This posting continues a periodic series on Rhode Island politics and taxation, building on twelve previous postings (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII).
Raymond Brooks of Providence wrote a letter to the editor of the ProJo that highlights how Rhode Island Speaker Murphy’s new House rules violate all sense of fair play and decency:
On March 23, I, along with many small-bar owners, attended and testified at a House Labor Committee hearing at the State House pertaining in part to House Bill H6159. This bill, after being orally amended and voted on, passing 6 to 3, would have stopped the exemptions with regard to smoking for Class C and D establishments as of June 1.
We in attendance thought the bill was headed to the House floor for a full vote, so after much applause and jubilation we went off into the night to celebrate what we thought was a great victory, but also knowing there would be much work ahead to secure the votes for equity. I got up early Thursday morning and e-mailed Governor Carcieri’s office to ask that he come out publicly in support of Bill H6159. I also e-mailed a thank-you to Rep. Jan P. Malik, for introducing the bill and for making the necessary changes in it for passage. I then headed to my restaurant to start my day, and that’s when my bubble burst.
I learned that after we had left and the smoke had cleared, House Speaker William Murphy rounded up five Labor Committee members who were not present for any testimony and re-addressed the bill. Please know that before Murphy’s Rules took effect, this action would not have been possible. In the past you would have needed consent from a representaive of the winning side before a bill, after passage in committee, could be re-addressed. The bill now lost, 8 to 2; only two supporters remained.
The politicians played political football with our lives, and we got kicked in the teeth. I ask all concerned to please help in sending a message to Speaker Murphy, at (401) 222-2466. Let him know his rules will not stand after the next election.
The arbitrary nature of this behavior by Speaker Murphy violates the rule of law upon which a civilized society relies for justice and ongoing citizen belief in the legitimacy of their government.
Shame on Speaker Murphy.
And why do we, the citizens of Rhode Island, take this dishonorable and dangerous behavior sitting down?
The most recent issue of The National Interest contains an article by Peter Drucker entitled “Trading Places” which discusses international economic trends:
The new world economy is fundamentally different from that of the fifty years following World War II. The United States may well remain the political and military leader for decades to come. It is likely also to remain the world’s richest and most productive national economy for a long time (though the European Union as a whole is both larger and more productive). But the U.S. economy is no longer the single dominant economy.
The emerging world economy is a pluralist one, with a substantial number of economic “blocs.” Eventually there may be six or seven blocs, of which the U.S.-dominated NAFTA is likely to be only one, coexisting and competing with the European Union (EU), MERCOSUR in Latin America, ASEAN in the Far East, and nation-states that are blocs by themselves, China and India. These blocs are neither “free trade” nor “protectionist”, but both at the same time.
Even more novel is that what is emerging is not one but four world economies: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade. These world economies overlap and interact with one another. But each is distinct with different members, a different scope, different values and different institutions…
Drucker concludes the article with concerns about the future competitive strength of the American economy:
For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world’s foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.
Greater economic risks lead to increased political risks. America would do well to develop strategically appropriate economic policies that anticipate these international trends.
[Open full post]I wrote a piece last December entitled “Pigs at the Public Trough” which talked about how the ideals of the 1994 Congressional revolution had dissipated into nothing more than power politics as usual.
Today’s Wall Street Journal contains an editorial entitled “Smells Like Beltway: The real reason Tom DeLay is in political trouble” that only reinforces why big government corrupts, regardless of party. Here are a few excerpts:
By now you have surely read about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s ethics troubles. Probably, too, you aren’t entirely clear as to what those troubles are–something to do with questionable junkets, Indian casino money, funny business on the House Ethics Committee, stuff down in Texas. In Beltway-speak, what this means is that Mr. DeLay has an “odor”: nothing too incriminating, nothing actually criminal, just an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse.
The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues. Increasingly, he smells just like the Beltway itself…
Taken separately, and on present evidence, none of the latest charges directly touch Mr. DeLay; at worst, they paint a picture of a man who makes enemies by playing political hardball and loses admirers by resorting to politics-as-usual.
The problem, rather, is that Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits…
…Rather than buck this system as he promised to do while in the minority, Mr. DeLay has become its undisputed and unapologetic master as Majority Leader.
Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out.
There were very legitimate reasons why the Founders believed in limited government. Our country would be better off if we quickly relearned the lessons they taught us a long time ago.
ADDENDUM I:
In contrast to the Wall Street Journal editorial, here are three counter-points:
First is a transcript from an interview with Tom DeLay that the Washington Times carried in its April 14 edition.
Second, Jeffrey Bell has written this article in the Weekly Standard.
Third, David Limbaugh has written this editorial.
I understand that Jerry Landay, “a former CBS News correspondent,” is part of the mainstream media club, and I continue to think the Providence Journal’s editorial page admirably broad in what it publishes. Still, I’m a bit surprised that the page would publish this rant from Landay:
Few of the “hath littles” are aware of what’s being done to them. The middle and blue-collar classes are victims of declining wages, ever-higher health-care costs, and other price hikes — led by energy costs, the highest in history, and climbing. Behind the smokescreen of a glorious “patriotic war,” fear of terrorism, and pumped-up religious fervor lies a home-front war against the middle and blue-collar classes: a conservative counter-revolution, which aims at a colossal redistribution of wealth upward, to the New Aristocracy — supported by a self-serving rewriting of the law based not on legal principle but on “free-market” theory.
The intended result is the creation of a “peasant” class, driven to the bottom by the need to compete against cheap labor pools, such as India’s and China’s, working for the bargain-basement wages that are all the big-business scrooges will dole out.
The intended result? And the former news correspondent knows this how? Unless somebody in the administration has said as much, Landay’s assertion reeks of vicious libel. One gets the sense that the Projo allowed Landay to get away with such a thing because his arguments aren’t meant to be taken as such, but rather as a noise pleasant to liberal ears — fare for the sort who would have had to invent Nazi rhetoric (perhaps through reams of phony memos) if it did not already exist.
It may be an amusing twist that Landay retools the “political ferment” in Ukraine and Lebanon (to which “citizens here look enviously”) to support his own anger at the administration that has facilitated the global environment in which it has occurred. But his piece is pretty much boilerplate, right down to its citation of a famous psychological experiment showing that humanity can’t be trusted to stand up to evil authority.
Asks Landay: “Why did 59 million voters, most of them victims of Bush’s economic tyranny, vote for George W. Bush and his party against their own best interests?” Well, for one thing, because Landay’s pined-for rebellion has yet to install the government for which we gullible citizens can’t comprehend our need. Something, it would seem, a bit more for the people (at least in its talking points) than by the people.
I guess I’ve always lumped the country-club folks with the managerialists. Whatever the case, I’d be inclined to include libertarians in your breakdown of the factions.
And regarding those libertarians, let’s just say I’m not quite as optimistic that the abstract principle that you’ve noted will serve as sufficient glue. My general sense is that the great bulk of libertarians take their position on government not primarily on the basis of a theory that compartmentalizes the sources of power in a society, but because they believe that removing morality from government will mean that they will never have to pay attention to others’ declarations about morality.
More broadly applicable than my impression, however, is that libertarians don’t see the secular philosophy as “you must honor a contract because the state says so.” The state is not the source of the coercive power. Rather, they see, as you admit, that one “of the few proper roles for government that most libertarians agree upon is enforcement of contractual arrangements freely entered,” and they would say that a person must honor those contracts because the state will enforce an explicit penalty (e.g., fines or jail time). No external morality is necessary for such a system except the narrow morality of immediate self-interest.
I’ve thought much the same thing for a while, Andrew, although I emphasize the tentative Republicans’ libertarianism, rather than what you call “managerialism.” It’s unfortunate that Terri Schiavo has become the excuse of the week for libertarians to stomp their feet about the “theocrats” with whom they have to share a coalition.
As I see it, there are two possibilities when it comes to the libertarian faction of Republicans shifting over to the Democrats:
- The Democrats could learn how to compromise with them on small-government issues.
- The Democrats could run their party into the ground so dramatically that the libertarians essentially take it over.
Number 1 would be the most expedient route — with number 2 taking decades, I would think — but it doesn’t look likely. Whenever Democrats want to appeal to a broader base, they move toward social conservatives, not governmental conservatives. (Witness Hillary.)
The Schiavo case, especially considering that the legislative and executive branches dealt with it by handing it back to the judiciary for another chance to bail them out of a tough political spot (sort of like the legislature’s initial reaction to Goodridge in Massachusetts), makes me wonder whether those who trumpet the possibility of a “Republican crack-up” don’t have it backwards. The common line is that social conservatives are busily enacting their moral policies, but what’s actually happening is that they’re being thwarted in doing so by the representatives to whom they look for influence. Moreover, since their involvement in government and politics is driven by something other than government and political theory, they may be more inclined to disengage from the coalition (whether that means disengagement from the entire process or just from the party).
I wonder: would libertarians have been more incensed by decisive legislative/executive action in the Schiavo case than the social conservatives will be by the ineffective show put on last weekend? I don’t think so. I do think, however, that politicians and libertarian Republicans both should be wary of assuming there to exist an immovable “base.” One too many monuments torn down, one too many lives not saved, one too many social policies rewritten in the courts, and social conservatives may decide that their time is better spent in the socio-cultural arena. That’s what libertarians claim to want, but they may not like the political consequences.
Mark Steyn writes the following in a piece that touches on the Terri Schiavo case:
You can read similar stories in almost any corner of the developed world, except perhaps the Netherlands, where discretionary euthanasia is so advanced it’s news if the kid makes it out of the maternity ward. As the New York Times reported the other day: “Babies born into what is certain to be a brief life of grievous suffering should have their lives ended by physicians under strict guidelines, according to two doctors in the Netherlands.”
Perhaps I can be forgiven for allowing paranoia to mix with principle for a moment as I ponder the procedure for writing and amending the “strict guidelines” that define “grievous suffering.” Although the rhetoric sometimes drifts into a debate about whether or not Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, floating around this issue (National Review Online’s Corner offers a self-contained example starting here) is the underlying question of whether her life is “worth living” or not. Putting aside the law, how does a culture define such a thing?
I ask because Projo blogger Sheila Lennon links to a personal anecdote from Barbara Brotman that steps a bit away from realm of being a vegetable:
My husband and I entered the murky waters on behalf of both his parents. They both headed into their 90s with dementia that left them unaware of their surroundings. Their bodies were gradually failing. They were adored by family members who agreed that if they began to die, we should not stand in their way.
One night, the phone call came. The nursing home called to say that my mother-in-law had pneumonia. The doctor wanted to send her to the hospital to be treated and was calling for the family’s permission.
Again, I have to wonder: where are the boundaries of “dementia,” and who will set the guidelines around it?
I’m wading deeply into speculative waters, but there seems to me clear reason to worry about a society that begins trimming its notions of rights and worthiness around the edges. Anybody who’s ever thought a Monday morning head cold would never fade knows that suffering is a fluid concept; when current, it feels eternal and unbearable. And anybody who’s ever been through or witnessed a teenage romantic breakup knows that whether a life is worth living is a matter of mushy perspective.
We all rightly despise suffering, and it is right to wish that our world did not include it. It’s also right to desire to relieve it in some way. We’d best be wary of looking to death for that relief, however, lest it become the prescription for midlife discomfort.
Congressman James Langevin voted in favor of allowing the federal court system to decide if Terri Schiavo should be allowed to continue receiving “food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life.”
Congressman Patrick Kennedy voted against against the measure, in effect voting to deny Ms. Schiavo “food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life.”
Text of the bill available here. Full roll call vote available here.
It’s called “the Curley effect,” according to an absolutely must-read column by Tom Coyne of RIPolicyAnalysis:
The authors note that “in his six mayoral races, between 1913 and 1951, James Curley represented the poorest and most ethnically distinct of Boston’s Irish. The city’s Brahmins always despised him because of his policies, his corruption, and his rhetoric, and always worked to block his victory. The probability that Curley would win in Boston was[enhanced by] increasing in the share of poor Irish Bostonians, and decreasing in the share of rich Bostonians of English descent.”
“Unsurprisingly, he tried to turn Boston into a city that would elect him. We call this strategy — increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies — the Curley effect.”
After reading Coyne’s list of current legislation, it’s not hard to see why one might be justified in concluding that “the Democratic leaders of the General Assembly have laid down a clear challenge to all those who oppose them: Either seize their power or leave Rhode Island.” When it comes to Rhode Island’s aristocracy, even citizens who benefit from payoffs of one kind or another have to ask themselves whether Rhode Island is our state or theirs.
[Open full post]Over on Dust in the Light I’ve explained that Terri Schiavo’s life has become a legitimate matter of interest for millions of Americans, and that it is our First Amendment right to demand that Congress do everything in its power to answer our grievance. Every court case does not get an appeal to Congress, but every court case that millions of Americans believe involves a matter of importance to them can and should.
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