Joint Session of Congress
And so it begins. It’s a new year and we have a new congress. Unfortunately the 112th promises to be as divisive as any session before it. Can we expect better? Unlikely. So far, House Republicans who align themselves with Tea Party activism have promised to either repeal Obama’s health insurance reform or refuse to fund it. They are also planning to cut $100 billion worth of domestic spending from the budget in an effort to bring down the deficit but have no intention of raising taxes, this despite the fact that tax rates for all income levels have reached lows that we haven’t seen since the 1950s. My personal favorite is the promise to read the Constitution aloud on the House floor as a reminder to elected officials of the Founder’s rules regarding limited-government. I’m not certain those rules are as explicit as conservatives think, what with a preamble that charges the government with such broad authority as promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty, but that may be a matter of interpretation.
Does a rejection of health care reform (well, health insurance reform) and deficit reduction without raising revenue represent a mandate that the electorate demanded when they voted the Democrats out of the majority last November? Should we thank the Tea Party that isn’t really a party for this? Will they be happy with the results?
I suspect that Tea Party activists may be no happier about the results of the 112th Congress as the New Left, energized by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, was with the 110th or even the 111th Congress. I say this because all of the hip hip hoorays that are chanted when we’re in office and they are out (it doesn’t matter if the “we” here is the Left or the Right) inevitably turns into the same sorry refrain, a refrain that goes something like, “Hold the phone there partner, that’s not what we asked you to do.”
Two years ago, the Left made it clear that we wanted, among other things, health care reform and an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we got was health insurance reform and although we’ve pulled back to a certain extent in Iraq, there can be no doubt that a US military presence will remain in both Iraq and Afghanistan for a long, long time. Last year, when the Right demanded that elected officials stop spending beyond our means, as so many of us have been forced to do in these hard economic times, were they expecting cuts to unemployment and food stamps? According to the latest 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, 61 percent of Americans favor increasing taxes on the wealthy as a way to reduce the deficit while 20 percent prefer cuts to the Defense Department. If we extrapolate those poll numbers, less than 20 percent of the American public has any interest in cutting entitlement programs or social services. [It’s actually much less than that if you read the poll carefully.] Given the choice to increase taxes on the wealthy or increase cuts to programs that benefit the poor and middle class, what do you think the 112th Congress will do?
Behind all of the complaints that we threw the bastards out and the new bastards aren’t any better is one inescapable reality. The new bastards and the old bastards have more in common with each other than they do with any of us.
The nation is divided, perhaps as divided as the Congress. We are divided by race; we are divided by political ideology; we pretend not to be divided by class, but in reality that is probably our most potent divide. To the never ending advantage of the elites in power, the electorate will forever blow out of proportion all the little things that make us different and ignore the issues in which we should be able to find common ground.
Riley Abbott’s report on Glenn Beck’s controversial Rally to Restore Honor and Al Sharpton’s response The Rally to Reclaim the Dream makes it clear that in fact there are a number of things upon which the Right and the Left agree. It also points out that neither side seems aware of this reality.
Alyssa Schimmel’s report on last October’s One Nation March highlights the demands the Left expected the Democratic Majority in the House and Senate to deliver now that they also had a Democratic president to back them up. Liberals and progressives at that rally demanded that government focus on the need for more jobs, better education and universal access to health care. Were the Right not so focused on undoing any accomplishments that the nation’s first African-American president could claim as his own, they might be in favor of those things as well. Oh, but that racial divide is ever so important. After all, what would it mean to that perhaps small but vocal percentage of Americans who remain bigoted, if a black man were to turn out to be one of our best presidents or even, and perhaps more realistically, just moderately more impressive than say Ronald Reagan?
Although these reports were recorded in 2010, they are relevant now as the electorate once again passes the baton to their representatives in office. Members of Congress both on the Left and the Right always claim to listen to the people but as we know they rarely hear (or accede to) our demands. Perhaps we should be less quick to pass that baton on and continue to make the demands we made last fall loud and clear. What might be even more impressive is, if we on the Left spent some of our energy helping our compatriots on the Right overcome their racism, their xenophobia, their sexism, their homophobia and perhaps most importantly their own self-loathing, so that we could find the common ground that the country desperately needs if we are ever to form anything close to a more perfect union.
Post Script,
The above was posted Thursday, January 6, 2011, two days before the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona. No doubt, we will begin to hear many voices asking that heated political rhetoric be toned down, lest it continue to inflame the passions of the mentally unstable and potentially dangerous. I suggest that if members of the press stopped treating that heated political rhetoric as if it were factual, in other words, if they would ask for proof when a politician claims that the US has the best health care system in the world or that undocumented workers are responsible for the unemployment rate, then fewer citizens, mentally stable or otherwise, would feel the urge to take up arms against foes that don’t really exist. Just a thought.
