The post Former U.S. Senators urge colleagues to defend democracy in a “dangerous era” appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>A stunning and unprecedented moment occurred on December 10, 2018, when forty-four former senators – among them, thirty-two Democrats, ten Republicans, and two Independents – publicly released a letter written to their colleagues now serving in the Senate. The letter was published in the op-ed section of The Washington Post.
This bipartisan letter represents a call to action to sitting senators to put aside party loyalty, self-interest, or fear of public humiliation and to recommit themselves to their oath of office and their constitutional obligations as senators serving in a co-equal branch of government.
The signers of this eloquently composed letter unflinchingly acknowledge the internal dangers threatening our democracy and national security. Their urgent call for the defense of our democracy is both frightening and unambiguous.
“Dear Senate colleagues,
As former members of the U.S. Senate, Democrats and Republicans, it is our shared view that we are entering a dangerous period, and we feel an obligation to speak up about serious challenges to the rule of law, the Constitution, our governing institutions and our national security.
We are on the eve of the conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and the House’s commencement of investigations of the president and his administration. The likely convergence of these two events will occur at a time when simmering regional conflicts and global power confrontations continue to threaten our security, economy and geopolitical stability.
It is a time, like other critical junctures in our history, when our nation must engage at every level with strategic precision and the hand of both the president and the Senate.”
We are at an inflection point in which the foundational principles of our democracy and our national security interests are at stake, and the rule of law and the ability of our institutions to function freely and independently must be upheld.
During our service in the Senate, at times we were allies and at other times opponents, but never enemies. We all took an oath swearing allegiance to the Constitution. Whatever united or divided us, we did not veer from our unwavering and shared commitment to placing our country, democracy and national interest above all else.
At other critical moments in our history, when constitutional crises have threatened our foundations, it has been the Senate that has stood in defense of our democracy. Today is once again such a time.
Regardless of party affiliation, ideological leanings or geography, as former members of this great body, we urge current and future senators to be steadfast and zealous guardians of our democracy by ensuring that partisanship or self-interest not replace national interest.”
The letter was signed by :
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]]>The post Why voters don’t trust Congress anymore appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Before casting your vote on Tuesday, November 6, for the individuals who will be tasked with representing you in the House or the Senate, consider this shocking fact. The U.S. Constitution is nearly silent on the expected duties of members of Congress. The only formal rule requires that members be present to vote on the questions before their respective chambers.
What this means is that the way in which our representatives conduct the duties of their offices has simply evolved over time. In other words, our representatives have no printed road map for the major responsibilities of their jobs, such as the vital responsibility to interact with constituents. It’s difficult to imagine, but there’s no rulebook for the degree to which representatives must take into account the viewpoints and desires of constituents when voting on legislation. Think about it. Our representatives – those people who write and vote on the legislation that determines our taxes, our healthcare options, the rules of the workplace, the guarantees of our civil rights, the safety of our food and water, and much more — govern by adhering (or not) to what is often referred to these days as nothing more than norms and traditions.
It’s hardly shocking, then, that lacking clear guidelines those norms and traditions can be summarily tossed out the window and with them the assumptions about how our democracy works. In the past, those norms and traditions were respected. But times are changing. And the brazenness of some members of Congress to disregard those traditions and depart radically from what is called “regular order” should shock us to our very core. Of course, the most egregious example was the denial by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of a confirmation hearing for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. This is where we are on the eve of the most consequential election of our lifetimes—deeply uncertain and justifiably distrustful about even the rules of the game, thanks to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party.
With no set rules, it’s not surprising that the manner in which our elected officials approach representing our interests becomes a personal choice, depending on personality, outlook, or commitment or courage for the time, energy, and fortitude it takes to interact in person with individuals and interest groups and weigh their sometimes conflicting opinions. It’s generally accepted, however, that two main styles of representation have emerged over time. Some representatives see their job as responding directly to the viewpoints and instructions of their constituents. This is called the delegate style. Members of Congress who follow the delegate style are more apt to hold public town halls and to solicit directly the viewpoints of their constituents before casting their votes. Other representatives follow what’s called the trustee style, in which they rely primarily upon their own judgment and initiative.
The trustee style, which seems to predominate among the current Republican members of Congress, has most certainly led to a lack of accountability and to the perception by many Americans that their elected officials do not reflect nor represent their interests. Combine the trustee style with the influence of donors, lobbyists, and special interest groups and it’s easy to understand why the fundamentals of truly representational government are threatened and why, unfortunately, so many Americans question the relevance of voting and believe that politics has no place in their lives.
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]]>The post Show-and-tell in Congress, starring floor charts appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Charts, graphs and, occasionally, weird things that look like fourth grade science projects have proliferated in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. When Congress is in session [an increasingly rare occurrence], and speakers want to get some attention for their pet projects and bills, the poster-board/permanent-marker industrial complex gets a major boost. And now that Congress has come back to Washington after its summer hiatus, we can expect to see a lot of these things.
Members of Congress love their visual aids—big, brightly colored poster boards that are known on Capitol Hill as “floor charts.” They’ve become a standard part of congressional speechifying, especially in the House of Representatives, where there’s a thing called “one-minute speeches,” whose enforced brevity makes visual shortcuts essential.
Some of the charts are very informative and easy to read. Others are laughably amateur looking, virtually illegible, or just plain bizarre. One of the dirty little secrets about these presentations is that they often are displayed during speeches given to a mostly empty House or Senate chamber.
Bill Gray, in his job as a producer at C-SPAN, sees them every day and observes that:
Many are about as sophisticated as the poster boards you remember in grade school. They fall into a handful of general categories — things like graphs and charts; text; photos and illustrations; memorials; and tallies.
Budget and deficit and deficit reduction and anything that has to do with hard numbers, those are the most popular because if you show a giant red line going from low to high, then it’s going to draw the number, and it’s just very simple — this number is higher than it used to be, here we go.
Who makes these things? Often, its Congressional interns. One congressional aide recently noted, in a report on NPR, that the House Republican Conference has a big printer, which makes these charts cheap to make, if not aesthetically perfect up close.
Sometimes you get the backend of a weird leftover presentation. Sometimes you get a poster board with a giant wedge taken out of it, so yeah, it varies,” he says. “The presentation via television is barely noticeable.”
In 2012, C-SPAN’s Gray launched a Floor Chart blog, with more than 800 examples, highlighting the good, the bad, the ugly, the mundane and the weird. Here are some examples, with my commentary added:
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]]>The post Senators’ tax-loophole suggestions to be kept secret for 50 years. Huh? appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>In a move that Business Week calls something that might have been “dreamed up by a 10-year-old after watching Thunderball,” the Senate Finance Committee plans to keep its members’ ideas for new and renewed tax loopholes under wraps until 2064. Wait, what?
The Senate Finance Committee is in charge of writing and rewriting the U.S. tax code. This year, the committee’s leadership is going with what they’re calling a “blank-slate” approach. They want to rewrite the tax code from scratch, wiping out all existing tax loopholes and giveaways, and either creating new ones or reconstituting some of the old favorites. The process they’ve been using involves asking members of the committee to submit their ideas for new, revived and revised tax breaks.
The deadline for these double-super-secret tax loophole preferences was July 26, 2013.
According to The Hill, here’s how it works:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), assured lawmakers that any submission they receive will be kept under lock and key by the committee and the National Archives until the end of 2064.
Deeming the submissions confidential, the Senate’s top tax writers have said only certain staff members — 10 in all — will get direct access to a senator’s written suggestions. Each submission will also be given its own ID number and be kept on password-protected servers, with printed versions kept in locked safes.
…Under the confidential procedures set by the Finance panel, other committee staffers will only be allowed to handle senators’ suggestions if supervised by at least of the 10 authorized staffers.
Both the Democratic and Republican sides will receive a copy of a submission, and authorized staffers are supposed to log when copies of those proposals are made, who made them and how many.
The submissions can be released publicly, the memo says, if they’re scrubbed of any way of identifying the senator behind them.
Ostensibly, the promise of secrecy is a way to encourage otherwise reluctant Senators to contribute their ideas–because it would be too scary to submit them with their names actually attached to them!
Given the mess known as the U.S. Tax Code, starting over actually sounds like an intriguing—if not totally practical—idea. But the way they’re going about it is about as undemocratic as it could possibly be: Committee members who submit their preferences have been assured that their ideas will be kept secret, to protect themselves from lobbyists and citizens who have other ideas.
Right. It would be such a bother to have citizens—constituents and taxpayers, that is—know what their representatives are doing and saying regarding taxes. We need to kept our constitutionally elected representatives safe from public scrutiny.
And, of course, secrecy will “protect” them from lobbyists. Really? You mean the lobbyists who suggest—I mean dictate —the very loopholes that Senators are proposing—I mean protecting. Senators don’t want to be protected from lobbyists: Lobbyists pay for their campaigns, for gawd’s sake. We’re the ones who need protecting.
Business Week sums it up this way:
…Any senator with a tax plea so secret it has to be physically locked away is definitely, absolutely not requesting it for the voters.
What a notion: Senators have the right to conduct this essential, public business in the dark, and to hide their actions in some kind of digital vault until we’re all practically, or actually, dead. I was unhappy when the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination was locked away for 75 years, under the pretext of national security or some such thing. But this is beyond that. Sure, watching legislative sausage being made is ugly, but building in a complete lack of accountability is inexcusable. Baucus and Hatch should be embarrassed, and we should be outraged.
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