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Impeachment as National Security: The Framers' Intentions |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52528"><span class="small">Charles Edel, Lawfare</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 December 2019 14:25 |
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Edel writes: "Fearful of the potential for unlimited, arbitrary or tyrannical exercise of power by an unprincipled president, the Constitution's authors allowed Congress to remove a president before the completion of his term if a sufficient number of lawmakers concluded that the president had committed 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.'"
President Trump and his attorney general William Barr at a White House news conference, in July. (photo: Asahi Shimbun/Getty)
Impeachment as National Security: The Framers' Intentions
By Charles Edel, Lawfare
11 December 19
 earful of the potential for unlimited, arbitrary or tyrannical exercise of power by an unprincipled president, the Constitution’s authors allowed Congress to remove a president before the completion of his term if a sufficient number of lawmakers concluded that the president had committed “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
This was intended to address a dilemma at the core of American national security. The founders were concerned that an insufficiently powerful executive would be unable to vigorously defend the nation. But they also feared that an unchecked executive could undermine national security and civil liberties alike if he decided to place his own interests above those of the nation. The Constitution’s framers therefore sought to find a safety feature for cases of extreme abuse of power that, nevertheless, did not unduly impede, paralyze or disable the nation’s security. Impeachment was their solution.
One of the most significant yet underappreciated lessons of the history of impeachment is that it was intended as a tool to strengthen the nation’s security—specifically to chart a middle path between an unlimited and unaccountable presidency and one that was insufficiently powerful to protect the nation.
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Impeachment originated in England as a method to hold royal officials to account for their public actions—although at that time it was restricted to officials and not to the king. Intended to curtail monarchical absolutism and replace it with parliamentary oversight, impeachment subjected royal officials to trial for public offenses. This included “certain high treasons and offenses and misprisions,” a phrase that appeared as early as 1386, although the precise term “high crimes and misdemeanors” did not appear until 1642. Moreover, according to the British model, officials convicted of impeachment were subject to a range of punishments including fines, imprisonment and the possibility of execution. The practice traveled across the Atlantic in the 17th century and found use in the American colonies as early as 1635. Because the English framework excluded the king from accountability, America’s founders determined that they needed to modify the English practice so as to prevent both the abuses of royal tyranny and the chaos engendered by weak central government.
To the early Americans who had fought a war against monarchy, the accumulation and arbitrary use of power were dangerous. As the historian Jeffrey Engel has written, the central question of their entire era was “what form of government could therefore be entrusted with the power it required, without simultaneously employing that power to undermine liberty? More specifically, in whose hands could such power possibly be trusted?” The answer they came up with was a mixed government consisting of executive, legislative and judicial branches, where the executive would exercise power but would also be dependent on, and constrained by, the other branches. Impeachment became one of the necessary tools—perhaps the central tool—to constrain the president. In this reading, impeachment became central not only to the U.S. Constitution but to the American idea of liberty—and was intended as a safeguard against the despotic accumulation and use of power by a president.
This argument was subsequently expanded by Alexander Hamilton in the “Federalist Papers.” In several essays discussing the powers of, and constraints on, the president, Hamilton argued in favor of a powerful and energetic executive, positing that it was not the same thing as absolute monarchy because there were multiple restraints on a president’s power, including institutionalized checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government; regular elections; and, as a last line of defense, impeachment. In many ways, the ability to empower while simultaneously constrain was the central dilemma the Constitution’s drafters faced. Nowhere could this be seen as clearly as in the debates surrounding the presidency and Congress’s powers of impeachment.
The Constitution gave sole powers of impeachment—the right to lay down a formal accusation or charge—to the House of Representatives and stipulated that, while the chief justice would preside at the trial, it was the Senate that would sit as both judge and jury, trying the accused. Presidents and other civil officials including federal judges could be impeached, and impeachable offenses were enumerated and limited to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While the Constitution remains silent on the legal standards for the process by which a president should be tried, or the standard of proof required for removal from office, it explicitly states that conviction and removal requires a two-thirds vote, and the only punishments available are removal and disqualification from holding office ever again. Other punishments were possible, but only after the charged party had been removed from office.
Examining the debates surrounding these clauses is especially revealing, as it explains not only what ended up in the Constitution but also the logic and intent behind those words as well as the ideas that were rejected.
The first question taken up at the Constitutional Convention was whether impeachment was even necessary. Weren’t regular elections enough of a check on a president’s behavior? Rufus King of Massachusetts pointed out that elections meant that the president “would periodically be tried for his behaviour by his electors.” Moreover, wouldn’t placing the president’s fate in the hands of the legislature place the president in a subservient position to the legislative branch?
Both of these opinions were decisively rejected. Fears that impeachment would render a president impotent or subservient to Congress were mitigated by setting a high standard for what constituted an impeachable offense and by making conviction require a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Such a combination meant that impeachment would be exceedingly rare.
The framers also found elections a necessary but ultimately insufficient safeguard for preventing the country from succumbing to an authoritarian leader. “What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious?” Benjamin Franklin asked before answering his own question: “Why recourse was had to assassination.” That was an outcome they clearly wanted to avoid. So, too, according to Edmund Randolph, were “tumults & insurrections.” Instead, they settled on making the president accountable and giving the legislative branch the legal mechanism to remove him from office. These debates reveal fears that republican government was vulnerable to a president with authoritarian instincts. They also underscore concerns that, without a mechanism for the safe and lawful removal of the president, the nation’s stability was likely to suffer.
“No point is of more importance that the right of impeachment,” George Mason argued, asking his fellow delegates, “Shall any man be above Justice?” James Madison agreed that it was “indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community [against] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate. The limitation of the period of his service, was not a sufficient safeguard.” That was especially true as the president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”
Here was the rationale for providing an extra check on presidential wrongdoing and an enumeration of what types of actions—incapacity, negligence, treason, corruption or oppression—should lead to impeachment. But this list was deemed too ambiguous, especially when the ill-defined “maladministration” was added to the mix. This had to be narrowed, and Gouverneur Morris argued that any charges of impeachment “ought to be enumerated and defined.”
The framers settled on “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The first two were clear enough from a definitional perspective, but the Constitution’s framers found them not sufficiently broad to serve as a sufficient safeguard. For them, criminality was neither necessary nor sufficient, even if it made the case clearer and more comfortable. The Constitutional debates reveal that the addition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was key as it signified the framers’ belief that an impeachable offense need not be a crime at all. Borrowing this phrase from previous British legal practice, the Constitution’s authors reasoned that there were “many great and dangerous offenses” that would not necessarily meet the precise definitions of either treason or bribery but that nevertheless would constitute an egregious abuse of power, an imperiling of national security or a betrayal of national trust.
Even if precise definitions remain elusive for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” British legal history, the deliberations at the Constitutional Convention and the subsequent ratification debates imply that such offenses were understood by the Constitution’s writers as profound political crimes committed against the state with grievous implications for the proper functioning of the country’s democratic processes. Presidents ought to be removable, not for general and vague reasons, but rather for specific abuses of the public trust. While the process would likely prove highly destabilizing and leave lasting scars on the country, it was also deemed necessary.
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History suggests several conclusions about the intended use of impeachment, the parameters that have been drawn around its employment and the elasticity it was intentionally given.
First, the Constitution was designed as a delicate, deliberate balancing act. It was meant to balance the powers of the various branches of government, federal and state authorities, and, at a more abstract level, the occasionally conflicting demands of liberty and order. Striking the right balance was the challenge that the Constitution’s framers faced, and nowhere was it more acute than in the office of the presidency. Rendering the executive too powerful would give it the capabilities to suppress individual liberties and subvert democratic government. But leaving it too weak, or too dependent on Congress, would rob it of the necessary vigor to enforce the laws, keep good order and stave off chaos. Perhaps the central question of the Constitutional Convention was how to strike the right balance between too enfeebled and too powerful a president.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 did so with the intention of restoring that balance. Americans had rejected monarchy in their war for independence but experienced disunity and disorder in the period after independence. Their lived experience had convinced many of the country’s leading political figures that the federal government required strengthening. In practice, this would mean endowing the executive branch with enhanced capabilities and broadened powers.
That, however, was not the same thing as a blank check. Hamilton, generally regarded as one of the most forceful advocates for a vigorous government, argued for empowering the executive branch. But he consistently tempered those calls with analysis of why the American presidency differed from the British monarchy. The main points of differentiation were oversight and punishment.
Second, the American Revolution had been justified as a fight against unlimited, arbitrary and unaccountable abuse of power by a remote king. Without sufficient safeguards, any exercise of power was likely to lead to a similar end. “The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” Franklin commented at the Constitutional Convention. That was not the issue, because all present in Philadelphia suspected, rightly, that George Washington would become the first president. The question was what would happen in the future as, Franklin observed, “No body knows what sort may come afterwards.” In the worst case, the Constitution’s authors fretted that “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister design, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means” obtain high office and betray the public trust.
To safeguard against an excessively ambitious individual putting his personal or political interests above those of the nation, they deliberately sought institutional mechanisms to constrain an individual with authoritarian, treasonous or corrupt impulses. Divided government where the various branches competed with, and intruded into each other’s spheres, was the first line of defense against such a power grab. Regular elections were another. But the Constitutional Convention debates reveal that neither of these was deemed sufficiently robust in the case of an individual bent on subverting democratic processes or undermining the nation’s security. Impeachment was the constitutionally prescribed response for how best to protect the nation when neither checks and balances nor regular elections proved sufficient.
A look at the constitutional debates also reveals that impeachment was not intended as a punishment but, rather, as a vital protection intended to remove a president whose continuance in office would likely result in further damage to the country. Whereas the British had allowed for the punishment of officials, the American practice did not make any stipulations beyond removal from office—and leaving open the potential for future prosecution. Impeachment was intended as a rare but necessary safeguard to the security and proper functioning of the nation’s democratic processes. Its intent was defensive, which required expeditious removal of the president from office, lest he repeat actions deemed gravely harmful to the proper functioning of the state. Charles Black, the constitutional law scholar and author of the authoritative 1974 essay on impeachment, observed that “we could punish a traitorous or corrupt president after his term expired; we remove him principally because we fear he will do it again, or because a traitor or taker of a bribe is not thinkable as a national leader.” In the absence of a constitutionally prescribed remedy, efforts to remove such individuals from power were likely to be highly violent—as America’s recent history of revolution against England underscored.
Moreover, just because the Constitution prescribed a legal mechanism from removing a president from office did not mean that impeachment would be stabilizing. As Hamilton foresaw more than two centuries ago, impeachment will “agitate the passions of the whole community” and connect to “pre-existing factions,” and the outcome will be determined less by “real demonstrations of innocence or guilt” and more by the competitive strength of the parties. It is precisely because of the contested nature and depth of the alleged harm done that impeachment has always been a ferociously partisan and highly divisive affair.
Yet, despite knowing that impeachment would likely prove destabilizing, the Constitution’s framers nonetheless incorporated impeachment into the U.S. Constitution as a necessary defense of the nation’s institutions and values against an unprincipled and unrestrained individual. Impeachment was intended not just as a remedy of last resort but also one that should be considered only in rare cases where presidential actions were deemed harmful to American society. James Iredell, later a Supreme Court justice, argued at the North Carolina ratification debates that “the occasion for its exercise will arise from acts of great injury to the whole community.” This was very much in keeping with the definition of “high Crimes,” as understood by the founding generation. William Blackstone, the leading British legal scholar of the late 18th century, wrote in 1792 that such wrongs were “a breach and violation of the public rights and duties” and “strike at the very being of society.” Such offenses were understood by the Constitution’s writers as assaults on civil order and governance itself.
Because impeachment levels such a grave charge, it was intended to be both political and public. This was intentional. Neither the Constitution, nor the proper functioning of the country’s democratic process, nor the nation’s sovereignty could survive sustained assaults in the absence of vocal and vigorous defenders.
Ultimately, the Constitution left it to the judgment of the House and the Senate to determine when, in the words of Hamilton, “the abuse or violation of some public trust” amounted to “injuries done immediately to the society itself” and required removing the president from office, lest his continued occupation of the presidency do further damage.
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The Democrats Handed Trump a Huge 2020 Policy Win Just After Moving to Impeach Him |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52386"><span class="small">Cameron Joseph, VICE</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 December 2019 14:25 |
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Joseph writes: "On Tuesday morning, House Democrats unveiled their articles of impeachment against President Trump. Just one hour later, they handed him a key policy victory."
Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
The Democrats Handed Trump a Huge 2020 Policy Win Just After Moving to Impeach Him
By Cameron Joseph, VICE
11 December 19
The USMCA is Trump's biggest policy win since he slashed corporate taxes two years ago.
 n Tuesday morning, House Democrats unveiled their articles of impeachment against President Trump.
Just one hour later, they handed him a key policy victory.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats announced Tuesday that they’ve hammered out a deal to support the USMCA, a trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada that updates and revises NAFTA.
If the deal passes Congress it’ll be Trump’s biggest policy victory since Republicans slashed corporate and personal tax rates two years ago — and could prove to be a huge political win for Trump, shoring up his populist bona fides for the 2020 election.
“Trump is going to take the fact that there was a bipartisan deal to say his trade policy is working,” Jeff Hauser, a Democratic strategist with deep ties to the labor movement, told VICE News. Pelosi's "wrong on the substance and dangerously wrong on the politics.”
Trump’s 2016 wins were fueled in part by his fierce criticism of international trade deals like NAFTA — a message that helped him sweep through the Midwest. Democrats struck back and won big in 2018 largely by painting him as a phony and a hypocrite on economic issues, hammering him and Republicans for failing to improve infrastructure and threatening voters’ healthcare while slashing tax rates for rich people and big corporations.
Swing state play
Those arguments and the damage Trump’s trade wars have caused helped Democrats sweep the governors’ and Senate races in the three most important swing states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and make gains elsewhere in the Midwest. They’re likely the strongest message to beat Trump in those states in 2020 en route to ending his presidency. And Pelosi and House Democrats may have just undercut their party’s best argument.
Trump was delighted:
Pelosi defended both the timing of the announcement and her decision to work with Trump’s team.
“There are some people who said ‘why make it look like he has a victory?’ Well, we’re declaring victory for the American worker and what is in this agreement,” she insisted. “Not any one of us is important enough to hold up a trade agreement that is important for American workers because of any collateral benefit that might accrue to any one of us.”
Pelosi has a different calculus than other national Democrats. She wants to see Trump lose, but her overriding goal is to keep House control, and that means reelecting the swing-district Democrats who won in 2018. Many of those are from more suburban districts where well-educated moderates abandoned Trump’s party en masse because of all the chaos and want to see the return of a functional government.
'Brilliant politics'
“The people who put us in power in ’18 were a lot of former Republican voters who wanted the craziness to stop. In the middle of impeachment, being able to say we’re not single-mindedly focused on this, we’re doing what we were sent here to do … it’s really brilliant politics,” said Democratic pollster John Hagner.
Hagner argued the upsides for House Democrats were concrete while the chance this helps Trump isn’t so clear-cut.
“The help is real and obvious and significant. The harm is theoretical,” he said.
But House members who win tough districts in wave years often believe it’s because they’ve managed to strike the perfect moderate tone, try to burnish that reputation by splitting with their party on key votes, and get wiped out of office anyways when the other party has a good election anyways. That happened to almost all of the House Democrats who voted against Obamacare in 2010, as well as to most of the Republicans who bucked Trump on Obamacare repeal and his tax cuts heading into the 2018 elections.
Often, their decisions to try to find a win-win for both parties ended up just undercutting their own chances by helping the other side make their case against their party own party.
“Giving Trump bipartisan cover on one of his biggest political vulnerabilities and preventing a potential Democratic President from negotiating a better, more worker-friendly deal in 15 months makes absolutely no political or substantive sense to me,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama.
When Trump sent out his celebratory tweet on USMCA, Pfeiffer warned that the message will soon be used “in ads during Packers, Lions, Steelers, and Eagles [NFL] games” in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52525"><span class="small">Ashley Dawson, In These Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 December 2019 14:25 |
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Dawson writes: "Cultural work needs to be seen as a vitally important part of the new green economy."
Students demonstrating in support of a Green New Deal. (photo: Getty)
The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too.
By Ashley Dawson, In These Times
11 December 19
Cultural work has a key role to play in shaping the climate-friendly economy.
 ear the end of his first term, as effects of the Depression lingered, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced growing popular clamor for dramatic economic action. In response, he launched a series of initiatives in 1935 that historians dub the Second New Deal. Among these audacious programs were the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided jobs for more than 8.5 million unemployed Americans. WPA workers built crucial infrastructure around the country, including the start of the federal highway system and hundreds of thousands of public buildings, parks and playgrounds.
The WPA also had a cultural wing that supported writers documenting the nation’s folklore (including the stories of elderly freed slaves), artists creating murals and statues for new public buildings, and playwrights and theater workers staging inexpensive performances across the country. WPA organizations like the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) brought art to the people and provided jobs for unemployed cultural workers— all while shining the spotlight on pressing political issues. The Green New Deal should learn from this: A federal Green Arts Project could help lift up radical solutions to corporate malfeasance in our own time, while creating huge numbers of low-carbon jobs.
In 1936, roughly 27 million Americans lived on farms, largely without electricity. As the science writer Waldemar Kaempffert argued in a New York Times editorial that year, electrification was a critical challenge for the United States, whose relatively weak federal government prevented it from launching the kind of nation-spanning modernization projects initiated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
This challenge underlined the inequities and dysfunctions of the United States’ capitalist economy. As Kaempffert explained, “Power companies are not philanthropic institutions. Investors look to them for dividends. If there is no market in a sparsely populated territory it is ruinous to electrify it, and this because it costs 10 times as much to distribute as to generate energy.” The logic of the market, in other words, not only acted against the public interest, but excluded a significant segment of the public—in particular, rural residents—from access to key infrastructure. As Kaempffert argued, “The profit motive must be subordinated to the obvious social duty of spreading the use of electricity.”
It was in this context that, in 1937, the Living Newspaper unit of the FTP debuted the play Power in New York City. Billed as “a thrilling dramatization of modern industry,” Power presented details of the corrupt dealings of the nation’s private, investor-owned electric utilities, such as rampant price fixing and other methods of gouging the public. Power challenged corporate control and corruption in media in two ways: on stage—showing how the big utilities bought off academics and newspapers to discredit the idea of publicly provided electricity—and off—by giving artists a space to produce critical accounts of timely social and political issues.
Power remains all too relevant. The nation’s dominant electric utilities are still in private hands, gouging ratepayers around the country. Worse still, saddled with massive fossil fuel assets, these monopolistic corporations are one of the major obstacles to a transition to renewable energy. Electric utilities largely rely on coal and natural gas and spend billions lobbying Congress in their interest.
The second half of Power documents the struggle to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the public entity that electrified much of the rural South. At the time Power was produced, the utilities were fighting TVA in the Supreme Court, but the FTP did not shy away from controversy; it was defined by its daring interventions. Under the direction of the pioneering female theater director and writer Hallie Flanagan, the FTP’s Living Newspaper unit assembled a team of journalists to gather factual information about an issue of public concern, then distributed the research to editors and writers to create narratives. The FTP’s focus on public power—in both senses—offers a suggestive model for today.
The Green New Deal, as outlined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and others, is self-evidently about transforming the country’s infrastructure. But like the New Deal, it also needs a cultural wing. The Green New Deal must, at bottom, be about changing people’s minds: about where power should come from and who has the right to generate it; about what a just transition for workers and affected communities should look like; about what constitutes a good life. While much has changed in U.S. culture since the 1930s, the corporate media is still failing to host these important conversations. When even supposedly enlightened companies like Google are contributing to climate change-denying think tanks, the public needs a space for media in the general interest.
We all know that a Green New Deal would involve massive public works: transforming the electrical grid to renewable energy; electrifying transportation; decarbonizing manufacturing; building millions of zero-carbon public buildings and social housing units; retrofitting existing buildings for efficiency and electrified heating and cooling; and totally revamping the country’s agricultural sector. All this will generate hundreds of thousands of wellpaying jobs that could lift entire communities out of economic and social oppression.
A federal Green Arts Project could boost such projects, too, by explaining the necessity and attractiveness of infrastructure like high-speed rail and zero-carbon social housing, using artforms that speak to the public more effectively than data ever could. Such a Green Arts Project could help dramatize the need for a just transition, one that attends to and rectifies the unevenness of environmental impacts.
The Green New Deal cannot just be about building more stuff. In fact, a crucial element of the Green New Deal must be figuring out how to consume much less without spurring mass unemployment. Capitalism as an economic system is inherently driven to grow or face crisis, which explains why CEOs sit around boardrooms figuring out how to get people to buy more Whoppers, 15-foot Rudolph-the-reindeer inflatables and Return of the Jedi wall clocks—wonders of consumer culture that make us sick and contribute to the destruction of ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest. All this economic growth has meant feeding more and more of the planet into the insatiable maw of capitalism. In the period from 1970 to 2017, as inequality skyrocketed, the global extraction of natural resources increased more than 240%. In 2017, the world extracted a staggering 92 billion tons of material stuff, from construction materials to metals to fossil fuels to food. The Global Footprint Network estimates that resource use overshoots, by more than 70% annually, what can be sustainably maintained.
While we should strive to increase our economic efficiency, the evidence shows that more growth inherently means more carbon emissions, and more extraction writ large. We ultimately must scale down global economic activity if we intend to avoid climate chaos, and build up new, low-extraction industries to avoid galloping unemployment. What we need is jobs that don’t involve working endlessly to make more useless stuff; instead, the Green New Deal should pay handsomely and connect people with one another. Building up the so-called social economy could include cooperative institutions for childcare, elder care, education and other services. It must also include cultural work.
The arts can be a low-extraction sector of the economy, and a Green Arts Project would clearly seek to support low-budget, minimal-impact ventures akin to the Federal Theatre Project rather than blockbuster Hollywood cinema. As with the FTP, the content of local productions could be tailored to local circumstances, allowing masses of people to consume relevant cultural productions without consuming lots of resources. And, as the model of Power suggests, a federal Green Arts Project could also allow writers and artists to catalyze important debates about corporate monopolies and the limits of economic growth.
Power could easily be updated for a contemporary audience. But in addition to such muckraking, a Green Theater Project might provide a forum to debate vexing questions about what public energy ought to look like: local and decentralized, largescale and federally run, or some combination? And how do we ensure that the energy transition is as just and democratic as possible?
There are obviously many complex technical issues behind these questions, about which members of the public need to be educated. But the challenge of creating renewable public power is ultimately a political, and even cultural, one. The American public needs new stories, ones that challenge dominant Hollywood narratives that suggest the climate crisis will inevitably devolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all. In place of such box office nihilism, we need visions of human empathy and solidarity in the face of ecological chaos. We need hope for a damaged people and planet. And to give it to us, we need an Arts Project for the Green New Deal.
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RSN: Will the Democratic Presidential Nomination Be Bought? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 December 2019 13:17 |
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Solomon writes: "From three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination."
Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. (photo: AP)
Will the Democratic Presidential Nomination Be Bought?
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
11 December 19
rom three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Pete Buttigieg has made big gains. A timeworn ally of corporate power, Joe Biden, is on a campaign for his last hurrah. And Michael Bloomberg is swooping down from plutocratic heights.
Those three men are a team of rivals — each fiercely competitive for an individual triumph, yet arrayed against common ideological foes named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The obvious differences between Buttigieg, Biden and Bloomberg are apt to distract from their underlying political similarities. Fundamentally, they’re all aligned with the nation’s economic power structure — two as corporate servants, one as a corporate master.
For Buttigieg, the gaps between current rhetoric and career realities are now gaping. On Tuesday, hours after the collapse of the “nondisclosure agreement” that had concealed key information about his work for McKinsey & Company, The New York Times concluded that “the most politically troubling element of his client list” might be what he did a dozen years ago for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — “a health care firm that at the time was in the process of reducing its work force.”
The newspaper reported that “his work appeared to come at about the same time the insurer announced that it would cut up to 1,000 jobs — or nearly 10 percent of its work force — and request rate increases.”
This year, Buttigieg’s vaguely progressive rhetoric has become more and more unreliable, most notably with his U-turn away from supporting Medicare for All. Meanwhile, wealthy donors have flocked to him. Forbes reports that 39 billionaires have donated to the Buttigieg campaign, thus providing ultra-elite seals of approval. (Meanwhile, Biden has 44 billionaire donors and Warren has six. Forbes couldn’t find any billionaires who’ve donated to Sanders; he did receive one contribution from a billionaire’s spouse.)
Not surprisingly, the political orientations of the leading candidates match up with the spread of average donations. The latest figures reflect candidates’ proximity to the class interests of donors, with wealthier ones naturally tending to give more sizable amounts. Nearly two-thirds (64.9 percent) of Biden’s donations were upwards of $200 each, while such donations accounted for a bit more than half (52.5 percent) of the contributions to Buttigieg. Compare those numbers to 29.6 percent for Elizabeth Warren and 24.9 percent for Bernie Sanders.
Buttigieg’s affinity for corporate Democrats — and how it tracks with his donor base — should get a lot more critical scrutiny. For example, Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeted in early November: “Asked Buttigieg if he agreed w Pelosi that PAYGO should stay in place if a Dem wins. ‘We might want to look at a modification to the rules, but the philosophical premise, I think, does need to be there… we’ve got to be able to balance the revenue of what we’re proposing.’”
But the entire “philosophical premise” of PAYGO amounts to a straightjacket for constraining progressive options. To support it is to endorse the ongoing grip of corporate power on the Democratic Party. As Buttigieg surely knows, PAYGO — requiring budget cuts to offset any spending increases — is a beloved cause for the farthest-right congressional Democrats. The 26 House members of the corporatist Blue Dog Coalition continue to be enthralled with PAYGO.
As for Joe Biden, since the launch of his campaign almost eight months ago, progressives have increasingly learned that his five-decade political record is filled with one repugnant aspect after another after another after another. Any support for him from progressives in the primaries and caucuses next year will likely come from low-information voters.
In sharp contrast to Sanders and Warren, who refuse to do high-dollar fundraising events, Biden routinely speaks at private gatherings where wealthy admirers donate large sums. His campaign outreach consists largely of making beelines to audiences of extraordinarily rich people around the country — as if to underscore his declaration in May 2018 that “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble… The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
One of those folks who presumably isn’t a “bad guy” is Bloomberg, who — with an estimated net worth of $54 billion — has chosen to pursue a presidential quest by spending an astronomical amount of money on advertisements. Writing for The Nation magazine this week, Jeet Heer aptly noted that Bloomberg “is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”
More powerfully than any words, Bloomberg’s brandishing of vast amounts of ad dollars is conveying his belief that enormous wealth is an entitlement to rule. The former New York mayor’s campaign is now an extreme effort to buy the presidency. Yet what he’s doing tracks with more standard assumptions about the legitimacy of allowing very rich people to dominate the political process.
Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager Faiz Shakir summed up the BBB approach this way: “Today, Joe Biden’s super PAC went on the air with a massive television ad buy. Mike Bloomberg is blanketing the airwaves almost everywhere with the largest ad buy in primary history. And Pete Buttigieg is taking time off the trail for a trio of private, high-dollar fundraisers in New York City.”
Thanks to grassroots low-dollar donations, Warren and Sanders (whom I support) have been able to shatter the corrupt paradigm that gave presidential campaign dominance to candidates bankrolled by the rich. That’s why Bloomberg has stepped in to save oligarchy from democracy.
As Frederick Douglass said with timeless truth, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Continual denunciations of anti-democratic power are necessary and insufficient. It’s far from enough to assert endlessly that the system is rigged and always will be.
Power concedes nothing. Fatalism is a poison that gets us nowhere. Constant organizing — outside and inside the electoral arena — is the antidote to powerlessness.
With the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination up for grabs, this chance will not come again.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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s a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.
