On February 25, BBC 5 Radio program "Up All Night" with Rhod Sharp interviewed me about the Supreme Court vacancy and the post I wrote about Ted Cruz. The audio file is below.
Showing posts with label Ted Cruz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ted Cruz. Show all posts
Sunday, March 6, 2016
BBC 5 Radio Interview on Ted Cruz and his Phony Supreme Court "Tradition"
On February 25, BBC 5 Radio program "Up All Night" with Rhod Sharp interviewed me about the Supreme Court vacancy and the post I wrote about Ted Cruz. The audio file is below.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Ted Cruz's Phony Supreme Court "Tradition"
[This post originally appeared on History News Network]
“It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year."—Senator Ted Cruz
If he honestly believes it is not legitimate to nominate and confirm a justice in an election year, Ted Cruz must hate the appointment of Chief Justice John Marshall. John Adams nominated him in January 1801, after he lost his re-election bid to Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800. Adams was a lame duck in the truest sense of the term—he was serving out the remainder of his term after being repudiated by the voters. Yet he did not hesitate to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court, and Marshall was confirmed by a lame duck Senate.
Perhaps the most striking irony of Cruz’s position (and increasingly the position of the entire Republican Party) is that this absurd debate is taking place over the replacement of Antonin Scalia. If there is one thing Scalia was known for, it is his originalist interpretation of the Constitution: it means what the founding generation said it meant. So is seems appropriate to ask: what did the Founders actually do in such circumstances?
In the final year of his presidency, George Washington had two nominations to the Supreme Court approved by the Senate. It was an election year and he was not running for reelection. It doesn’t get more "original intent" than that. Adams could easily have left the Supreme Court vacancy for Jefferson—who had already been elected, after all, and would take office in a matter of weeks—and didn’t. That seems as clear as it could be. The founders saw no impediment to a president in the final year--or even in the final weeks--of the presidency successfully appointing new justices to the Supreme Court.
What about Cruz's contention about the last 80 years? Even that does not hold up.
The facts are pretty simple. In the last 80 years there has only been one instance in which a president was in a position to nominate a justice in an election year and did not have the nominee confirmed. In 1968, LBJ’s nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice to succeed Earl Warren (and of Homer Thornberry to take the seat held by Fortas) was blocked in the Senate, but not because of some alleged “tradition.” Certainly there were Senators who wanted the next president to name a new justice. But the opposition to Fortas had everything to do with the specific nominee and specific objections to him (particularly charges of cronyism and inappropriate financial dealings). To the best of my knowledge, no one cited Cruz’s “tradition” to say it was not appropriate for Johnson to nominate someone, or that it would have been inappropriate to confirm anyone.
A second instance took place 28 years earlier. In 1940, FDR nominated Frank Murphy in January of that election year and he was confirmed that same month. There was no “tradition” blocking that election-year appointment. (This also shows that Cruz got the math wrong—this happened 76 years ago, not 80.) [Note: The morning after this post first appeared, Orrin Hatch spoke on NPR and amended the claim to no "term-limited" president had had a nominee confirmed in an election year--evidently an attempt to exempt FDR's confirmed nominee from the "tradition."]
So, there were two instances similar to the current situation in the last 80 years. In one case the nomination was rejected and in the other it wasn’t. To Ted Cruz, this constitutes “a long tradition that you don't do this.”
Ted Cruz’s invention of this alleged "tradition" that we don’t nominate and confirm Supreme Court justices in an election year would be laughable if so many supposedly responsible political leaders were not taking it seriously.
It is absurd on the face of it. If the Republicans in the Senate want to block any nominee Barack Obama sends them, they have the votes to do it. But they should stop hiding behind the obvious fiction that doing so is part of some “tradition.” It would be nothing but the raw, cynical use of their political power. This suggestion that Obama should not even nominate someone (both John Kasich and Marco Rubio said so in Saturday’s debate), or if he does, that the nominee should be rejected out of hand simply because of the timing (as the Senate Majority Leader and many Republican Senators are now saying), is simply silly.
True conservatives don’t invent traditions. They work to protect existing ones. Our true tradition is that the president nominates and the Senate votes, regardless of when the vacancy occurs.
The speed with which Cruz jumped to make this claim and with which so many others have fallen in line, speaks to the nihilistic radicalism that has infected today's Republican Party. Any position can be taken if it produces the correct result. Facts can be denied, “traditions” can be invented. The only value taken seriously is “does it work to our advantage?”
This tactic may well work politically. It has already had the effect of framing the debate as “Should Obama nominate someone?” That is truly extraordinary. The actual question should be “Should the Senate confirm Obama’s nominee?” That’s a legitimate debate, but it would put the focus on the nominee and that person’s qualifications. By hiding behind this phony “tradition,” Republicans are trying to avoid having to show that a given nominee should be rejected on the merits. In short, they don’t want to take responsibility for rejecting someone who—in all likelihood—will be eminently qualified for the job. That’s not statesmanship. It’s cowardice.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
A Brief History of American Attitudes Toward Refugees
[Back in September, in response to efforts opposing the resettlement of Syrian refugees in South Carolina, my colleague Dr. Byron McCane organized a group of Wofford College faculty to present a panel on the subject of refugees. My colleagues Dr. Laura Barbas-Rhoden (Modern Languages), Dr. Phil Dorroll (Religion), Dr. Kim Rostan (English) and I all participated. My job was to give a brief overview of refugees in American history in the September 24 event at Wofford.
On Nov. 11, we reprised the panel at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, with the welcome additions of USC colleagues Dr. Breanne Grace (College of Social Work) and Dr. Rajeev Bais (Clinical Internal Medicine).
Due to recent events, the refugee situation has unfortunately become a political issue in the presidential race, with candidates like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush asserting that only Christian refugees should be admitted into the United States, and Donald Trump calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Below is an adapted version of my presentations at Wofford and USC. This previously appeared as a series of posts on History News Network.]
From the earliest days of the republic, the American attitude toward those fleeing conflicts and hardship abroad has been marked by an ambivalence and tension between two contradictory reactions.
On the one hand, Americans want to see themselves as a people who welcome refugees. In the 1790s, the American scientist David Rittenhouse said the United States was “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted, and to the oppressed of other climes.” The prominent historian Gordon Wood writes: “By the early 1790s Americans were not surprised that their country was in fact attracting refugees from the tyrannies of the Old World. The enlightened everywhere had come to recognize the United States as the special asylum for liberty.”
On the other hand, Americans have also feared that such people might represent a danger to the United States: religious, political, economic, cultural--or all of the above.
When I say from the earliest days, I mean just that. The decade of the 1790s saw nearly 100,000 immigrants come into the United States—at a time when the population of the country was about 4 million people. Probably at least 15-20,000 of them were political refugees, fleeing revolutionary violence and political oppression.
The first refugee crisis in United States history came during the first term of George Washington, in 1792. The revolution in Santo Domingo led to thousands of refugees fleeing the island, most of whom came to Richmond, Virginia. One historian’s estimate of perhaps 10,000 is probably too high, but there are records indicating the existence of at least 2,000 such refugees in the US by 1794. We know this because Congress voted a specific appropriation of $15,000 for the relief of the refugees (out of $6.3 million budget that year). As the historian of this incident concluded: “For the first time in its existence as an independent state, the United States met the refugee problem in its most tragic form, and met it with … generosity and human sympathy.”
Many thousands of other refugees also fled to the United States in the 1790s, mostly from the more famous revolution in France. They were, as one historian put it, of all political stripes: “Royalists, Republicans, Catholics, Masons, courtiers, artisans, priests and philosophers.” These political refugees started their own explicitly political newspapers and book presses. They brought their passions with them, and competing groups sometimes engaged in street violence against each other.
In 1795, the pro-British Jay’s Treaty damaged American relations with revolutionary France and threatened to result in outright war. If war came, the Federalists feared that the French would use “native collaborators to create revolutionary puppet republics” and “French emigres and Jacobinical sympathizers in the country [might] become collaborators.”
Suddenly, asylum seekers were seen as the threat within. In 1798, Federalist Rep. Harrison Gray of Massachusetts, said: “Do we not know that the French nation have organized bands of aliens as well as their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes? By these means they have overrun all the republics in the world but our own … And may we not expect the same means to be employed against this country?” Another Federalist said that the new immigrants were “the grand cause of all our present difficulties” and plainly stated: “let us no longer pray that America become an asylum to all nations.”
As a result of this growing fear, Congress changed the law. The first Naturalization Law in 1790 had required only two years residency in the US before one could become a citizen. That was extended to five years residency in 1795, and then in 1798, Congress raised it to 14 years. All immigrants were required to register with the government within 48 hours of arrival, and the law forbade all aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the US was at war from becoming American citizens.
The crackdown on immigrants and refugees was inextricably wrapped up in domestic politics. The Alien Act, passed by a Federalist Congress and signed by a Federalist president, was a reaction to their fear that the newcomers were overwhelmingly supporters of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party. Refugees from revolutionary France were joined by hundreds, perhaps thousands, fleeing political oppression in Ireland. Their historian Michael Durey concludes: “the radicals’ experiences after emigration were too varied and problematic to allow us to any longer assume uncritically that America was a welcoming asylum for them all. For many it was Bedlam.”
The Alien Act was allowed to expire, and the anti-French fever broke. But the tendency to both welcome and fear refugees would continue in the 19th century, long after the specific fear of the French dissipated.
Fifty years after the Alien Act, revolution in Europe again produced a similar American reaction to the influx of refugees. The revolutions of 1848, starting in Paris and spreading through much of Europe, also produced a large number of political refugees to the United States, especially Germans who were known in the U.S. as the “Forty-eighters.”
The American government generally welcomed the revolutions, seeing them as democratic in character, and thus consistent with American values. In fact, the United States “was the only major government which saw fit to send greetings to the Parliament at Frankfurt.” President James K. Polk stated: “The great principles of … the Declaration of Independence seem now to be in the course of rapid development throughout the world.”
But as students of the Revolutions of 1848 well know, those revolutions were more complex than that, and so were the refugees who fled to America. According to their historian, the “typical Forty-eighter was a freethinker, if not an atheist. They believed in universal suffrage, abolition of the Sunday laws, taxation of church property, establishment of the eight hour day, and government ownership of the railroads.”
Some Americans thus denounced them as “socialists, rationalists, atheists and desecrators of the Sabbath.” Southerners in particular feared their influence because the Forty-eighters were thought to favor abolitionism. Some Forty-eighters were, in fact, socialists. One, Ernst Schmidt, would later run for mayor of Chicago in 1859 on a socialist ticket, while others formed their own utopian socialist communities in the United States.
Some of the Forty-eighters were also liberal Catholics, and of course at the same time thousands upon thousands of Irish Catholics were arriving in the United States as economic refugees of the famine in Ireland. This combination gave rise to an explicitly nativist movement that found political expression in the American Party, more commonly known as the “Know-Nothings.”
The Know-Nothings never actually succeeded in changing American law regarding refuges and immigrants, but in their oath, members pledged to never vote for any man for any office who was not born in the United States. They called for “War to the hilt on political Romanism” and “Hostility to all Papal influences when brought to bear against the Republic.” They effectively argued that Catholicism was not so much a religion deserving First Amendment protection as a dangerous political movement contrary to democracy. (This is reminiscent of Dr. Ben Carson’s recent statement that Islam is “inconsistent with the values and principles of America.”)
The Know-Nothings saw the Irish and Germans as a religious/political threat, bringing “Popery” to the United States and thus undermining American principles. The Know-Nothings wanted to deny the newcomers the right to vote—they called for increasing the required number of years of residency from 5 to 21 before an immigrant could vote. (I cannot help but wonder how the Know-Nothings of the 1850s would have reacted to the sight back in September of the Pope, standing where the President stands when giving the State of the Union, addressing the United States Congress, while the Catholic Speaker of the House and Catholic Vice-President sat behind him.)
Despite these political reactions in the mid-19th century, what seems note-worthy in retrospect is that there was no legislative attempt to actually prevent any people from coming into the United States prior to 1882. When it happened, it was deliberately, openly discriminatory. That year, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This was an explicitly racial law, a response to the popular backlash against the large number of Chinese in the west, which barred immigration by the Chinese.
Most American are familiar with the fact that many Chinese came to work on the transcontinental railroad, but what is often forgotten is that many were also refugees from the one of the bloodiest periods of Chinese history, the era of the Taiping Rebellion—in the 30 years before the Chinese Exclusion Act, an estimated 20-30 million Chinese died in a major civil war and several different rebellions. Over 1.5 million fled China, and historians estimate that 250,000 of them came to the United States. (Oregon alone had about 100,000 Chinese in 1890.) The Exclusion Act remained law for 60 years, until it was finally repealed during World War II, when China was an American ally in the war against Japan.
Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, for most of the people of the world, the United States remained a place of asylum. The great turning point was World War I. The previous two decades had seen millions of immigrants, many from southern and eastern Europe, arrive on American shores, leading to increasing calls for limitations.
Once America entered the World War in 1917, the fear that lingering attachments of these relative newcomers to their mother countries might create conflicting loyalties in wartime led to the propaganda theme “100% Americanism.” In addition to the well-known reactions against German-Americans, any so-called “hyphenated American” now became suspect. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 added the fear of radical politics to the mix—this, despite the fact that many of those seeking asylum in the United States because of the revolutions in Russia were fleeing the Bolsheviks, not people who shared their views.
The postwar period saw immigrants—particularly those suspected of radical politics—subjected to heightened levels of scrutiny and even deportation. The drive to put restrictions on eventually led to legislation: first the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and then a permanent Immigration Act in 1924.
As a result of decades of growing nativist sentiment, the United States for the first time in its history imposed quota limits on the number of people allowed to come into the country: 165,000 maximum per year, with a quota that was based on the number of people from that country in the 1890 census. No specific provision was made in the legislation for refugees. Supporters of the legislation made it clear that the goal of maintain an “Anglo-Saxon” nation was more important that being an “asylum for the oppressed.”
Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina said:
It is probably no coincidence that this change corresponds roughly with the emergence of the nation as a great power on the world stage. While outsiders had long been viewed suspiciously—especially those with different religious or political views—now such people were perceived as not just a potential internal threat, but as what we would now call a “national security threat.”
There was no need for an American policy toward refugees prior to the 1920s, since there were so few restrictions on entering the United States. The immigration restriction legislation, however, changed that. It required that no more than two percent “of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the United States Census of 1890” be allowed into the United States in any year. By setting strict numerical quotas based on the country of origin, the law left no flexibility depending on the circumstances in that country, and thus no ability to adjust to a refugee problem.
Thus the Immigration Act of 1924 set the stage for two disgraceful incidents in America’s history of dealing with refugees. Despite the rising persecution of German Jews in the late 1930s, all German immigration to the United States was subject to the existing yearly quota (due to the formula noted above, Germany actually had by far the highest quota in the world, over 50,000). In early 1939, in the aftermath of Krystallnacht in November 1938, Sen. Robert Wagner of New York proposed to Congress a Refugee Act that would allow 20,000 German children into the United States, over and above the established yearly national quota.
Wagner’s intent was that those children would be German Jews, but fearing that anti-Semitism would doom the bill, he did not specify that in the legislation. Opponents argued that, whatever its merits might be, the bill would undermine the quota system. They also made an economic argument. One said in testimony to Congress: “These children, if admitted, will presumably grow up and as youths will become competitors with American citizens for American jobs.” Opponents killed the bill in Congress, and no refugee children came to the United States. There is no way to know how many children might have able to enter the United States, but it seems likely that some who might have been saved later died in the Holocaust.
In another case that has become much more well known in recent weeks, we know exactly how many could have been saved had they been admitted into the United States. In the midst of the Refugee Bill debate, the ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg for Cuba with over 900 German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. Opposition arose in Cuba to letting them into that country, with anti-immigrant groups claiming that the passengers were Communists and thus should not be admitted. Only 22 of the Jewish passengers were allowed into Cuba. 743 were awaiting visas to enter the United States but had not received them. They cabled the State Department and the White House from the ship asking to be allowed into the United States. But at that time 83% of Americans opposed any relaxation of the immigration laws, and since the German quota for the year had already been filled, they were denied entry. The passengers returned to Europe. The British, Dutch, Belgians and French took in the refugees. But due to the German occupation during the war of all of those countries save Britain, some 254 of them died in the Holocaust. The United States government, knowing full well that Germany was persecuting its Jews, refused to alter its immigration policy to save refugees and 254 lives that could have been saved were lost.
World War II, of course, created an unprecedentedly large refugee problem. In 1945, President Truman did what FDR never did: he issued an executive order allowing in 40,000 refugees above the quotas. In 1946, he proposed to Congress the Displaced Persons Act, which produced the same kind of response as Wagner’s Refugee Act did in 1939—opponents charged (despite the nearly full employment postwar economy) that they would take jobs from returning veterans. Some argued that the bill would allow Communists into the United States. Concerns that large numbers of Jews (who were often equated with Communism) would be admitted led supporters of the legislation to stress that most of those admitted would be Christians. This time opponents did not defeat the bill. It passed. They did, however, cut the number admitted into the US in half, from 400,000 to 200,000.
Throughout most of the cold war, U.S. policy toward refugees was largely driven by cold war foreign policy, and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, those fleeing communism were welcomed. The United States admitted refugees of the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet-backed regime in 1956, for example. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the United States conducted “Operation Safe Haven” for Hungarian refugees. Eisenhower said: "It is heartening to witness the speed with which free nations have opened their doors to these most recent refugees from tyranny. In this humanitarian effort our own nation must play its part." That pattern was repeated several times: those fleeing the Cuban revolution in 1959, as well as the boat people seeking to escape North Vietnam’s conquest of the south in 1975 (under the Indochinese Migration and Refugee Assistance Act), were welcomed into the United States, while those fleeing other tyrannies were often out of luck. In 1980, the Refugee Act finally put refugees outside the regular immigration system, allowing for 50,000 refugees per year.
In sum, the reactions we see today to the prospect of admitting refugees from Syria and elsewhere have a long history in this country. Americans have a history of both welcoming and refusing refugees. Today we face a choice: which of those legacies will we embrace? When I began working on this issue nearly three months ago, I had some hope that it would be the former. The events in Paris and San Bernadino—and more importantly, the generally fearful reaction of many Americans to those events—have left me fearing that Americans are more inclined to opt for the latter. What this overview of the history shows is that such fears have in the past been overblown, and Americans have often had great reason to regret their fear-driven, short-sighted overreactions. Nevertheless, that list of regrets looks likely to grow longer.
On Nov. 11, we reprised the panel at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, with the welcome additions of USC colleagues Dr. Breanne Grace (College of Social Work) and Dr. Rajeev Bais (Clinical Internal Medicine).
Due to recent events, the refugee situation has unfortunately become a political issue in the presidential race, with candidates like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush asserting that only Christian refugees should be admitted into the United States, and Donald Trump calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Below is an adapted version of my presentations at Wofford and USC. This previously appeared as a series of posts on History News Network.]
From the earliest days of the republic, the American attitude toward those fleeing conflicts and hardship abroad has been marked by an ambivalence and tension between two contradictory reactions.
On the one hand, Americans want to see themselves as a people who welcome refugees. In the 1790s, the American scientist David Rittenhouse said the United States was “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted, and to the oppressed of other climes.” The prominent historian Gordon Wood writes: “By the early 1790s Americans were not surprised that their country was in fact attracting refugees from the tyrannies of the Old World. The enlightened everywhere had come to recognize the United States as the special asylum for liberty.”
On the other hand, Americans have also feared that such people might represent a danger to the United States: religious, political, economic, cultural--or all of the above.
When I say from the earliest days, I mean just that. The decade of the 1790s saw nearly 100,000 immigrants come into the United States—at a time when the population of the country was about 4 million people. Probably at least 15-20,000 of them were political refugees, fleeing revolutionary violence and political oppression.
The first refugee crisis in United States history came during the first term of George Washington, in 1792. The revolution in Santo Domingo led to thousands of refugees fleeing the island, most of whom came to Richmond, Virginia. One historian’s estimate of perhaps 10,000 is probably too high, but there are records indicating the existence of at least 2,000 such refugees in the US by 1794. We know this because Congress voted a specific appropriation of $15,000 for the relief of the refugees (out of $6.3 million budget that year). As the historian of this incident concluded: “For the first time in its existence as an independent state, the United States met the refugee problem in its most tragic form, and met it with … generosity and human sympathy.”
Many thousands of other refugees also fled to the United States in the 1790s, mostly from the more famous revolution in France. They were, as one historian put it, of all political stripes: “Royalists, Republicans, Catholics, Masons, courtiers, artisans, priests and philosophers.” These political refugees started their own explicitly political newspapers and book presses. They brought their passions with them, and competing groups sometimes engaged in street violence against each other.
In 1795, the pro-British Jay’s Treaty damaged American relations with revolutionary France and threatened to result in outright war. If war came, the Federalists feared that the French would use “native collaborators to create revolutionary puppet republics” and “French emigres and Jacobinical sympathizers in the country [might] become collaborators.”
Suddenly, asylum seekers were seen as the threat within. In 1798, Federalist Rep. Harrison Gray of Massachusetts, said: “Do we not know that the French nation have organized bands of aliens as well as their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes? By these means they have overrun all the republics in the world but our own … And may we not expect the same means to be employed against this country?” Another Federalist said that the new immigrants were “the grand cause of all our present difficulties” and plainly stated: “let us no longer pray that America become an asylum to all nations.”
As a result of this growing fear, Congress changed the law. The first Naturalization Law in 1790 had required only two years residency in the US before one could become a citizen. That was extended to five years residency in 1795, and then in 1798, Congress raised it to 14 years. All immigrants were required to register with the government within 48 hours of arrival, and the law forbade all aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the US was at war from becoming American citizens.
The crackdown on immigrants and refugees was inextricably wrapped up in domestic politics. The Alien Act, passed by a Federalist Congress and signed by a Federalist president, was a reaction to their fear that the newcomers were overwhelmingly supporters of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party. Refugees from revolutionary France were joined by hundreds, perhaps thousands, fleeing political oppression in Ireland. Their historian Michael Durey concludes: “the radicals’ experiences after emigration were too varied and problematic to allow us to any longer assume uncritically that America was a welcoming asylum for them all. For many it was Bedlam.”
The Alien Act was allowed to expire, and the anti-French fever broke. But the tendency to both welcome and fear refugees would continue in the 19th century, long after the specific fear of the French dissipated.
Fifty years after the Alien Act, revolution in Europe again produced a similar American reaction to the influx of refugees. The revolutions of 1848, starting in Paris and spreading through much of Europe, also produced a large number of political refugees to the United States, especially Germans who were known in the U.S. as the “Forty-eighters.”
The American government generally welcomed the revolutions, seeing them as democratic in character, and thus consistent with American values. In fact, the United States “was the only major government which saw fit to send greetings to the Parliament at Frankfurt.” President James K. Polk stated: “The great principles of … the Declaration of Independence seem now to be in the course of rapid development throughout the world.”
But as students of the Revolutions of 1848 well know, those revolutions were more complex than that, and so were the refugees who fled to America. According to their historian, the “typical Forty-eighter was a freethinker, if not an atheist. They believed in universal suffrage, abolition of the Sunday laws, taxation of church property, establishment of the eight hour day, and government ownership of the railroads.”
Some Americans thus denounced them as “socialists, rationalists, atheists and desecrators of the Sabbath.” Southerners in particular feared their influence because the Forty-eighters were thought to favor abolitionism. Some Forty-eighters were, in fact, socialists. One, Ernst Schmidt, would later run for mayor of Chicago in 1859 on a socialist ticket, while others formed their own utopian socialist communities in the United States.
Some of the Forty-eighters were also liberal Catholics, and of course at the same time thousands upon thousands of Irish Catholics were arriving in the United States as economic refugees of the famine in Ireland. This combination gave rise to an explicitly nativist movement that found political expression in the American Party, more commonly known as the “Know-Nothings.”
The Know-Nothings never actually succeeded in changing American law regarding refuges and immigrants, but in their oath, members pledged to never vote for any man for any office who was not born in the United States. They called for “War to the hilt on political Romanism” and “Hostility to all Papal influences when brought to bear against the Republic.” They effectively argued that Catholicism was not so much a religion deserving First Amendment protection as a dangerous political movement contrary to democracy. (This is reminiscent of Dr. Ben Carson’s recent statement that Islam is “inconsistent with the values and principles of America.”)
The Know-Nothings saw the Irish and Germans as a religious/political threat, bringing “Popery” to the United States and thus undermining American principles. The Know-Nothings wanted to deny the newcomers the right to vote—they called for increasing the required number of years of residency from 5 to 21 before an immigrant could vote. (I cannot help but wonder how the Know-Nothings of the 1850s would have reacted to the sight back in September of the Pope, standing where the President stands when giving the State of the Union, addressing the United States Congress, while the Catholic Speaker of the House and Catholic Vice-President sat behind him.)
Despite these political reactions in the mid-19th century, what seems note-worthy in retrospect is that there was no legislative attempt to actually prevent any people from coming into the United States prior to 1882. When it happened, it was deliberately, openly discriminatory. That year, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This was an explicitly racial law, a response to the popular backlash against the large number of Chinese in the west, which barred immigration by the Chinese.
Most American are familiar with the fact that many Chinese came to work on the transcontinental railroad, but what is often forgotten is that many were also refugees from the one of the bloodiest periods of Chinese history, the era of the Taiping Rebellion—in the 30 years before the Chinese Exclusion Act, an estimated 20-30 million Chinese died in a major civil war and several different rebellions. Over 1.5 million fled China, and historians estimate that 250,000 of them came to the United States. (Oregon alone had about 100,000 Chinese in 1890.) The Exclusion Act remained law for 60 years, until it was finally repealed during World War II, when China was an American ally in the war against Japan.
Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, for most of the people of the world, the United States remained a place of asylum. The great turning point was World War I. The previous two decades had seen millions of immigrants, many from southern and eastern Europe, arrive on American shores, leading to increasing calls for limitations.
Once America entered the World War in 1917, the fear that lingering attachments of these relative newcomers to their mother countries might create conflicting loyalties in wartime led to the propaganda theme “100% Americanism.” In addition to the well-known reactions against German-Americans, any so-called “hyphenated American” now became suspect. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 added the fear of radical politics to the mix—this, despite the fact that many of those seeking asylum in the United States because of the revolutions in Russia were fleeing the Bolsheviks, not people who shared their views.
The postwar period saw immigrants—particularly those suspected of radical politics—subjected to heightened levels of scrutiny and even deportation. The drive to put restrictions on eventually led to legislation: first the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and then a permanent Immigration Act in 1924.
As a result of decades of growing nativist sentiment, the United States for the first time in its history imposed quota limits on the number of people allowed to come into the country: 165,000 maximum per year, with a quota that was based on the number of people from that country in the 1890 census. No specific provision was made in the legislation for refugees. Supporters of the legislation made it clear that the goal of maintain an “Anglo-Saxon” nation was more important that being an “asylum for the oppressed.”
Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina said:
Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation.After 140 years of effectively welcoming all those who wished to come, the United States shut the door.
It is probably no coincidence that this change corresponds roughly with the emergence of the nation as a great power on the world stage. While outsiders had long been viewed suspiciously—especially those with different religious or political views—now such people were perceived as not just a potential internal threat, but as what we would now call a “national security threat.”
Thus the Immigration Act of 1924 set the stage for two disgraceful incidents in America’s history of dealing with refugees. Despite the rising persecution of German Jews in the late 1930s, all German immigration to the United States was subject to the existing yearly quota (due to the formula noted above, Germany actually had by far the highest quota in the world, over 50,000). In early 1939, in the aftermath of Krystallnacht in November 1938, Sen. Robert Wagner of New York proposed to Congress a Refugee Act that would allow 20,000 German children into the United States, over and above the established yearly national quota.
Wagner’s intent was that those children would be German Jews, but fearing that anti-Semitism would doom the bill, he did not specify that in the legislation. Opponents argued that, whatever its merits might be, the bill would undermine the quota system. They also made an economic argument. One said in testimony to Congress: “These children, if admitted, will presumably grow up and as youths will become competitors with American citizens for American jobs.” Opponents killed the bill in Congress, and no refugee children came to the United States. There is no way to know how many children might have able to enter the United States, but it seems likely that some who might have been saved later died in the Holocaust.
In another case that has become much more well known in recent weeks, we know exactly how many could have been saved had they been admitted into the United States. In the midst of the Refugee Bill debate, the ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg for Cuba with over 900 German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. Opposition arose in Cuba to letting them into that country, with anti-immigrant groups claiming that the passengers were Communists and thus should not be admitted. Only 22 of the Jewish passengers were allowed into Cuba. 743 were awaiting visas to enter the United States but had not received them. They cabled the State Department and the White House from the ship asking to be allowed into the United States. But at that time 83% of Americans opposed any relaxation of the immigration laws, and since the German quota for the year had already been filled, they were denied entry. The passengers returned to Europe. The British, Dutch, Belgians and French took in the refugees. But due to the German occupation during the war of all of those countries save Britain, some 254 of them died in the Holocaust. The United States government, knowing full well that Germany was persecuting its Jews, refused to alter its immigration policy to save refugees and 254 lives that could have been saved were lost.
World War II, of course, created an unprecedentedly large refugee problem. In 1945, President Truman did what FDR never did: he issued an executive order allowing in 40,000 refugees above the quotas. In 1946, he proposed to Congress the Displaced Persons Act, which produced the same kind of response as Wagner’s Refugee Act did in 1939—opponents charged (despite the nearly full employment postwar economy) that they would take jobs from returning veterans. Some argued that the bill would allow Communists into the United States. Concerns that large numbers of Jews (who were often equated with Communism) would be admitted led supporters of the legislation to stress that most of those admitted would be Christians. This time opponents did not defeat the bill. It passed. They did, however, cut the number admitted into the US in half, from 400,000 to 200,000.
Throughout most of the cold war, U.S. policy toward refugees was largely driven by cold war foreign policy, and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, those fleeing communism were welcomed. The United States admitted refugees of the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet-backed regime in 1956, for example. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the United States conducted “Operation Safe Haven” for Hungarian refugees. Eisenhower said: "It is heartening to witness the speed with which free nations have opened their doors to these most recent refugees from tyranny. In this humanitarian effort our own nation must play its part." That pattern was repeated several times: those fleeing the Cuban revolution in 1959, as well as the boat people seeking to escape North Vietnam’s conquest of the south in 1975 (under the Indochinese Migration and Refugee Assistance Act), were welcomed into the United States, while those fleeing other tyrannies were often out of luck. In 1980, the Refugee Act finally put refugees outside the regular immigration system, allowing for 50,000 refugees per year.
In sum, the reactions we see today to the prospect of admitting refugees from Syria and elsewhere have a long history in this country. Americans have a history of both welcoming and refusing refugees. Today we face a choice: which of those legacies will we embrace? When I began working on this issue nearly three months ago, I had some hope that it would be the former. The events in Paris and San Bernadino—and more importantly, the generally fearful reaction of many Americans to those events—have left me fearing that Americans are more inclined to opt for the latter. What this overview of the history shows is that such fears have in the past been overblown, and Americans have often had great reason to regret their fear-driven, short-sighted overreactions. Nevertheless, that list of regrets looks likely to grow longer.
Monday, October 28, 2013
To Still a Wackobird
"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win."
I came across this line last week while re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird for my humanities class, and it struck me that it nicely captures the appeal of the GOP's recent quixotic effort to defund Obamacare that resulted in the government shutdown.
The line belongs to Atticus Finch, the attorney who takes on the legal defense of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. While I think it absurd to compare the principled nobility of that fictional act to the GOP's attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act, the people who rallied to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's cause don't. They believe in the nobility of the hopeless fight.
Harper Lee's novel retains its power more than 50 years after it was first published because it not only sends a clear message of condemnation of racial prejudice, but also tries to understand how whites came to hold those views, and turn those views back on them.
One of the lessons Atticus imparts to his children is the need to understand those we are tempted to dismiss or condemn: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." On some level, Lee's novel is an exercise in just that.
Lee understands the depth of the racial prejudice she attacks, and knows how to reveal it. She adroitly connects her hero to the very quality ostensibly prized by the adherents of the South's "Lost Cause" mentality. When Atticus says it is worth fighting even when you know you will lose, Scout associates the sentiment with his Cousin Ike.
If what white Southerners truly value is a principled fight, Lee suggests, then they should stand with Atticus Finch. When they don't, they show what it is they truly value: the preservation of a system that institutionalizes their racial privilege. In some sense, Lee's novel revolves around that insight: the gap between the purported ideals and the ugly reality that they mask.
The power of the ideal is undeniable: persisting in the face of certain defeat is supposed to prove the purity of the motive. The honor of the fight is all.
This is the ideal embraced by the supporters of the shutdown strategy. More mainstream Republican figures said the idea was crazy and bound to fail (John McCain has memorably called Cruz a "wackobird"). To them, an effort that has no chance of success is foolish, even counterproductive. For others, however, the fact that it has no chance is precisely what recommends it.
In the aftermath of his utter lack of success, Cruz refused to express any regret. He called the fight a "courageous stand" and a "profile in courage." When asked if the fight was worth it, Rep. Michele Bachmann replied: "Absolutely.... What we did is fought the right fight.”
It is too easy to dismiss Cruz's shutdown advocacy as a stunt meant to propel him into the rank of 2016 presidential contenders. Of course it was that. The more important question is this: why did he think (evidently correctly) that it would have appeal among the Republican Tea Party base?
I would argue it is because he rightly recognized the appeal of the "Lost Cause" mentality.
In the course of American history, that concept is most closely associated with white Southerners, and while it may be more common among them, it is not at all uniquely "Southern." It is, however, an idea that has a special appeal to people who believe they have already lost the battle.
Many Southerners are Tea Party supporters, but not all Tea Party supporters are Southerners. During the shutdown, when a Tea Party protest at the White House brought out a Confederate battle flag, it was easy (too easy, really) to label all Tea Partiers as "neo-Confederates." Yes, race is an element here. It is not, however, everything. What is going on is more complex than that.
What we too loosely refer to as the "southern" mentality of the Tea Party is not geographic, but cultural. The Tea Party represents a subset of the larger culture: more white, more rural, more elderly, more traditional. The reason the apocalyptic rhetoric, the dig-in-your-heels style, and the confrontational (even anti-democratic) tactics appeal to Tea Party supporters is due to a simple fact: they see "their" America dying.
That's what they have in common with the Southern fire-eaters of the pre-Civil War era.
What many people don't understand about secession is that it was prompted merely by the fact of Lincoln's election, not anything concrete he had done--he had not even taken the office yet when eight states seceded. Secession was a response to what his election represented: the end of the Southern veto over national policy. Lincoln's election proved the northern states could elect a president without the aid of the southern states.
At that point, the fire-eaters decided the democratic game was over within the United States: they would always lose. Thus the only way to win, the only way to preserve "their" America, was to separate and create a new one in which they would be the permanent majority.
Today's GOP faces something similar. Demographic trends suggest that in the future, the GOP will not be able to remain the same ideologically and also be a majority party. Since it is not geographically defined the way the pro-slavery South was, the Tea Party core cannot secede in order to create a new majority (though "secession" and "nullification" have predictably enjoyed a recent resurgence in Tea Party circles).
One solution to this dilemma would be ideological change, which would require writing off the Tea Party. But the party is unwilling to take that step. Nothing shows that better than the way Speaker John Boehner abdicated all leadership in deference to the Tea Party caucus during the recent shutdown.
So what the party has been trying to do instead is change the rules so that they can control government without having to be an actual majority party.
That is what holds together the variety of the tactics used by the GOP since Obama's election in 2008. The abuse of the filibuster in the Senate has become a vehicle of minority veto, a way to say no to everything, to make a supermajority the new requirement for things that traditionally required a regular majority. The voter ID laws reflect the same desire to rig the outcome: if we cannot get a majority of the existing electorate, we can find a legal way to redefine the electorate and create an artificial majority.
The shutdown debacle was the same thing--unable to achieve the "correct" result through normal democratic process, Tea Partiers decided to hold the funding of government hostage to achieve its end of defunding Obamacare.
Why choose that issue? The term "Obamacare" has come to encompass everything they despise: the man himself, the electoral coalition that brought him to power and successfully kept him in office, the governmental philosophy he represents. It is the embodiment of their fear--bordering on certainty--that history is passing them by, that the America they believe in is passing away.
The desperation in the rhetoric is real. As long as cynics like Ted Cruz continue to pander to it, it will not diminish, and the Tea Party will remain politically relevant--and destructive.
Republicans are trying their best to frame the current divisions within the party as merely a matter of "tactics and strategies," as Cruz recently put it. It is not. It is a fight between those who think time is short and compromise is betrayal, and those who don't. The Tea Partiers are right, I think, if deep down they believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As long as they continue to demonstrate power within the GOP primaries, however, the racket of the wackobirds will go on and on.
I came across this line last week while re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird for my humanities class, and it struck me that it nicely captures the appeal of the GOP's recent quixotic effort to defund Obamacare that resulted in the government shutdown.
The line belongs to Atticus Finch, the attorney who takes on the legal defense of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. While I think it absurd to compare the principled nobility of that fictional act to the GOP's attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act, the people who rallied to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's cause don't. They believe in the nobility of the hopeless fight.
Harper Lee's novel retains its power more than 50 years after it was first published because it not only sends a clear message of condemnation of racial prejudice, but also tries to understand how whites came to hold those views, and turn those views back on them.
One of the lessons Atticus imparts to his children is the need to understand those we are tempted to dismiss or condemn: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." On some level, Lee's novel is an exercise in just that.
Lee understands the depth of the racial prejudice she attacks, and knows how to reveal it. She adroitly connects her hero to the very quality ostensibly prized by the adherents of the South's "Lost Cause" mentality. When Atticus says it is worth fighting even when you know you will lose, Scout associates the sentiment with his Cousin Ike.
"Tell you, Atticus," Cousin Ike would say, "the Missouri Compromise was what licked us, but if I had to go through it agin I'd walk every step of the way there an' every step back just like I did it before an' furthermore we'd whip 'em this time ..."Lee's brilliance consists of taking this mindset--the one that allowed defeated Confederates to salvage something from their defeat by focusing on the honor of making a good fight rather than the system of slavery that victory would have perpetuated--and transferring it to a character who stands for the rule of law and equal justice, rather than the Jim Crow oppression that the "Lost Cause" sentimentality made possible. Atticus tells Scout: "This time we aren't fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our friends." Lee neatly equates the proponents of white supremacy with the hated Northerners.
If what white Southerners truly value is a principled fight, Lee suggests, then they should stand with Atticus Finch. When they don't, they show what it is they truly value: the preservation of a system that institutionalizes their racial privilege. In some sense, Lee's novel revolves around that insight: the gap between the purported ideals and the ugly reality that they mask.
The power of the ideal is undeniable: persisting in the face of certain defeat is supposed to prove the purity of the motive. The honor of the fight is all.
This is the ideal embraced by the supporters of the shutdown strategy. More mainstream Republican figures said the idea was crazy and bound to fail (John McCain has memorably called Cruz a "wackobird"). To them, an effort that has no chance of success is foolish, even counterproductive. For others, however, the fact that it has no chance is precisely what recommends it.
In the aftermath of his utter lack of success, Cruz refused to express any regret. He called the fight a "courageous stand" and a "profile in courage." When asked if the fight was worth it, Rep. Michele Bachmann replied: "Absolutely.... What we did is fought the right fight.”
It is too easy to dismiss Cruz's shutdown advocacy as a stunt meant to propel him into the rank of 2016 presidential contenders. Of course it was that. The more important question is this: why did he think (evidently correctly) that it would have appeal among the Republican Tea Party base?
I would argue it is because he rightly recognized the appeal of the "Lost Cause" mentality.
In the course of American history, that concept is most closely associated with white Southerners, and while it may be more common among them, it is not at all uniquely "Southern." It is, however, an idea that has a special appeal to people who believe they have already lost the battle.
Many Southerners are Tea Party supporters, but not all Tea Party supporters are Southerners. During the shutdown, when a Tea Party protest at the White House brought out a Confederate battle flag, it was easy (too easy, really) to label all Tea Partiers as "neo-Confederates." Yes, race is an element here. It is not, however, everything. What is going on is more complex than that.
What we too loosely refer to as the "southern" mentality of the Tea Party is not geographic, but cultural. The Tea Party represents a subset of the larger culture: more white, more rural, more elderly, more traditional. The reason the apocalyptic rhetoric, the dig-in-your-heels style, and the confrontational (even anti-democratic) tactics appeal to Tea Party supporters is due to a simple fact: they see "their" America dying.
That's what they have in common with the Southern fire-eaters of the pre-Civil War era.
What many people don't understand about secession is that it was prompted merely by the fact of Lincoln's election, not anything concrete he had done--he had not even taken the office yet when eight states seceded. Secession was a response to what his election represented: the end of the Southern veto over national policy. Lincoln's election proved the northern states could elect a president without the aid of the southern states.
At that point, the fire-eaters decided the democratic game was over within the United States: they would always lose. Thus the only way to win, the only way to preserve "their" America, was to separate and create a new one in which they would be the permanent majority.
Today's GOP faces something similar. Demographic trends suggest that in the future, the GOP will not be able to remain the same ideologically and also be a majority party. Since it is not geographically defined the way the pro-slavery South was, the Tea Party core cannot secede in order to create a new majority (though "secession" and "nullification" have predictably enjoyed a recent resurgence in Tea Party circles).
One solution to this dilemma would be ideological change, which would require writing off the Tea Party. But the party is unwilling to take that step. Nothing shows that better than the way Speaker John Boehner abdicated all leadership in deference to the Tea Party caucus during the recent shutdown.
So what the party has been trying to do instead is change the rules so that they can control government without having to be an actual majority party.
That is what holds together the variety of the tactics used by the GOP since Obama's election in 2008. The abuse of the filibuster in the Senate has become a vehicle of minority veto, a way to say no to everything, to make a supermajority the new requirement for things that traditionally required a regular majority. The voter ID laws reflect the same desire to rig the outcome: if we cannot get a majority of the existing electorate, we can find a legal way to redefine the electorate and create an artificial majority.
The shutdown debacle was the same thing--unable to achieve the "correct" result through normal democratic process, Tea Partiers decided to hold the funding of government hostage to achieve its end of defunding Obamacare.
Why choose that issue? The term "Obamacare" has come to encompass everything they despise: the man himself, the electoral coalition that brought him to power and successfully kept him in office, the governmental philosophy he represents. It is the embodiment of their fear--bordering on certainty--that history is passing them by, that the America they believe in is passing away.
The desperation in the rhetoric is real. As long as cynics like Ted Cruz continue to pander to it, it will not diminish, and the Tea Party will remain politically relevant--and destructive.
Republicans are trying their best to frame the current divisions within the party as merely a matter of "tactics and strategies," as Cruz recently put it. It is not. It is a fight between those who think time is short and compromise is betrayal, and those who don't. The Tea Partiers are right, I think, if deep down they believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As long as they continue to demonstrate power within the GOP primaries, however, the racket of the wackobirds will go on and on.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Three-Fifths Understanding
The infamous three-fifths clause is back in the news.
The Twittersphere exploded last Wednesday when the GOP nominee for Lt. Governor of Virginia, E. W. Jackson, made this comment:
“Rev. [Charles Wallace] Smith must not have understood the 3/5ths clause was an anti-slavery amendment. Its purpose was to limit the voting power of slave-holding states.”
Jackson has made all sorts of interesting comments, so it is not surprising that some people put the worst possible interpretation on his remarks, suggesting that he was defending the clause. But Jackson was not entirely wrong.
 |
| E.W. Jackson |
In the popular mind, the clause has come to mean that the Constitution considered a slave to be three-fifths of a person, and in a metaphorical sense, that is true. That is not, however, what motivated the clause.Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
What was actually at issue here was how to deal with the reality that the new government would be a union of states, some of which had done away with slavery (or were in the process of doing so; most northern states did away with slavery gradually) and others which had large numbers of slaves. Since the new House of Representatives was to apportion representatives based on population, the framers needed to decide whether the slave population would be taken into account.
From a modern perspective, it seems simple: just add up the total number of people (or "Persons" in the Constitution's language). In this case (as in so many others for the next six decades), slavery took what should have been an easy question and made it a complicated one. In a legal sense, slaves were property, not "Persons." So northerners argued that they should not be counted for representation at all.
That's right: the anti-slavery portion of the country argued that slaves should not be three-fifths of a person, but zero-fifths of a person. To add to the absurdity, southerners--who otherwise insisted that slaves were not "Persons" any more than horses were--argued that in this instance, and this instance alone, slaves should be counted as whole Persons, equal to every white man, woman, and child.
Each section adopted the convenient argument which would enhance its political power. To get past the impasse, they compromised on three-fifths. So compared to the southern position, Jackson is correct: three-fifths is relatively anti-slavery in that it gave slave states less power in the House than they would have had if slaves were counted as whole Persons. Compared to the northern position, however, three-fifths can only be seen as pro-slavery, since it allowed white southerners to count 60% of their slaves as both Persons and property.
The important question, however, is not whether the three-fifths clause was pro- or anti-slavery. What matters is what this story tells us about the nature of compromise in the American political system.
How do we evaluate such a compromise? From today's perspective, most of us are understandably appalled, and shudder when someone fails to be.
For example, three months ago, James Wagner, the president of Emory, stepped into it. He called "the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress" an example of "constitutional compromise" which he praised as one of the "[p]ragmatic half-victories [that] kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together."
He was pilloried for those comments, and was forced to issue this statement: "I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman."
Wagner's mistake was not in praising compromise in general, but in holding up this compromise as an example to emulate.
No one, north or south, looks good in this story. No one. The practical business of creating a framework for government brought the Constitutional Convention face-to-face with a fundamentally moral question, one whose very existence exposed the essential, inescapable immorality of slavery: is a slave a Person or property?
Faced with a stark moral choice, the framers side-stepped it and reframed it as merely a practical matter. They split the difference. They compromised.
Today, we rightly recoil from the immorality of this compromise. But this instance should not deceive us into rejecting all compromise.
The American political system is built for compromise. It breaks down when faced with moral questions that do not lend themselves to compromise solutions. That is why the federal government today is in danger of becoming utterly dysfunctional: the GOP has seemingly decided that virtually all compromise is ignoble surrender.
There are times when compromise truly is ignoble. The three-fifths clause seems like one. Today we rightly recoil at the idea that slaves were considered three-fifths of a Person.
But given the two proposals, which one would you choose? Would the north's zero-fifths option have been preferable moral ground? Would the south's blatantly hypocritical stand--that for purposes of political power, slaves were whole Persons, but under state law they were mere property--have been morally satisfying?
No, there was no good moral ground on which to stand. So pervasive was the moral corruption caused by the evil of slavery that it left no good political choices. Everything was tainted by it. The only truly moral choice would have been to abolish it completely and immediately, and few white American leaders took that idea seriously in the late 1780s. And the nation made that choice only after the political system broke down completely and the country descended into civil war.
Most of the decisions government makes, however, don't involve basic moral principles. They engage practical questions, ones where splitting the difference makes good sense. Ideologues who insist on treating every disagreement as one over principles threaten to disrupt the political system and render it as useless on all questions as it once proved on the issue of slavery.
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| Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) |
Perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of the Tea Party movement is this reflex to raise every decision to that moral level. The demagogue de jour, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, does this as well as anyone. Recently, he has refused to let Senate and House conferees meet to decide on a budget because he is convinced it will lead to a deal to raise the debt limit. Cruz casts this (and virtually every legislative issue) as a matter of "fighting to defend liberty, ... fighting to defend the Constitution."
This is absurd. There is no moral (or immoral) answer to whether (or how much) to raise the debt ceiling.
Political maturity requires knowing the difference between matters of principle and matters of utility. By casting nearly everything as the former rather than the latter, the Tea Party members of Congress show that they lack the most basic judgment needed to govern effectively. And as long as saner members of Congress appease them, they risk making the national legislature utterly unworkable.
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