years – even decades – to come.
Either way, the right-wing media and much of the mainstream press will put the blame on Obama and the Democrats. They will be held accountable for failing to govern.
The Republican propaganda machine will tell the American people that they must throw Obama and the Democrats out of office for stability to return. There will be assurances about how the “magic of the market” will bring back the bright days of prosperity.
Of course, the reality of a new Republican administration, especially with a GOP Congress, would be the return of the old right-wing nostrums: more tax cuts for the rich, less regulation of corporations, more military spending, and more privatization of social programs.
Any budget balancing will come at the expense of labor rights for union employees and shifting the costs for health care onto the backs of the elderly. Yet, all this will be surrounded by intense propaganda explaining the public pain as a hangover from misguided government “social engineering.”
There is, of course, the possibility that the American people will see through today’s Republican CIA-style strategy of “making the economy scream.” Americans might come to recognize the role of the pseudo-populist propagandists on Fox News and talk radio.
Or Republicans might have second thoughts about playing chicken on the debt limit and running the risk of a global depression. Such a gamble could redound against them. And, it’s hard to believe that even their most ardent billionaire-backers would find destruction of their stock portfolios that appealing.
But there can be a momentum to madness. We have seen throughout history that events can get out of hand, that thoroughly propagandized true believers can truly believe. Sometimes, they don’t understand they are simply being manipulated for a lesser goal. Once the chaos starts, it is hard to restore order.
That has been another bloody lesson from the CIA’s operations in countries around the world. These covert actions can have excessive or unintended consequences.
Ousting Allende turned Chile into a fascist dictatorship that sent assassins far and wide, including Washington, D.C. Ousting Mossadegh in Iran led to the tyranny of the Shah and ultimately to an extreme Islamist backlash. Ousting Arbenz in Guatemala led to the butchery of some 200,000 people and the rise of a narco-state. Such examples can go on and on.
However, these CIA-type techniques can be very seductive, both to U.S. presidents looking for a quick fix to some international problem and to a political party trying to gain a decisive edge for winning. These methods can be especially dangerous when the other side doesn’t organize effectively to counter them.
The hard reality in the United States today is that the Republicans and the Right are now fully organized, armed with a potent propaganda machine and possessing an extraordinary political will. They are well-positioned to roll the U.S. economy off the cliff and blame the catastrophe on Obama.
Indeed, that may be their best hope for winning Election 2012.
By: Robert Parry, Consortium News, AlterNet, June 9, 2011
Debt Ceiling Charade: Why Are Republicans Voting Against America’s Interests?
There isn’t much credibility left in Congress, perhaps none at all. In fact, the ceaseless C-SPAN sitcom we call government has offered plot lines from titillating tweets to illegitimate children, foreign lovers to shady cover-ups. But even their writers sometimes run out of ideas. Last week, when they thought you weren’t watching, they stooped to acting out their actual jobs: faking a vote on the debt ceiling.
A group of Republicans and Democrats alongside them turned sacred duty into dramedy. Pretending they would favor something they actually don’t endorse, they voted against their own beliefs and our national interests.
Of course, they first sold their banker buddies the good seats. Along with popcorn and reassurance that they weren’t actually planning a default on our debt, they were just pretending to do so in order to exact concessions.
These “leaders” admit that not raising the debt limit is untenable. Defaulting on our loans, we’re told, has the potential to wreck our economy. In fact, we’re supposed to be very concerned about this economy. It’s not “healthy”; it’s in “free-fall”; it’s “crumbling into ruin”.
But this belies the true damage these members of Congress seem intent to bring upon us. The economy is nothing besides the people that work, buy, save and invest within it. The collateral damage here isn’t to some numerical abstraction; it’s a serious and even fatal blow to Americans. We talk so much about the economy suffering; it’s easy to forget it’s actual people who stand to be hurt badly, over and again.
Even Republicans know raising the debt ceiling is not really negotiable. This issue is at core about whether or not we do what we say, whether or not America can be trusted. And raising the debt ceiling without precondition is about whether we make good on our promises not just to our creditors, but to each other. For all Republicans talk about not being able to afford things, it seems to apply only to food, health care, housing and electricity for their constituents. We’re flush when it comes to not collecting taxes from corporations, giving more to millionaires, subsidizing polluters and bombing other countries.
Without raising the debt ceiling free of conditions, we cannot honor our commitments to our grandparents who need to see their doctors and purchase their meds, to our children who need trained teachers and classrooms with heat and to our neighbors who need help when jobs are scarce and earnings don’t cover what life costs. Further gutting social spending will hurt those least equipped to sustain further injury. The jobless, the homeless, the young and the old will be the ones maimed.
With all this at stake, those of us without Goldman-sized bonuses to cover the cost of a heads-up beforehand are left watching in horror from the nose bleed section. This is a scripted show mocking not only we the people but the very exercise of elected office.
If voting among the masses is democracy in action – the votes of those we’ve voted for should be even more important. This is the logic behind representative democracy as our beloved Constitution has enabled it. This is the belief that has served us as a nation and as a people.
We all like to have occasional fun at the office. Some facebook checking, coffee drinking, office gossiping stress relief help the hours tick by. Republican House Members and some Democrats have turned workplace tricks into a dangerous practical joke on us, and we’re not laughing. This is the scariest kind of reality television. No more theatrics about our security and prosperity. Our elected leaders need to stop playing at their jobs and step up to do them.
By: Anat Shenker, AlterNet, June 12, 2011
‘Illusions Of Grandeur’: The Richly Earned Humiliation Of Newt Gingrich
If his goal when he officially launched his presidential candidacy last month was to inflict a massive amount of humiliation on himself in as short a time as possible, then Newt Gingrich has succeeded spectacularly.
After an epically botched campaign roll-out — which included accusations of ideological treason from influential conservatives and a nationally televised exchange with an Iowa voter who called him “an embarrassment to our party” and urged him to quit the race “before you make a bigger fool of yourself” — Gingrich was left struggling to explain how he and his wife racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at Tiffany’s jewelers. Then he randomly took off on a vacation (a lavish Greek cruise, it turned out), and now he’s returned to find that virtually his entire staff has quit.
Does this latest development change the presidential race in any significant way? Not really. Since even before his month from hell, Gingrich had no realistic chance of winning the GOP nomination, and not since the 1990s has he been a significant force on the right. Most conservative activists and opinion-shapers long ago tuned him out.
But much of the political media world never quite figured this out, instead treating Gingrich for the last decade as an enduring relevant national leader. The instinct was understandable: The celebrity (and notoriety) he attained during his mid-’90s stint as House Speaker never fully faded, and he could always be counted on for a lively, provocative quote or two.
This is the promise of Gingrich’s amazing crash-and-burn as a White House candidate (I know, he says he’s staying in despite the staff defections): that it might compel the political media to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
The reality is that Gingrich’s serious career in elected politics lasted for 20 years and ended in 1998.
He spent the first 16 of those years clawing his way through his party’s House ranks, finally reaching the top spot just as the ideal circumstances — complete Democratic control of Washington for the first time since the Carter administration, a profoundly unpopular president, and a ton of low-hanging fruit in the South — presented themselves for a Republican takeover of the House. The midterm election of 1994 made Gingrich Speaker of the House.
The tactics he employed during that rise could be devious. Early on, he formed the Conservative Opportunity Society with about a dozen fellow far-right GOP members. They pushed their party’s leadership toward a more confrontational posture and engaged in harsh and highly personal attacks on their Democratic colleagues.
In one episode in 1984, Gingrich used an after-hours “special orders” speech on the House floor to read off the names of ten Democrats who had written a letter to Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinistas had seized control of the country in 1979, urging him to hold democratic elections and to allow expatriates to return to vote. The ten, Gingrich said, had “undercut and crippled” U.S. foreign policy; he suggested they be prosecuted under the Logan Act of 1798, which gives the president the right to conduct foreign policy. Upon learning of this, Speaker Tip O’Neill confronted Gingrich on the floor, calling his attack “the lowest thing I’ve seen in my 32 years in Congress.”
In 1989, Gingrich edged out Edward Madigan, the candidate preferred by Robert Michel, the pragmatic House GOP leader, to become minority whip, then the No. 2 position on the Republican side. Four years later, in the run-up to the 1994 election, Michel announced that he’d retire. Officially, it was his decision, but Gingrich was breathing down his neck. The GOP conference was increasingly filled with confrontational conservatives who preferred Gingrich’s style.
His four-year run as Speaker proved disastrous, for Gingrich personally and for his party. His own obnoxious style — when a South Carolina woman drowned her children in a horrifying late 1994 incident, Gingrich called it a sign of society’s breakdown and proof that people needed to vote Republican — alienated all but the most hardcore Republicans. And his eagerness to force a government shutdown over a GOP plan to slash Medicare spending gave President Clinton and Democrats a winning issue in 1996, when nearly 20 Republican incumbents lost their seats and the GOP barely held the House. Shortly after that, Gingrich held off an attempted coup from a band of frustrated but incompetent House Republicans. Then he made things worse for his party by leading an impeachment drive against Clinton in 1998 (even, as we later learned, while engaging in an extramarital affair himself), which backfired and led to shocking Democratic gains in that year’s midterms.
It was then that Gingrich took his massive unpopularity and walked off the political stage, knowing that his party was ready to throw him off if he didn’t make the first move. From that moment on, the party’s elites — elected officials, activists, interest group leaders, and opinion-shaping commentators — have had little use for him. But the media has been a different story. A few years after his demise as Speaker, Gingrich reemerged and was quickly welcomed back into every green room in America. Convinced he’d been rehabilitated, he began making noise about seeking the presidency, first in the run-up to the 2008 race and then again this time. His taste for ugly, personalized attacks hadn’t faded, either, something he’s shown over and over during the Obama presidency.
But the idea that he was a real player in politics was an illusion, something that’s become clear during the month-long Gingrich candidacy. Most of the important figures in the Republican Party never had any interest in seeing him run for president. There have been few endorsements, donors have shunned him, and conservative activists and commentators have amplified every one of his embarrassments.
Even with his staff quitting on him, Gingrich insists he’ll stay in the race. We’ll see how long that lasts. One way or the other, he’ll soon be taking the same walk of shame off the political stage that he took 13 years ago. This time, let’s hope it’s for good.
By: Steve Kornacki, News Editor, Salon, June 10, 2011
Walking Away From The Truth: GOP Playing With Matches On The Debt
Just ignore Tuesday’s vote against raising the debt ceiling, House Republican leaders whispered to Wall Street. We didn’t really vote against it, members suggested; we just sent another of our endless symbolic messages, pretending to take the nation’s credit to the brink of collapse in order to extract the maximum concessions from President Obama.
Once he caves, members said, the debt limit will be raised and the credit scare will end. And the business world apparently got the message. It’s just a “joke,” said a leader of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street is in on it. Not everyone found it funny.
No matter how they tried to spin it, 318 House members actually voted against paying the country’s bills and keeping the promise made to federal bondholders. That’s an incredibly dangerous message to send in a softening global economy. Among the jokesters were 236 Republicans playing the politics of extortion, and 82 feckless Democrats who fret that Republicans could transform a courageous vote into a foul-smelling advertisement.
The games that now pass for governing in an increasingly embarrassing 112th Congress are menacing the nation’s future. It was bad enough when Republicans threatened to shut down the government to achieve their extreme and extremely misguided spending cuts, but that threat would have caused temporary damage. The debt limit is something else altogether. If the global credit markets decide that the debt of the United States will regularly be held hostage to ideological demands, it could cause significant harm to investment in long-term bonds and other obligations. That, in turn, could damage domestic credit markets and easily spark another recession.
To prevent this from happening, 114 Democrats in April asked for a “clean” vote without conditions. But Republicans were not about to set their hostage free. Knowing that the clean vote would not pass — and imposing a two-thirds majority requirement to ensure its failure — House Republicans gave the Democrats what they requested. They then voted it down, sending their reckless message to the world.
But there was no excuse for so many Democrats to go along with that message, including the leadership. Steny Hoyer, the minority whip, urged his members to vote no so they would not “subject themselves to a political 30-second ad attack” with all Republicans voting no. Apparently Mr. Hoyer did not trust voters to understand what a dangerous and dishonest game the Republicans are playing.
The exercise has prompted the White House to convene talks to discuss the Republicans’ scattershot demands, which have ranged from trillions in spending cuts to the outright dismantling of vital safety-net programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats have hoped to get an increase in revenues out of any deal, but House Republican leaders emerged from a White House meeting on Wednesday spouting the usual discredited claims that higher taxes on the rich would impede job growth.
What Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge is that the debt-limit debate is not about future spending. It is about paying for a deficit already incurred because of two wars and tax cuts approved by both Republicans and Democrats at the behest of a Republican president. Tuesday’s vote was a chance to do the right thing and educate the public on why it was necessary. Instead, too many lawmakers walked away from the truth.
The Fake James Madison: Conservatives Selective Reading Of The Founding Fathers Threatens Social Security And Medicare
The House Republican plan to phase out Medicare is crashing and burning. Rep.-elect Kathy Hochul (D-NY) just won an impossible election victory by campaigning to keep Medicare alive. The Senate just soundly rejected the House GOP’s plan. Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who once shut down the government in a failed attempt to force President Bill Clinton to support draconian Medicare cuts, blasted this Medicare-killing plan as “radical right-wing social engineering.”
Yet even as this concerted assault on Medicare hemorrhages support from elected officials, conservatives have a backdoor plan to get the courts to kill Medicare for them. Numerous lawmakers embrace a discredited theory of the Constitution that would not only end Medicare outright but also cause countless other cherished programs to be declared unconstitutional. Under this theory, Pell Grants, federal student loans, food stamps, federal disaster relief, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Social Security must all be eliminated as offensive to the Constitution.
In essence, supporters of this constitutional theory would so completely rewrite America’s social contract that they make Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP plan, look like Martin Luther King Jr. This issue brief explores the legal and historical gymnastics required to accept the conservative position that programs like Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution.
The general welfare
Although Congress’s authority is limited to an itemized list of powers contained in the text of the Constitution itself, these powers are quite sweeping. They include the authority to regulate the national economy, build a national postal system, create comprehensive immigration and intellectual property regulation, maintain a military, and raise and spend money.
This last power, the authority to raise and spend money, is among Congress’s broadest powers. Under the Constitution, national leaders are free to spend money in any way they choose so long as they do so to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” For this reason, laws such as Medicare and Social Security are obviously constitutional because they both raise and spend money to the benefit of all Americans upon their retirement.
Many members of Congress, however, do not believe the Constitution’s words mean what they say they mean. Consider the words of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who recently explained the origin of the increasingly common belief that Congress’s constitutional spending power is so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub:
If you read [James] Madison, Madison will tell you what he thought of the Welfare Clause. He said, “Yeah, there is a General Welfare Clause, but if we meant that you can do anything, why would we have listed the enumerated powers?” Really, the Welfare Clause is bound by the enumerated powers that we gave the federal government.
In essence, Paul and many of his fellow conservatives believe Congress’s power to collect taxes and “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” really only enables Congress to build post offices or fund wars or take other actions expressly authorized by some other part of the Constitution. According to this view, the spending power is not—as it is almost universally understood —itself an independent enumerated power authorizing Congress to spend money.
Paul’s understanding of the Spending Clause is not simply the idiosyncratic view of an outlier senator. Indeed, there is strong reason to believe his view is shared by the majority of his caucus. In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans released a “Pledge to America,” which broadly outlined their plans for governing if they were to prevail that November. In it, the lawmakers claimed that “lack of respect for the clear constitutional limits and authorities has allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year.”
This language suggests that many conservatives agree with Sen. Paul that Congress is somehow exceeding its constitutional authority to spend money. But there is no support for this view in constitutional text or in Supreme Court precedent.
In its very first decision to consider the issue—its 1936 decision in United States v. Butler—the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that “the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution,” as Sen. Paul would claim. Similarly, while the text of the Constitution establishes that “the exercise of the spending power must be in pursuit of ‘the general welfare,’” neither Sen. Paul nor the Pledge cites examples of laws that fail to meet this criterion.
Selectively reading Madison
While conservatives’ narrow understanding of the spending power finds no support in the text of the Constitution or in the Supreme Court’s decisions, Sen. Paul is correct that it does have one very famous supporter. In an 1831 missive, former President James Madison claimed that the best way to read the Spending Clause is to ignore its literal meaning and impose an extra-textual limit on Congressional power:
With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
Sen. Paul suggests that Madison’s extra-textual limit is both authoritative and binding—even if it means that programs ranging from Social Security to Medicare to Pell Grants must all cease to exist. But it is a mistake to assume that Madison’s preferred construction of the Spending Clause must restrict modern-day congressional action.
First of all, even the most prominent supporters of “originalism”—the belief that the Constitution must be read exactly as it was understood at the time it was written—reject the view that an individual framer’s intentions can change constitutional meaning. As the nation’s leading originalist, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explains, “I don’t care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words.”
Indeed, Madison himself would have been dismayed by the claim that an established understanding of the Constitution must bend to his own singular views. Like Scalia, Madison rejected the notion that the framers’ personal desires can defeat the words they actually committed to text. As he explained to future President Martin Van Buren, “I am aware that the document must speak for itself, and that that intention cannot be substituted for [the intention derived through] the established rules of interpretation.”
Secondly, Madison embraced a way of interpreting the Constitution reminiscent of the evolving theories of constitutional interpretation that are so widely decried by modern conservatives. Although Rep. Madison opposed on constitutional grounds the creation of the First Bank of the United States in 1791, President Madison signed into law an act creating the Second Bank in 1816. He “recognized that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and (most important, by failing to use their amending power) the American people had for two decades accepted” the First Bank, and he viewed this acceptance as “a construction put on the Constitution by the nation, which, having made it, had the supreme right to declare its meaning.”
The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt
Even if we must, as Sen. Paul suggests, be bound by the Founding Fathers’ subjective intentions, Madison’s understanding of the Constitution hardly reflects the consensus view among those who created it. The truth is that Madison’s voice was merely one of many competing voices among the founding generation—and his vision of the Constitution was eventually rejected by no less a figure than George Washington himself.
Madison’s chief antagonist in early debates about constitutional meaning was Alexander Hamilton. As the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton offered an interpretation of the Spending Clause that closely resembles the modern understanding:
These three qualifications excepted, the power to raise money is plenary, and indefinite; and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts and the providing for the common defence and “general Welfare.” The terms “general Welfare” were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those which Preceded; otherwise numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a Nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou’d have been restricted within narrower limits than the “General Welfare” and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.
Hamilton’s understanding of the spending power was one part of a broader, more expansive vision of congressional power that also included a robust interpretation of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause. This broader understanding of Congress’s role prevailed over Madison’s very limited one during the earliest days of the Republic. Hamilton was the chief advocate who convinced President George Washington to sign the First Bank bill over Madison’s objections.
The point here is not that constitutional interpretations should be played like the card game “War,” where conservatives play the Madison card and everyone else plays the Washington card, and whoever plays the higher card wins. Rather, the point is simply that conservatives are wrong to treat the Founding Fathers’ statements as if they were a menu that lawmakers can search through and order the kind of Constitution they want. The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt.
Moreover, it is hardly necessary to dismiss Madison’s tremendous contributions to the Constitution itself in order to recognize why America should not relitigate a 230-year-old argument about America’s power to spend money on programs like Medicare. Hamilton was undoubtedly correct that his own reading of the Spending Clause is more consistent with the Constitution’s text than the reading offered by Madison—Madison himself concedes as much—but Madison was also correct to warn that the nation rejects a longstanding and widely accepted constitutional interpretation at its peril.
Millions of Americans depend upon programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and federal student loans, and America has grown into the wealthiest and most prosperous nation ever to exist in the years since these programs were enacted. Throughout this golden age, not one Supreme Court justice has questioned what Justice Scalia recently told a gathering of members of Congress: “It’s up to Congress how you want to appropriate, basically.”
Conclusion
Few things are certain in American politics, but after this week one thing is crystal clear—the American people cherish Medicare and they want no truck with an agenda that would destroy it. Sadly, far too many conservative lawmakers refuse to listen to their constituents on this basic and obvious point—to the extent of inventing a theory of constitutional interpretation that would achieve their goal of ending Medicare far sooner than the House Republicans’ ill-considered budget.
Conservatives will tell you that killing Medicare is the only way to read the Constitution consistently with the framers’ intent. Don’t believe them. The truth is that the only way to reach this conclusion is to hunt through the framers’ statements, cherry pick statements that conservatives like, and ignore the very text of the Constitution itself in the process.
By: Ian Millhiser, Center for American Progress, May 27, 2011
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