Month: August 2011

The reason I have so little respect for Small Government, drown-it-in-the-bathtub arguments, and often the people who spout them, is that when the proverbial excrement hits the fan, every person in this country howls for the gub'mint to save him like a baby that needs its bottle. As a nation we whine incessantly about it and vote for people who vow to destroy it, but there will be hell to pay if it isn't there immediately to fix things when the (hurricane/tornado/wildfire/drought/blizzard/plague of locusts) comes. Why can't Washington cut my taxes while also protecting me from every conceivable threat?

Earlier this year, Rick Perry demanded that the Obama administration declare Texas a disaster area due to wildfires, the primary advantage of which from the states' perspective is the ability to send FEMA a bill. When disaster declarations are made, Washington typically lets states handle the disaster but repay around 75% of the costs. So yes, that was Rick Perry demanding that the government (of the nation he wants to secede from) asking Congress cut him a check…
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and then throwing a bitch fit when it said No.

Chris Christie will be following Perry's example soon now that New Jersey has sustained what he estimates as "billions" of dollars in damage. I guess New Jersey's budget is a little short and the legions of Tea Party volunteers aren't going to be handling the cleanup and rebuilding. Do I blame states and their residents for wanting the government to provide disaster relief? No. I blame them for insisting that Government is Evil, sometimes actively working to dismantle it, until the tornado turns their house and community into a pile of twigs. A little consistency is too much to expect, apparently.

Not surprisingly, people who actually know a thing or two about emergency management are worried that "deficit fever" severely limits the government's ability to respond to major disasters. FEMA's hurricane response is forcing it to eliminate or delay tornado relief projects in Joplin, MO. The public at large, and even non-profit organizations, tend to forget about affected communities as soon as the cameras leave town and the story goes stale. The government and its army of bureaucrats have always been relied upon to stay until the job is done. Neither the resources nor the will power are forthcoming from any other source.

Since the media and the right are in love with the Federal budget as Household budget analogy, it's surprising (but not really) that the idea of saving for a rainy day is so far beyond them. Anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck knows that you can never get ahead financially because…well, shit keeps happening. The car breaks down, the kids get sick, and so on.

When your budget and expenses are equal almost to the penny, every unexpected expense is a back breaker.

Now that our Beltway betters have decided that the government will be run on a shoestring with an eye toward hollowing it out even further in the coming years, I suppose that recovering from hurricanes and flooding is another area in which it is time for Rugged Individualism to shine.

When teaching about the presidency I emphasize that the Constitution describes an office with a limited set of powers.

In fact, only one of the enumerated powers in Art. II can be exercised by a president without the consent of another branch – for example, appointments, treaties, and military action all require some degree of participation from Congress. The sole power he can exercise independently is the pardon. The same is true for the governor in many, but not all, states.

Why? Well, I usually point out to the class (with no small amount of sarcastic humor) that the authors of our Constitution realized that, believe it or not, the justice system they created might – just might – convict innocent people. Borrowing the pardon from the British system, where final appeals could be made to the monarch, the Constitution allows the wrongly convicted one last and final appeal from a court of one.

Of course, over time the pardon has become a way to score cheap political points – Grr! Tough on Crime! – and the facts of cases are rarely determinative of the outcome.

The takeaway point is that even The Great Exalted Founders recognized that our justice system – the system they created according to their own ideals – would convict the innocent and too harshly punish the convicted. And boy howdy were they right. The only real flaw in their logic was the belief that the pardon power would do anything to ameliorate the problem.

Over the past few days there has been a celebratory atmosphere around the release of the so-called West Memphis Three, a trio of convicted murderers in Arkansas (one sentenced to death) caught up in the late 1980s moral panic over "satanic ritual abuse" and subject to an absolute sham of a trial. It took many years for DNA evidence to exonerate them – shockingly enough, there was plenty of DNA at the crime scene from the murdered boys' own father, but not the convicted men. I can't say "All's well that ends well" because these men have lost 18 years of their lives and no amount of compensation or post-release celebration can make up for that. But at least they're out. They didn't die in prison.

I understand why people feel like high-fiving and enjoying a "We did it!" moment, as publicity and activism for the WM3 contributed to the eventual outcome. Not to be a downer, but here's the problem: our prisons are full of these people. Chock full. And very few of them have two documentary films, a star-studded benefit album, and dozens of Hollywood backers to keep the spotlight on the case. They don't all have excellent pro bono counsel and independent investigators devoting a decade to their cause. Most of them are going to die in prison, or at least spend an unforgivably long amount of time there. Americans live in a considerable amount of denial about the efficacy of our judicial system; in the back of our minds we know that it's a sham and that the outcomes depend on the price of one's lawyer, the color of one's skin, and all kinds of other superficial nonsense.

We know it, but we don't like to think about it.

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We content ourselves with the occasional cause celebre, and a successful resolution creates the impression that progress is being made. Yet if we ever bothered to peel back the crusted layers of fraud, bias, and oppression around our criminal courtrooms we would be forced to confront the reality of hundreds upon hundreds of questionably convicted inmates who aren't so fortunate as to be on Henry Rollins' tweets every few weeks to remind us of their plight. We can't wrap our minds around the number of wrongfully or questionably convicted people in our prisons, so we don't try.
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Let's get right to the point today: So what ever happened to that whole Tea Party thing? Anyone notice how it just sort of, you know, disappeared?

In 2009 they were highly visible, achieving commendable turnout at a number of rallies thanks in part to promotion on conservative websites, talk radio, and TV. In 2010 they were organized enough to defeat numerous high profile or incumbent Republicans in congressional primaries. Their anti-incumbent and pro-Republican leanings no doubt influenced the outcome of last year's general election as well.
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As a social movement, if it can be so called accurately, it was stunningly successful, accomplishing almost all of its fundamental goals. They moved Obama and the Republican establishment to the right.
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They elected a coalition of amateurs, ideologues, and zealots to Congress. They brought the "liberal" Obama agenda of 2009 to an effective halt.

Perhaps that's why we no longer see them holding rallies, or why we hear about them constantly in the media but only as an abstraction or represented by a small number of high profile career activists. Tea Party^tm exists as a brand name, but where has the Tea Party itself gone? Protests at the Capitol during the debt ceiling debate turned out embarrassingly small crowds, basically a couple dozen nutbars in tri-cornered hats and ill fitting Halloween costumes.

What happened? Did they decide that they Won last year and return home satisfied? That's hard to believe; the problems they claimed to care about remain or have worsened, and they don't appear happy with the Congress they helped elect. Did they get jaded, realizing that the new Congress isn't producing different outcomes than the old one? Hmm. That would imply that their motivations were issue-based, which I find dubious. Did they simply get tired? Maybe. They were pretty goddamn old.

The Awl has a great piece from a woman who spent two years involved in local Tea Party politics in Wisconsin. While sympathetic, she is also realistic about what she sees.

I concluded that trying to figure out what they wanted was a dead end because what they wanted was simply to complain—that the Tea Party "is not a group of listen and respond; this is a group of respond and respond."

The Tea Party is no longer about economics, not that it ever solely was. At the larger rallies and for the cameras (CNN or laptop), they hold forth about founding fathers, liberty, spending, deficits, TARP, kicking cans down roads, taxes, living within means and fiscal responsibility. But when the lights are off, it's all about Jesus, with "God" thrown in, on occasion for Israel.

In the end though, the biggest enemy of the organized grassroots faction of the Tea Party is that it's a lot of work for a hobby.

In the last year or so, in addition to going to meetings and rallies, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time on the websites, Facebook pages and social networks of Tea Party organizations and those sympathetic to them. While many are still active, many others have not been updated for months and months. Many appear to have fallen off in activity in December, just after the elections. Event calendars are barren. "Latest updates" are months old and unanswered. Those that are active are often just ugly RSS feeds, just a string of links to news items on Breitbart sites or Newsmax.

The most active presences now are the Tea Party leaders who've gone whole hog with the movement and have nothing to lose in doubling down (such as Kim Simac) and the professional Tea Party organizers such as Freedomworks, American Majority, Tea Party Express and 9/12, who are, at the end of the day, simply community organizers for corporate advocacy.

Freedomworks head Dick Armey? Well, that's just the Contract with America all over again.
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American Majority head Ned Ryun? A speechwriter for George W. Bush, now out on his own.

The claim that the Tea Party was a grassroots movement has been treated with extreme skepticism from the outset, and the facts undermine such claims. Despite being backed by corporate money, interest groups, and consummate Beltway insider leadership, however, the Tea Party did rely on the participation of non-professionals. Those 1,000-100,000 people who showed up to various rallies were not all on Dick Armey's payroll. These are real people. They circulated emails, talked to friends and family, and went where they were told to go. And less than a year later, they lack the energy or enthusiasm to even maintain or update a website.

So where did they all go? The Tea Party has become the Mary Celeste of political movements, a rudderless hulk that continues to scare the shit out of Republicans even though no one appears to be on board. Did the anger dissipate? Did the election of a GOP House satisfy them? Did their minimal interest in politics run out? Was their movement, to the extent that it was a genuine one, co-opted by the Armeys and Reeds of the professional right? I don't have a good answer, but their silence is deafening after two unbroken years of hearing the phrase "Tea Party" every 30 seconds.
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