A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on August 22nd, 2010 in Congress

I just returned from vacation and saw this email waiting for me:

Welcome to the Daily Kos action email list. You received this email either because you are a registered member of the Daily Kos community, or because you donated to a Daily Kos operated Act Blue page. To unsubscribe from this list, follow the link at the bottom of this email.

Today we’re launching a campaign to end the filibuster. Join this campaign by following the link below and signing the petition that appears:

http://campaigns.dailykos.com/action/reformthesenate

Here’s how signing the petition makes a difference.

We’ll deliver the petition to every Democratic nominee for Senate and every returning Democratic Senator. When we do, we’ll get them on record about whether they agree that the rules of the Senate can, and should, be changed with a simple majority vote on the first day of Congress next year.

Once 51 returning and potential Senators have come out in support, we’ll have proven that changing Senate rules is possible with a simple majority vote.

http://campaigns.dailykos.com/action/reformthesenate

Entrenched power players like Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu have all depended on the filibuster to enable Republican obstructionism and water down progressive legislation. Corporate interests have used it to protect themselves by purchasing a few small state Senators on the cheap.

There’s no bigger decision Senate Democrats will make next year. The Senate is where good legislation goes to die. Democrats can either change a system that allows a tiny unaccountable minority to thwart the will of the country, or they can continue being part of the problem.

http://campaigns.dailykos.com/action/reformthesenate

Let’s get started,

Markos Moulitsas

Founder, Daily Kos

This email proves several things: 1) Markos is willing to venture into the land of the spammer when it suits his need (notice that I didn’t “opt in” to anything – he just decided to contact me because, at some point, I used his website and/or donated money to someone); 2) he fails to understand the importance of protecting our country from a “mere majority;” and 3) he doesn’t actually believe there’s any chance that sixty Progressives can ever be elected to the Senate.

The first one is simply an irritant. But I consider foisting email onto people who don’t want it and haven’t asked for it to be rather unethical. Kos has one of the highest trafficked websites on the web – he could just put a post on the front page and leave it there. But to start a “Daily Kos action email list” and assume that people who have already signed onto a site will: 1) want to see it, and 2) actually agree with it; is the height of conceit. I suppose it also points to the fact that he doesn’t believe his faithful followers will respond in enough numbers to actually use his site for what it was intended to do.

The second point shows that he and his mindless minions actually are a threat to our country – in exactly the same way that the mindless minions of FOX News are. Both badly misinterpret the design of our government and the fact that our Founders wanted it to be difficult to enact legislation. Both want to get 50% plus one and then claim they have the authority to enact massive legislative agendas (the “mandate”).

John Adams:

To remedy the dangers attendant upon the arbitrary use of power, checks, however multiplied, will scarcely avail without an explicit admission some limitation of the right of the majority to excercise sovereign authority over the individual citizen… In popular governments [democracies], minorities [individuals] constantly run much greater risk of suffering from arbitrary power than in absolute monarchies…

James Madison:

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.

Alexander Hamilton:

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

In fairness, I have to say that these men would be horrified that eight or nine Senators can grind the business of government to a halt. But they foresaw such an event and believed the best prevention was simply to expose those obstructionists for what they were and trust the voters to turn them out. Unless, of course, the voters wanted their representatives to obstruct that particular measure.

The problem with the Senate isn’t that the vote for cloture is set too high – it’s that the Democrats simply can’t manage to reach that number. So what happens if they lower the magic number for cloture to fifty-one and they find they only have forty-eight reliable votes for it (due to either electoral changes or personal intransigence)? That reality exposes the real belief at the heart of the measure.

Progressives simply don’t believe that they can forge a governable majority. They understand that they can’t win if they play by the rules, so they want to change the rules. I’m not necessarily against changing the rules, but the email is rather vague about “reform” – other than needing fifty-one votes to change a rule.

Our government was designed to make it difficult to pass legislation, because the Founders understood that it is easier to block bad legislation than to try and reform it later. In other words, it is often better to do nothing now and wait for the election cycle to turn out a stronger majority. Democrats made use of this idea when they started referring to the Republicans as “the party of no.” But, apparently, they believe they are going to lose and lose badly in November.

They would do well to remember that just a few short years ago, it was the Democrats who were in the minority. Back then, it was Democrats using legislative procedure to hold back the tide on the Bush agenda. I can’t, for the life of me, understand why any coherent and rational person would want to remove their last line of defense for getting steamrolled – unless they believe they will never be in the position of being steamrolled. But then, if Democrats believed they were a permanent and growing majority, they wouldn’t need to change the rules of operation, would they?

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