June
2006
Values Week in the U.S. Senate
It’s not a totally lost cause. But that’s really the best that can be said about the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” There are still a few senators, including some Republicans, who won’t pander to the hard Right and who take their responsibilities seriously. One, certainly, is Arlen Specter who this week sent a spine-tingling letter to Dick Cheney protesting White House interference with the work of the Judiciary Committee.
That said, the general drift of things in the Senate is dispiriting, to say the least. Bill Frist and other would-be saviors of “traditional marriage” used unspeakable demagoguery to try to drum up 50 votes (they failed) for their marriage protection amendment. The worst was describing the amendment as vital to preserving religious freedom. The implication is that unless gay marriage is constitutionally barred, clergy will somehow be forced to perfrom unnatural weddings against the dictates of their conciences.
Then there is the GOP leadership’s next sop to the folks they consider to be their base: a bill, also to be debated this week, to proscribe flag burning. Here, unfortunately, we see prominent Democrats–notably Hillary Clinton–joining in the descent to madness. As someone pointed out, it isn’t as though the country were beset by a rash of flag burnings and other “desecrations” at the moment. There have been few times in our history, in fact, when as many are displaying the stars and stripes with pride. So what is this bill really about? I would say that it’s about the same thing as the gay marriage amendment: it’s about enshrining a kind of bad religion as law, it’s about limiting the excercise of individual conscience, it’s about shutting down freedom in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” over which the flag is presumably flying.
How many times do we have to say that the flag is not a sacred object and therefore cannot be desecrated? How many times do we have to point out that the only other nation in modern times to sacralize its flag and strictly prohibit “desecration” was Hitler’s Germany? Apparently common sense and a long train of legal decisions and precedents count for very little in today’s Senate. We shall see how it turns out, but the very idea that such a bill is being debated brings disgrace to the body.
The marriage protection and flag protection measures are supposed to be getting ”values voters,” especially conservative Christians, engaged and in sync with Republican rule. But what about the most value-laden vote of all, the failed (at least for now, thank God) effort today to repeal the estate tax? The people who sought to purchase repeal from the Senate (18 of America’s wealthiest families spent a cool $150 million lobbying this) would have reaped something like $70 billion had repeal been enacted. The total amount of revenue that would have been lost to the Treasury is an amount that would more than cover any anticipated shortfall in Social Security funding over the next several decades. Yet a majority of Senators (57, including four Democrats - 60 votes were needed) voted to proceed with consideration of this horrible private-interest measure.
Meanwhile, over in the Senate Armed Services Committee, much consternation over the fact that the Pentagon is reluctant to send over anybody to testify on the Haditha massacre. Or should I say, much appearance of consternation. Committee chair John Warner, a “good friend” of the Pentagon brass (to say the least) needs to make it look like he’s trying to get testimony. I suspect that like Rumsfield himself, Warner really wishes this would just blow over. Who would want the American people to know more than they already know about how it is that 24 unarmed civilians, including children and a woman in a wheelchair, were brutally shot dead “in retaliation” for the fact that a Marine unit had just been hit nearby? If there is too much focus on such incidents, why then the whole Iraq policy might have to be called into question–and God knows that isn’t going to happen in the world’s greatest deliberative body.