THE FAULT LINE IN COMMON GROUND

H. N. Burdett

While recent polls show that 82.5 percent of the American public disapprove of the job the United States Congress is doing, one would be hard pressed to find anyone professing to be among the 11.3 percent who approve. The polls do not reveal how the media stands on our representatives in Washington. But the legendary Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen pointed out some seven decades back that Congress-bashing has been a time-honored pastime of the media.

In July 1942, Dirksen read to his colleagues a litany of newspaper and magazine criticism of national lawmakers, including:

(1837) "A more weak, bigoted, persecuting and intolerant set of instruments of malice and every hateful passion, were never assembled in a legislative capacity in any age or any land."

(1873) "We are not certain that it is not possible to make the situation worse and Congress would probably speedily reach that result if that were possible."

(1908) "If God had made Congress, he would not boast of it."

(1942) "It is true that for collective brains, guts, vision and leadership, the Seventy-seventh would stand pretty close to the bottom in any ranking of the seventy-seven Congresses that have assembled...since 1789."

Polarization of the two major U.S. political parties has virtually stagnated the current Congress on virtually every major issue confronting it. National lawmakers' perpetual legislative treadmill has assigned to the realm of limbo priorities ranging from the budget to possible remedies for a swifter recovery from the worst economy since the 1929 stock market crash.

Neither of the two parties is blameless. President Obama turning his back on the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles), which he himself had appointed to draw up a blueprint for compromise, must be counted as a major disappointment of his presidency. The report placed on the table entitlements dear to Democrats, as well as taxes that are anathema to Republicans, draining any interest a significant segment of either party had in pursuing it.

Future historians would do well to examine closely the results of two ideology-fueled blunders of the present era: The congressional overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Supreme Court's overruling of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.

The calculated collapse of Glass-Steagall, which in 1932 legislated a firewall between commercial and investment banks, contributed substantially to the evidence that capitalism - a vital underpinning of American democracy - is unsustainable without reasonable regulations that are actually enforced.

Though Glass-Steagall did not assure foolproof protection against the chicanery of the least scrupulous of Wall Street operatives, for nearly 70 years it at least prevented wholesale conflicts of interest by prohibiting commercial banks from peddling securities - including those that were deceptively risky and others that were blatantly worthless.

Three Republican lawmakers - Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representatives Jim Leach of Iowa and Tom Blilely of Virginia - introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to end Glass-Steagall. This pried the lid from the Wall Street cookie jar and the crumbs could be followed down the path of economic disaster.

Polarization further led to the brazen distortion of the U.S. Constitution by those charged with dispensing justice from the nation's pinnacle of jurisprudence: the Supreme Court.

Conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in the Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on grounds that the law violated corporations' right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their 5-4 decision opened the door for unlimited sums from undisclosed sources to influence elections.

The cornerstone of Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-age dissent was that the Constitution protects individual rather than corporate rights. For conservatives who had railed long and loud against political activist jurists to deny that their ruling was anything but judicial activism is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty if not outright hypocrisy.

Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few remaining GOP moderates in the U.S. Senate, not only voted for McCain-Feingold, she was also one of the fewer still members of her party to denounce the Court's Citizens United ruling. In her words, the decision was "a great disservice to American democracy."

Sen. Snowe recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term in the Senate. In a Washington Post op-ed explaining her decision, Senator Snowe wrote: "The great challenge is to create a system that gives our elected officials reason to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support. In a politically diverse nation, only by finding that common ground can we achieve results for the common good. That is not happening today and, frankly, I do not see it happening in the near future."

The 1963 Civil Rights Act, which has been characterized as the completion of the "second American Revolution," was dependent upon the earlier mentioned Senator Dirksen rallying sufficient Republican votes to ensure its passage. Were that same decision left up to the present U.S. Congress, that landmark legislation would languish in the desert of irresponsible inaction. Inability by the major political parties to locate common ground is without doubt the greatest and continuing threat to American democracy.
###



C
o