Unthinking extremists are political pawns

Much of my writing over the past several years has focused on the paralysis of the federal government and the extent to which it contributes significantly to the nation's mounting problems. I've argued that both political parties are guilty as sin for the mess we're in because Democratic and Republican officeholders have figured out how to game the system so that it keeps them in office as they avoid grappling with the nation's problems.

But make no mistake about it, you and I are responsible for re-electing these self-possessed bozos. And the grip that the right- and left-wing nuts have on the Republican and Democratic parties contributes mightily to that sorry state of affairs.

This is why last fall I joined with Times-News columnist Mike Tower to form Citizens Against Politics As Usual, CAPAU. At that time, I changed my party registration from Republican to unaffiliated. I had been a registered Republican for many years. And before that I had been a registered Democrat for many years.

CAPAU (capau.org) is working hard to convince voters that it's vital for them to defeat all incumbents in order to begin to break the logjam in Washington that imperils our economy, our way of life and our freedom as Americans.

In early March, I was invited to be one of a panel of three questioners at a debate at Brevard College on March 26 that brought together all but one of the Republicans seeking the nomination for the 11th Congressional District of North Carolina. Well into the debate, I asked the following question: Are you willing to denounce Rush Limbaugh's statements about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, wherein he called her a slut, a prostitute, a femi-nazi, and called upon her to record her sexual encounters and post them on the internet?

The relevance of the question goes to the steep decline in the support of women voters for Republicans since Limbaugh's comments, which also was the subject of my column of March 18.

The GOP candidates who responded to that question did so with thoughtful and measured comments. But several members of the audience in the Porter Center for the Performing Arts, where the debate was held, went ballistic at my having asked that question. There were catcalls of "pathetic" and "pitiful question" from the audience.

A week after the debate, I received the following email, which is quoted here in its entirety except for the author's name.

Mr Goldman:

A week ago tonight you participated in the debate at Brevard College. I wanted to think things over before commenting on your first question (as well as the first question of the debate) concerning Rush Limbaugh asking the candidates about the need to apologize for his comments reference the agenda-driven Ms Fluke. These are just my thoughts on this portion of the debate.

First of all, your question was as unctuous as any I've heard from David Gregory or Bob Schieffer. If your intent was to emulate them then you succeeded. I am ashamed that, other than Jeff Hunt, who gave a halfway decent response, none of them took your obnoxious question and put it back on you.

Limbaugh had already apologized so the civil discourse Obama claimed to desire last year after the Arizona shooting was honored, at least by Limbaugh. What goes unchallenged is the unending attack by the likes of Bill Maher, David Letterman, Ed Schultz et al on any and all republican/conservative candidates. Our women especially, are the targets of comments far exceeding the bounds of decency or anything Limbaugh said.

The hypocritical, faux-indignation as demonstrated by you and other leftists does not go unnoticed and the righteousness you are trying to convey only succeeds in coming across as the SELF-righteous propaganda you are really aiming for.

May my beloved country and culture I was born to, continue in spite of the efforts of you and your fifth column compatriots in attempting to extinguish it.

signed

Brevard, NC

This venomous email isn't worthy of reprinting here except for the fact that it so disgustingly shines a bright light on the unthinking extremism that has taken root in and paralyzed both political parties.

Now the individual who sent me this email has a right to whatever political views he wishes. But that said, the views expressed are factually in error, incoherently expressed, extremist in nature and imbedded in concrete. It reminded me of Ben Franklin's comment that whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

If CAPAU stands for anything, it stands for replacing incumbents of both parties who too frequently manipulate to their own advantage those who bay at the moon and are utterly clueless to the fact that they are but pawns in the hands of self-serving elected officials.

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Please Visit:  Mike Tower Political Opinions

Once upon a time in America ...

Let's free associate. Let's suppose that Mitt Romney, who you will recall ran for president in 2008, was nominated and defeated Barack Obama four years ago.

And let's also suppose that, as President Romney took office in 2009, the Republicans had won control of both houses of Congress. Now that we've got the stage set, let's assume that immediately after taking office, President Romney announced that the enactment of health care reform would be his top priority.

He tells the nation that health care costs have become so staggeringly and uncontrollably high that reform is necessary to prevent the soaring costs of Medicare and Medicaid from bankrupting the nation. He tells the nation that we can no longer permit 50 million Americans to go without health insurance, and so he will propose to cover 30 million of them.

And most importantly, President Romney tells the nation that his initiative will be modeled after the program he enacted as governor of Massachusetts. At its heart will be the individual mandate.

In order to dispel skepticism among Republicans, who had expected that fixing the nation's economic mess would take center stage, President Romney reminds them that his program with the individual mandate as its centerpiece had come from conservative thinkers. After all, it was Mark Pauly, a conservative economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who had devised the individual mandate as the alternative to the Democrats and their obsession with a single-payer health care system.

Not long after Pauly advanced the individual mandate, Stuart Butler at the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's premier conservative think tanks, began to push the mandate with Republicans. For them it was the perfect free-market alternative to the Democrats' addiction to big-government solutions.

But rather than develop a bill to do just that and submit it to Congress, the president hands the job off to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. McConnell and Boehner, both partisan lawmakers, quickly decide to write the bill to their own liking in anticipation that they could secure the votes to pass it. The Democrats predictably are radicalized in their opposition to the bill and to a process that excludes them.

The enactment of health care reform is by definition complex and controversial. But President Romney's withdrawal from the field of battle coupled with McConnell's and Boehner's "my way or the highway" approach turns the passage of the legislation into all-out war.

Fifteen months later, President Romney signs the bill into law. Not a single Democrat has voted for it. It's grown to more than 2,500 pages in length, and nobody understands it. Its real costs are disguised by frontloading the revenues and backloading the costs. Soon it will have more than 10,000 pages of federal regulations.

Town hall meetings held by members of Congress to explain the new program to their constituents turn into screaming matches among those who love or hate a bill they don't understand. The nation is torn in half.

And very shortly after it becomes law, the inevitable happens. More than 20 states file suit, claiming the individual mandate is unconstitutional. The heart of their complaint is that the individual mandate, which will force the American public to purchase health insurance or face stiff fines imposed by the federal government, is an unconstitutional exercise of power based on the Constitution's Commerce Clause. The suits argue that Romneycare, as it has come to be known, is proposing to create an economic market and then compel individual Americans to enter that market or face hefty federal penalties. They assert that Romneycare will profoundly and destructively alter the relationship between the federal government and the people.

Ultimately, the cases reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The four liberal justices mount a full-throated assault on the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate during an unprecedented three days of oral arguments before the high court. Justice Stephen Breyer's questions indicate that, while he sees no constitutional problem with funding health care through a well-established single-payer system like Medicare, he worries that the individual mandate stretches the federal reach of the Commerce Clause to and beyond the breaking point.

On the other hand, Justice Antonin Scalia and the other three conservative justices argue just the opposite. If single-payer Medicare is constitutional, then surely so, too, is the individual mandate. Moreover, they inferentially raise the specter that striking the individual mandate amounts to activist judges legislating from the bench.

There you have it. The folks we put in office to lead, and it makes no difference whether they're Democrats or Republicans, won't work together. Once upon a time in America, it was not like this. It's way past time to purge the incumbents — all of them.

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Politics, religion inextricably intertwined

Just after Easter 42 years ago, I was only a few months into my first job on Capitol Hill with the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. The Committee closely monitored NASA, especially during manned space flight operations.

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 had set off for the moon. But on the 13th we all heard Jim Lovell's five terrifying words, "Houston, we've had a problem." When you're 200,000 miles from Earth and you get a master alarm that indicates a main B bus undervolt, you know the spacecraft and its crew are in desperate, potentially unrecoverable circumstances.

Most of us know how NASA's ingenuity and the crew's bravery combined to enable them to return safely to Earth. Less well known is the way in which the government and the American people turned to God during this crisis. Most Americans, indeed millions around the world, began to pray to God for the safety and survival of Apollo's crew. Prayer is a solemn request for God's assistance. It inherently assumes the existence of a sovereign and holy God with dominion over the universe.

The U.S. Congress, controlled by the Democrats, swiftly passed a resolution urging prayer for the astronauts.

President Richard Nixon, a Republican, called for the nation to observe a day of prayer for the astronauts, and he said, "I think more people prayed last week than perhaps have prayed in many years in this country."

Nobody said any of this violated the separation of church and state. Nobody questioned the worth of prayer or the existence of God. But when government officially calls for prayer, it is assuming the existence of God; it is assuming such prayer is not in vain; and it is assuming that God in His providence may answer such prayer.

But look where we are now, 42 Easters later. The American people and their elected and appointed leaders in all three branches of the government are caught in an increasingly polarizing conflict between Christians who feel persecuted and secularists and atheists who are demanding that there can be no nexus between the state and religion. Religious wars are never pretty, and this one is no exception.

Most Americans have been taught to believe that mixing politics and religion is a bad idea. But that teaching flies straight into the face of this nation's history and heritage. And whether we like it or not, or whether we're willing to admit it or not, politics and religion are inextricably intertwined.

To sort this out, it's useful to look at the thinking of Michael Gerson. Gerson is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. Time magazine has called him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

Gerson believes that too frequently the use of religion in politics has become a source of cynicism. By that he means that when faith adopts a political ideology too closely, it sacrifices its independence. Gerson abhors the extent to which some Christian evangelicals have twisted Christian social ethics into an uncompromising, anti-government ideology.

Gerson reminds us that, although Christ did not focus on Roman politics, Christ's teachings on compassion and human dignity have had dramatic public consequences. In other words, he's saying religion has and should continue to play a significant role in the definition of political priorities.

And he amplified these ideas at a recent speech delivered at Calvin College, an evangelical school in Michigan. He said, "Public expression of faith often reveals the deepest commitment of the faithful, and determines their image in the world." He went on to urge Calvin's students to engage the political system as the best way to strengthen justice and morality.

He's suggesting that the hard-edged, sometimes apocalyptic tone of the religious right is counterproductive. He argues that this "politicization of religion" has been responsible for the fact that many young people have turned against religion itself.

Gerson believes Christian political engagement is both worthy and necessary. But he also believes it needs to have at its center the protection of human dignity. Gerson is arguing for a redefinition of the interface between politics and government on the one hand and religious faith on the other. And that can be achieved if Christians understand that the vast majority of Americans reject both secularism and sectarianism.

Gerson's on to something here that has worth far beyond his focus on the role of faith in public life. The coarsened and bitter debate between evangelicals and secularists that Gerson finds so counterproductive is but another example of how the dominance of political power at the extreme right and the extreme left have polarized and paralyzed the political process and brought the federal government to its knees.

The only time I'd like to see the government on its knees is when it's praying.

Happy Easter.

Please Visit:  Citizens Against Politics As Usual

Please Visit:  Mike Tower's Political Opinion

Health care reform or high court reset?

The anguished and incomplete American struggle to achieve health care reform (HCR) is now 100 years old. In 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness.” From Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama, presidents of both parties have sought the Holy Grail of HCR. None of them has found it. And, as the costs of health care have spiraled upward and our society has grown much older, the nation now stands on the edge of an economic abyss. The reality is that today health care costs are threatening to destroy the federal government.

The costs of health care are now more than onesixth of the nation’s GDP, and those costs are rising much faster than any other major component of the national economy.

Federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid is the largest item in the federal budget. It’s over $832 billion this year — larger than Social Security, defense or interest payments on the national debt. The nation’s unfunded liability for Medicare and the new prescription drug program is in excess of $100 trillion dollars — that’s trillion with a “T.”

Right after he took office, President Obama made the enactment of HCR his top priority.

The battle raged for 15 months. It tore the nation in half. It produced a bill that only Democrats supported.

The law President Obama signed is 2,300 pages in length, has more than 10,000 pages of regulations, and none of us understands it. The latest CBS/New York Times poll shows that only 26 percent of the American people support Obamacare.

The fundamental problem with Obamacare is that it’s too light on reform and cost containment, and too heavy everywhere else. More importantly, it raises profound constitutional issues.

American history teaches us that major social legislation cannot be successfully implemented in the absence of at least a modicum of bipartisan support. In case you’ve forgotten, 97 Republicans voted for Social Security in 1935, and 83 Republicans voted for Medicare in 1965. Thus, it’s no surprise that the constitutionality of Obamacare was immediately challenged in court.

And now the Supreme Court has concluded an unprecedented three days of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law. Now the nation will hold its collective breath until the High Court renders judgment this summer. The stakes, political and constitutional, could not be higher. The high court’s ruling will not only significantly influence the outcome of the 2012 election, it may also create the conditions that force painful, yet urgently necessary, decisions to rein in skyrocketing health care costs. But most importantly, the court’s rulings may set limits on the federal government’s authority to regulate individual behavior through the Constitution’s commerce clause.

Three blockbuster issues are at the heart of this dispute. The first is whether the individual mandate in the law that would force individuals to purchase health insurance is or is not permissible under the Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce. The second is whether the court will strike down all of Obamacare if it finds the individual mandate unconstitutional. And the third issue is whether the gigantic expansion of Medicaid that Obamacare imposes on the states is or is not consistent with the Constitution’s concept of federalism.

Prior to the oral arguments this past week, most constitutional scholars had anticipated that the law would be upheld. But now that appears to be in doubt. Justice Anthony Kennedy has been the swing vote on numerous cases before the high court. His questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, whose job it was to defend Obamacare, suggests that Kennedy may be poised to strike down the individual mandate.

Kennedy’s questions suggest that he believes the individual mandate “changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way,” thus giving Congress with what amounts to unlimited power.

Chief Justice Roberts echoed this same concern when he said, “Once we accept the principle, I don’t see why Congress’ power is limited.”

If the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare this June, it will trigger a political earthquake across the landscape of the 2012 election.

If Republicans have any sense at all, they will keep their options open between now and then. It’s essential for the GOP to get beyond the conclusion of their primaries in early June without allowing any candidate to amass the 1,144 delegates needed to wrap up the nomination.

Even if you discount all of Mitt Romney’s flaws, and I don’t, there is no doubt that he’s joined at the hip to the individual mandate because of Romneycare in Massachusetts. That makes him damaged goods.

The GOP needs to let the court reach its decision, and then pick a fresh face in Tampa.

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Please Visit: Mike Tower's Blog: Mike Tower Political Opinions