“Listening To The Founding Fathers”: Constitutionalism With An Anti-Government Ideology Is Historically And Philosophically Mistaken
A political backlash has commenced within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and unelectable primary candidates.
But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates describe as “constitutionalism.” Our national recovery, in this view, depends on returning to the severely constrained governing vision of the Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution. Many Republicans now seem to be saying: Yes, this is the conservative ideal, but it is just not practical to implement at the moment.
This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,” Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is historically and philosophically mistaken.
It is not enough to praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong central government, which is what the Constitution actually created. Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of government, they believed that good government was essential to promote what they called the “public good.”
And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34, “are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages. . . . Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”
In the tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,” Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action” of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and afflicted.”
Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an 18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.
This is not to argue that the Founders would be happy with the current size and role of government. But, after protecting a variety of essential civil liberties, they placed such matters mainly in the realm of democratic self-government. They made it procedurally difficult for majorities to prevail. But they placed few limits on the public policies that durable majorities might adopt in the future — leaving “a capacity to provide for future contingencies.”
In our time, durable majorities have endorsed the existence of Social Security and Medicare. These roles of government were not envisioned by the Founders. But they do not violate a principle of our system nor run counter to the prescient mind-set of the Founders. People are free to argue for and against such programs. But this debate can’t be trumped or short-circuited by simplistic and legalistic appeals to the Constitution as a purely limiting document.
The broad purposes of the modern state — promoting equal opportunity, providing for the poor and elderly — are valid within our constitutional order. But these roles are often carried out in antiquated, failing systems. The conservative challenge is to accept a commitment to the public good while providing a distinctly conservative vision of effective, modest, modern government.
But a shift in mind-set is first required among conservatives: thinking of government as a precious national institution in need of care and reform. This would honor the Founders. The real Founders.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“The Fight Is History, Done, Finito”: The Affordable Care Act Is Here To Stay
Now that the fight over Obamacare is history, perhaps everyone can finally focus on making the program work the way it was designed. Or, preferably, better.
The fight is history, you realize. Done. Finito. Yesterday’s news.
Any existential threat to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ended with the popping of champagne corks as the new year arrived. That was when an estimated 6 million uninsured Americans received coverage through expanded Medicaid eligibility or the federal and state health insurance exchanges. Obamacare is now a fait accompli; nobody is going to take this coverage away.
There may be more huffing, puffing and symbolic attempts at repeal by Republicans in Congress. There may be continued resistance and sabotage by Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures. But the whole context has changed.
Now, officials in states that refused to participate in Medicaid expansion will have to explain why so many of their constituents — about 5 million nationwide — remain uninsured when they could have qualified for coverage. More than 1 million of these needlessly uninsured Americans live in Texas, which is targeted by Democrats as ripe for inroads because of its rapidly changing demographics. Will Gov. Rick Perry (R) be forced to reconsider his Obamacare rejectionism? Or will he ultimately be remembered for speeding the state’s transition from red to blue?
Performance of the federal insurance exchange Web site, HealthCare.gov, will continue to improve, if only because the initial flood of applicants is bound to subside. Meanwhile, insurance costs and benefits in states that refused to set up their own exchanges will be compared with those in states that did. There will be questions about how the new law is performing — but no one will be able to pretend it does not exist.
And we will surely hear more stories about individuals taking advantage of the law’s consumer benefits, especially the fact that preexisting conditions can no longer be used to deny coverage. This is life-changing for insurance seekers who suffer from chronic illnesses such as diabetes or who have survived cancer.
Opponents of the law can hardly advocate going back to a system in which those who really need insurance can’t get it. What they can do, and surely will, is make lots of noise by pretending that any problem with anyone’s health insurance is due to the Affordable Care Act. Before Obamacare, millions of Americans had their policies canceled by the insurance companies every year. Millions more had their premiums raised, their coverage reduced or both. Now when these things happen, critics will try to blame the new law.
Increasingly, though, the GOP will sound foolish and irrelevant if it continues to put all of its eggs in the “repeal and replace” basket. The problem is that the Affordable Care Act is a set of free-market reforms based on ideas developed in conservative think tanks. Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare would have to replace it with something suspiciously similar.
If Republicans in Congress would work with the administration to make technical corrections to the Affordable Care Act, they could claim a victory of sorts: Obama gave you this mess and we cleaned it up. But after demonizing the program — and the president — for so long, the party has painted itself into a corner.
Note to the GOP: “We refuse, under any circumstances, to make the law work better for the citizens we represent” is perhaps not the ideal campaign slogan for the midterm election.
The real problem with the ACA, and let’s be honest, is that it doesn’t go far enough. The decision to work within the existing framework of private, for-profit insurance companies meant building a tremendously complicated new system that still doesn’t quite get the job done: Even if all the states were fully participating, only about 30 million of the 48 million uninsured would be covered.
But Obamacare does establish the principle that health care is a right, not a privilege — and that this is true not just for children, the elderly and the poor but for all Americans.
Throughout the nation’s history, it has taken long, hard work to win universal recognition of what we consider our basic rights. Perhaps future legislation will expand and streamline the ACA reforms until everyone is covered. Or perhaps we’ll move toward a single-payer system, possibly by expanding Medicare and Medicaid until they meet in the middle.
I don’t know how we’ll get there, but we’re now on the road to universal health care. There’s no turning back.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 3, 2014
“The GOP’s ‘Jobs’ Hypocrisy”: Their Own Party Is The Biggest Obstacle
I bring good news this new year! Conservatives have a jobs agenda, one that isn’t built around merely cutting taxes and regulations and getting the government out of the way so the free market can strut its stuff.
No—this includes… are you ready?… infrastructure investment, and a monetary policy less obsessed with keeping inflation under 2 percent. It’s new, it’s exhilarating, it’s brilliant! And it’s the same stuff that Barack Obama and most liberal Democrats have favored for years.
When David Frum, whom I respect a great deal, tweets that a new article should be thought of as “a ‘95 theses’ moment for the reformist right,” he gets my attention. So I clicked immediately and read through “A Jobs Agenda for the Right,” by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, from the new issue of National Affairs. I liked the essay and even agreed with a respectable percentage of what Strain had to say. But reading it was far more infuriating than reading something by a conservative and disagreeing with every syllable, because articles like Strain’s refuse to acknowledge, let alone try to grapple with, the central and indisputable fact that the contemporary Republican Party—his presumed vehicle for all this pro-jobs reform—has opposed many of these initiatives tooth and nail.
The first big measure Strain touts in his essay is infrastructure. “Anyone who has driven on a highway in Missouri or has taken an escalator in a Washington, D.C., Metro station knows that the United States could use some infrastructure investment,” he writes. He doesn’t lay out a specific program, but clearly he favors fairly broad public investment.
Um, OK. There are people who’ve been trying to do just that. And not only Barack Obama. John Kerry led this effort in the Senate, and he was joined by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison (who’s since retired). Their attempts to fund a modest infrastructure bank were supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it could never get anywhere because of rock-solid GOP opposition. Does Strain not even know this? Or is he pretending it never existed so he doesn’t have to deal with the political reality of Republican obduracy?
I think, of course, it’s the latter, and there’s further evidence for my guess in the way Strain talks about recent history. The 2009 stimulus was not a failure in infrastructure terms at all (has he read Michael Grunwald?). But even if you believe it was an infrastructure failure, or have to say so for political reasons, should you not acknowledge in fairness that it was Democrats and liberals who wanted it to have more infrastructure spending, and that nearly 40 percent of the bill took the form of tax cuts because that’s what Republicans demanded (before they decided en masse to vote against it anyway)?
From there, Strain turns to monetary policy, and this is even more comic. The Federal Reserve, he writes, should relax the 2 percent inflation target to get the unemployment numbers down. Uh, yes. It should. But it’s not as if Strain just originally thought of this. Liberals have been saying this ever since 2009, or 2008 even. And in response, conservatives have been saying that doing so will produce galloping inflation and destroy our economy. You’ve seen Ben Bernanke get badgered about inflation by Republicans from Paul Ryan on down for years. Inflation could have been 1.2 percent, or lower, but if Bernanke was up on the Hill, Republicans tore into him as if he were unleashing the mid-’70s on us again.
As I said, I agree with Strain. I agree when he writes: “In short, conservatives should see that there is a role for macroeconomic stimulus in getting the labor market back on its feet” and that “monetary policy with its eye on enabling growth can make a big difference.” Yes, they should. Well… how are they going to see that? Does Strain have some special pixie dust?
It’s astonishing that he can write this way, but it’s what they all do on the right. They maintain the fiction that their party is a party of rational people who will listen to rational argument and isn’t simply dug into a state of psychotic opposition to anything Barack Obama wants to do. Everyone watching our politics for the last five years knows that if Obama is for it, the Republicans will oppose it. Strain might say counting noses in the Senate isn’t his job. Well, OK. But at least he could acknowledge that his party has been preventing some of his own ideas from having any hope of becoming reality (he goes on to discuss other proposals, some of them more traditionally conservative, others that acknowledge a fairly strong governmental role in getting people back to work).
Usually, with regard to jobs and wage stagnation and poverty and so on, the problem is that conservatives deny empirical reality. This gives us people like Paul Ryan, for example, who genuinely seems to believe, in the face of the mountains of evidence about how the social safety net and federal entitlements have saved millions from lives of far worse destitution, that all government can do is make slaves of people. That’s bad enough.
But now, we have conservatives who accept enough empirical reality to agree that public investment is not a crime against nature, but who deny the political reality that the Republican Party stands in the way of progress. This may actually be worse. The only hope of changing Washington for the better is getting a Republican Party in which there are enough legislators who act like legislators again and who are willing to cross party lines occasionally for the sake of governance and the country. If conservative intellectuals keep pretending this isn’t a problem, there is no hope that it will change.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 3, 2014
“Targeted Demobilization Of Minority Voters”: The Most Disgraceful Practice In American Politics Today
It’s called “targeted demobilization of minority voters.” The phrase comes from Perspectives on Politics, a leading journal published by the American Political Science Association. December’s issue includes a sobering article by Keith G. Bentele and Erin E. O’Brien titled, “Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies.” The abstract tells the basic story:
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in state legislation likely to reduce access for some voters, including photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, registration restrictions, absentee ballot voting restrictions, and reductions in early voting. Political operatives often ascribe malicious motives when their opponents either endorse or oppose such legislation. In an effort to bring empirical clarity and epistemological standards to what has been a deeply-charged, partisan, and frequently anecdotal debate, we use multiple specialized regression approaches to examine factors associated with both the proposal and adoption of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006-2011. Our results indicate that proposal and passage are highly partisan, strategic, and racialized affairs. These findings are consistent with a scenario in which the targeted demobilization of minority voters and African Americans is a central driver of recent legislative developments…. [emphasis added]
Bentele and O’Brien’s statistical analysis of 2006-2011 data makes plain what was already pretty obvious. Republican governors and legislatures have sought to hinder minority turnout for partisan purposes. States were especially likely to pass restrictive voting laws if Republicans were politically dominant, but where the state observed rising minority turnout or where the state was becoming more competitive in the national presidential race. Variables that capture the strategic value to Republicans of minority voter suppression are more powerful predictors of restrictive voting legislation than is actual incidence of voter fraud.
This is the most disgraceful and toxic practice in American political life. It’s out there. It’s blatant. I keep waiting for decent conservatives to speak out against this stuff. Now that would be a Sister Souldjah moment worth watching. So far, no takers.
Memories of these efforts will darken the Republican Party’s reputation for many years. It certainly should.
By: Harold Pollack, Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, December 30, 2013
“Thanks For Nothing Republicans”: Unemployment Benefits, The Cruelest Cut Of All
To 1.3 million jobless Americans: The Republican Party wishes you a Very Unhappy New Year!
It would be one thing if there were a logical reason to cut off unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work the longest. But no such rationale exists. On both economic and moral grounds, extending benefits for the long-term unemployed should have received an automatic, bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress.
It didn’t. Nothing is automatic and bipartisan anymore, not with today’s radicalized GOP on the scene. In this case, a sensible and humane policy option is hostage to bruised Republican egos and the ideological myth of “makers” vs. “takers.”
The result is a cruel blow to families that are already suffering. On Saturday, benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months. These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire.
Extending unemployment benefits is something that’s normally done in a recession, and Republicans correctly point out that we are now in a recovery. But there was nothing normal about the Great Recession, and there is nothing normal about the Not-So-Great Recovery.
We are emerging from the worst economic slump since the Depression, and growth has been unusually — and painfully — slow. Only in the past few months has the economy shown real signs of life. Job growth is improving but still sluggish, with unemployment hovering at 7 percent — not counting the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work.
An extension of long-term unemployment benefits should have been part of the budget deal between Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) but wasn’t. Democrats tried to offer an amendment that would extend the benefits for three months, and they identified savings elsewhere in the budget to pay for it. But House Speaker John Boehner refused to allow a vote on the proposal.
In terms of economic policy, this makes no sense. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that extending long-term unemployment for a full year would cost about $25 billion, which would add to the deficit. But the measure would boost economic growth by two-tenths of 1 percent and create 200,000 jobs. Given that interest rates are at historical lows, and given that the imperative right now is to create growth and jobs, refusing to extend the benefits is counterproductive as well as cruel.
Sadly, cruelty is the point.
The Republican far right perceived the budget deal as a political defeat — even though it caps spending for social programs at levels that many Democrats consider appallingly low — because it does not slash Medicare and Social Security. For some in the GOP, accepting an unemployment extension would have been too much to swallow, simply because it was favored by Democrats.
For some other Republicans, unemployment isn’t really about spending, growth, deficits or even politics. They see it as a moral issue.
To this way of thinking, extended benefits coddle the unemployed and encourage them to loll around the house, presumably eating bonbons, rather than pound the streets for any crumbs of work they can find, however meager.
This view is consistent with the philosophy that Mitt Romney privately espoused during his failed presidential campaign. It sees a growing number of Americans as parasitic takers who luxuriate in their dependence on government benefits — 47 percent was the figure Romney came up with. The makers who create the nation’s wealth are not really helping the down-and-out by giving them financial support to make it through tough times, this philosophy holds. Much better medicine would be a kick in the pants.
I wonder if these Ayn Rand ideologues have ever actually met a breadwinner who has gone without a job for more than six months. I wonder if they know that some jobless men and women — and I know this is hard to believe — don’t have well-to-do parents or even a trust fund to fall back on. I wonder if they understand that unemployment benefits don’t even cover basic expenses, much less bonbons.
The Republican establishment doesn’t want this to be a campaign issue for Democrats, so it’s quite likely that the benefits will eventually be extended. Until then, more than 1 million households are being made to suffer privation and anxiety — for no good reason at all. Thanks for nothing, GOP.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 30, 2013
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