ANY HOPE OF REDEEMING
OUR ERODING DEMOCRATIC FOUNDATIONS MUST BEGIN WITH A CLEAR RECOGNITION OF HOW
BAD THINGS ARE
By Burt Hall
The
American people are deeply frustrated with not being fairly represented in
Congress and not having a voice in our democracy. They are demanding an end to
our great political divide and a return to a working democracy. For years politicians have been well aware of
these concerns and the need for the two parties to be civil and work together.
And, they well know that trust in government has been at an all time low. But,
the problem persists unabated.
The
only sure way for change may be to confront politicians with the results of
their mishandling of government affairs and insist on public accountability. Government mishandling for three decades and
their adverse effects are described in this article. It concludes with how we
can restore our democracy back to normal in partnership with the voting public.
Our great political divide began in a big way when,
after owning the White House for 12 years, Republicans lost it to the Clinton
presidency. They were outraged at the loss, considered his victory
illegitimate and believed he had to be driven from office. The political environment that followed has continued
to the present day and is best expressed by Republican George Voinovich. After serving as
an outstanding mayor and governor, he worked across the aisle during two terms
in the Senate (winning all 88 Ohio counties) and always had the ear of the
president. He confessed at Senate retirement that the attitude of his
colleagues was “We’re going to get what we want or the country
can go to hell”.
To
get what they wanted, Republicans dishonored the integrity of the American
ballot with two strategies. First, they
dramatically changed their response to presidential elections from honoring the
“people have spoken” to one of no presumption of legitimacy of an elected
president. Second, Republicans limited voter participation of
groups likely to vote Democratic and then diluted the voting power of those
who did vote.
The
Republican no presumption of legitimacy strategy led to immediate refusals to
accept presidential election results. In
the case of President Clinton, baseless investigations and impeachment plagued
his tenure and were employed in a failed coup to remove him from office. The
vast majority of Americans, members of Congress, law professors and historians favored
censuring Clinton for having lied under oath about a private affair -- a public
reprimand.
However,
obsessed with
impeachment, House Republican leaders railroaded it in a lame duck House
session by blackmailing their members to get the necessary votes. House leaders
knew Senate conviction was out of the question; their intent was to simply
force Clinton to resign, as Nixon had done. He did not. The impeachment had nothing to do with
Clinton’s performance in office and it violated the U.S. Constitution (Protecting American Democracy Against
Internal and External Interference, pp 2-3).
The
Republican strategy of Limited voter participation led to
control of legislatures across the nation and in Washington
and gave Republicans the power to obstruct presidents, gridlock legislation and
shutdown government. They did so relentlessly during the Obama presidency. He was delegitimized and ruthlessly
obstructed nonstop during his tenure in an attempt to force his presidency to fail.
It did not. Among the many legislative obstructions were refusals to consider
rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and reforming our immigration system –
matters that still are unresolved today.
Both
Clinton and Obama had been duly elected for two terms and weathered the storm.
Historians now rank them near the top ten of all U.S. presidents. Throughout
their four terms, the American people suffered with a negative political
environment during which much more could have been accomplished for them
economically and otherwise. The first Republican administration to follow was
the Bush/Cheney presidency and the second is the one we have now, the Trump
presidency.
The attempts to nullify Clinton’s presidency and the related media
frenzy led to the close presidential election that followed. The Supreme Court
elected George W. Bush, by overstepping its judicial authority and stopping the
Florida recount of the closest election in history. Soon afterwards, two
independent media recounts showed that the Supreme Court had elected the wrong
president.
Retired Republican
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later acknowledged they should not have taken the
case. This is not the only time that an overreaching and politicized Supreme
Court has been no friend of our democracy. They also unleashed, with Citizens
United, massive amounts of money into our system of elections – a form of
legalized bribery -- and gutted the Voting Rights Act (ibid, pp 11-12).
The
Bush/Cheney Republican presidency did not maintain President Clinton’s
priorities on balanced budgets with surpluses or on responding to the gathering
threat of international terrorism. Osama Bin Laden had already declared war on
the United States and attacked us several times, including a1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center that failed. The terrorist leader was captured, prosecuted
and jailed. Clinton responded to the rising threat by appointing a chief of
counterterrorism to the White House who reported directly to him. They
developed a series of anti-terrorism capabilities and a bold plan of attack to
destroy Osama Bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan. It was to be activated after
the FBI confirmed responsibility for a 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer, USS
Cole.
During
transition, the Bush/Cheney White House was fully informed of the gravity of
the terrorism threat and the network headed by Osama Bin Laden by President
Clinton’s national security team, the CIA Director, the White House chief of
counter-terrorism and two separate U.S. national security commissions, one on
terrorism and the other on threats of the 21st century. Nevertheless, the Bush/Cheney White House (1)
let a CIA death warrant on Bin Laden lapse and refused twice to renew it, (2)
demoted the chief of counterterrorism who no longer reported to the president
and (3) disregarded the Bin Laden attack plan despite his responsibility for
the USS Cole attack.
During
the spring and summer that followed, the U.S. received extraordinary warnings
from heads of state of England (twice), Jordan (twice) Russia (“in
strongest possible terms “) and from intelligence agencies of other countries,
such as the top ones of Germany and Israel. Warnings included the hijacking of U.S.
aircraft for use as missiles and that twenty al-Qaeda members had slipped into
the U.S., four of whom were training to fly. Israel gave us a terrorist list of
persons residing in the U.S. and four of them were the actual hijackers.
Another warning reported the 9/11 code, “The Big Wedding”.
The
CIA Director informed the White House that “attack preparations have been made.
Attack will occur with little or no warning …This is going to be a big one … of
catastrophic proportions.”
In July, when there was still no response, the
CIA Director made an emergency unannounced visit to the White House to present
his case for a military response at that “very moment”. Again there was no
response -- no serious precautions taken, no rounding up of al-Qaeda agents
reported to be in our country, no screening of flying schools and passenger
lists, no locks put on cockpit doors and, most damaging, no warnings made to
the American people as President Clinton had done with far lesser terrorism
threats (ibid pp 3-5).
Following
the 9/11 breach of national security, the White House recklessly responded with
two unnecessary wars with no end in sight, while allowing Bin Laden to escape
without pursuit. Neither of the wars were justified based on information known
at that time. (ibid pp 5, 6).
Cover-ups of these colossal errors in judgment followed and permitted
reelection of the failed presidency for a second term. The Katrina disaster,
the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a plummeting stock
market and huge job losses followed.
Why
no accountability? Some possibilities are (1) the 9/11 Commission feared the
White House and their supporters in the media and elsewhere would undermine
recommendations in their report, (2) media management feared confronting a
sitting president with something as charged as 9/11 and life-and-death
accountability and (3) the Democratic Party has not been able or willing to defend
against an overly aggressive Republican Party that was out to win at any cost. Had
the shoe been on the other foot, Democrats would have been held accountable in
spades (ibid pp 10, 12, 15).
The
damage done by the Bush/Cheney presidency was astronomical in terms of total
loss of life, injury, forced displacement of millions of innocent civilians and
a massive worldwide increase in international terrorism. They also handed over
to a new president a long-term federal debt of massive proportions structured
for decades, an economy losing 800,000 jobs a month, a housing market
in crisis, a dying auto industry, a tumbling stock market and a decline in world
leadership. Future historians will find it difficult to estimate the
devastation done.
As
to limiting
voter participation, the votes of Democrats and Independents willing to
leap voting hurdles erected by Republicans were rendered worthless by legislative boundaries drawn to elect only members of one party.
Voters could no longer choose their elected officials; party officials had
already done it for them. In general, those who might vote against their candidate
were exported and those who were likely to favor their candidate were imported.
For example, legislative boundaries were drawn to pack African Americans in
large voting districts and create many small white districts likely to vote
Republican.
These
distorted and discriminatory voting districts contributed to landslides in 9
out of every 10 House races in 2016. In 2017, they contributed to two special
election Republican wins. For example, not even a strong Democrat candidate
with a $39 million war chest could overcome the GOP engineered map for
Georgia’s sixth district. It has been safe for 21 straight elections (The Secret Behind Latest Democratic losses,
Hedrick Smith). Among other things, this unconstitutional practice offers
candidates safe seats and freedom to be totally partisan. And, it discourages competition from worthy
candidates of the other party. While both parties do this, Republicans did it
four times as much as Democrats using a very effective high-tech computer-aided
method.
It is clearly unconstitutional to rig voting systems for
personal and partisan gain of the political party in power. At the state level,
illegal districts with legislative majorities permit passage of
unconstitutional bills, such as voter suppression and discriminatory bills that
hurt everyday Americans. At the federal level, illegal districts permit
obstruction of a president of the other party or, when their party owns the
White House, the passage of bad legislation, such as the recent healthcare
bills. If there were any justice, guilty legislatures would be barred from
passing new laws, other than essential government functions, until their
districts were redrawn and new elections held.
The
courts are taking an eternity to deal with problems of voters’ rights, rigged
partisan voting maps and big money influence over elections while legislation
languished in Congress that could have corrected these problems long ago.
Now,
our two-party system is broken and too divided for any president to govern and
we are living in an entirely different world today because of it. Our worldwide
admired democracy has been abandoned. And, unless civility returns to our
politics, we are heading for a national crisis of unknown proportions.
Is it OK for Republicans to interfere for
decades with our electoral system, but wrong for Russia to do it in the 2016
election? Is Russian
hacking worst than voter suppression and partisan drawn maps diluting power of
those who do vote? Do Americans have
some special privilege to interfere with their elections that outsiders don’t
have? Do we need protection from both? A cartoon in the Richmond Times Dispatch
said “What makes you think the Russians can do a better job of undermining our
democracy than we can?”
Trump
is just a symptom of our unraveling democracy. We must deal with the underlying
problems or symptoms will surface again in different ways in future elections.
Any hope of restoring our democracy and revitalizing the Democratic Party must
begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are today and holding public
officials accountable for their mishandling of government affairs. Only when
confronted with these facts will Republicans reform their win–at-any-cost
political strategies and regain the trust of the American people. And, as their
own Republican governor John Kasich recently said, “No one will ever remember
you if you don’t put the country first.”
Overall,
the mission of the Democratic Party should be to turn our politics around to
the better days of the last century when our country was mostly unified and
exceptional (ibid, pp 13 and 16-19). Developing a way to do that will be
difficult. One way is to conduct a week-long session, when Congress is on
recess, to brainstorm a message and a strategy for its execution that is in the
public interest. During these deliberations the Democratic Party must figure
out what it stands for in our democracy. Otherwise, it can’t win anything. The
week-long session should include the best thinkers and leaders of the
Democratic Party, including past presidents and vice-presidents.
The
ultimate aim of the Democratic message should be to address reforms of our
electoral system so that future members of Congress will (1) be elected to
provide fair representation in accordance with our Constitution, (2)
accept how their actions affect the country at large and (3) protect the public
against interference with our political system, whether foreign or domestic.
The Democratic message must close the gap between rural and urban communities
with policies and an economy that are fair to both. The message must change the
culture in Congress to the successful bipartisan one of earlier decades, promote
youthful Democratic leadership and encourage return of disappearing Republican
moderates who contributed so much to our exceptionalism of the past century
(ibid, pp 13, 14). Ideally, the message would be led by a persuader-in-chief
with potential of becoming the next president.
Encouraging
a participatory democracy of ideas and feedback as our democracy is restored
will lead to overwhelming grass roots support and resources to assist in coming
elections. Relying on an anti-Trump strategy would be unwise and detrimental to
the future of the Democratic Party. History will simply repeat itself. In the
end, Democrats must correct the corrupt political system that stole their power
and Supreme Court seat and hold public officials accountable for inexcusable
mishandling of government affairs. Until Republicans begin to accept
responsibility for their misconduct, they will not be either ready or entitled
to serve in office.
