Trey Gowdy Thinks Obamacare is Comparable to Segregation

The lunacy never ends.

It's bad enough that one of the two great American political parties has gone completely off the deep end, indulging in magical thinking that says it can reverse the results of the last presidential election simply by politically holding its breath. Now they want us to see their political temper tantrum as the equivalent of the Civil Rights movement.

In today's Spartanburg Herald-Journal, my representative, Trey Gowdy (R-SC), said the following about the government shutdown and the Tea Party obsession with derailing the Affordable Care Act:

“Some people might say that we should go along with what the President wants, and the Supreme Court ruling, but I would submit that just because it's law doesn't make it a good law,” Gowdy said. “There was a time when it would have been unlawful for (Sen.) Tim Scott and I to sit-down at a restaurant and eat together. There are bad laws and those worth staying and fighting for and I happen to think this is one of them.”

It shouldn't be necessary to point out how utterly absurd this comparison is, but as George Orwell once said, "we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

So let me state the obvious: a law that makes it possible for uninsured Americans to buy health insurance at a price they can afford is not comparable to segregation.

Gowdy postures as a man of principle, but anyone with an elementary understanding of what constitutes principles would understand the difference. Yes, the general idea (a law is not necessarily a good law) is true.

Everything else Gowdy says is despicable, an insult to everyone who fought to end segregation. Those people quite literally put their lives on the line to challenge a moral and constitutional injustice.

What has Trey Gowdy done?

Trey Gowdy, talking to a history class in his district. Hopefully
he did not tell them that Obamacare is like segregation.

He has refused to approve ongoing funding of the federal government because he insists on defunding a law he does not like.

And what has Trey Gowdy sacrificed for this "principle"?

He continues to draw his salary while hundreds of thousands of federal employees, many trying desperately to make ends meet, are furloughed and lose their incomes. He continues to enjoy the security of knowing that he and his family are well-insured if, God forbid, any health problems should arise, while he tries to prevent less fortunate people from having that same peace of mind.

A real profile in courage, that.

And what will happen if Trey Gowdy gets his way? Who will his principled stand help?

No one.

But he can be proud of having made a principled stand to free other people from the burden of having health insurance.

If Trey Gowdy were truly concerned with principle, he would take seriously the principle upon which our government rests: that our laws are the result of a process, one which was followed and ratified in every particular in the case of this law. It is not simply "what the President wants." It is the law of the land.

Trey Gowdy has every right--even the duty--to argue his case, to do all he can to convince Americans to elect representatives, senators, and a president who want to repeal the law. If he succeeds, people like me who favor the idea will have to accept repeal. Because we accept the legitimacy of the process.

But what he and his Tea Party cohort want is not to play by the rules, but to blow them up. They don't give a damn about process. If it does not serve their ends, they will manipulate it, undermine it, pervert it until they get what they want.

Their arguments failed to sway the Supreme Court, they failed to win the presidential election, they failed to gain control of the Senate, and they think none of that should matter. They should get their way regardless, because they are RIGHT.

After all, they think they are like the Civil Rights protesters.

The lunacy never ends.

American Perfectionalism: The Constitution

Today, we observe Constitution Day. While the Constitution itself is quite old, Constitution Day is not--as a federally recognized celebration, it only dates back to 2004. The law passed that year requires federally-funded educational institutions to mark the day by paying some formal attention to the document. Given the regularly exposed ignorance of many American citizens about what is actually in the Constitution, this generally seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

All good ideas, however, end up becoming political footballs. In South Carolina last week, Constitution Day became a pretext to attack President Obama's alleged lack of dedication to the document.

At a "Take Our Country Back" rally in Greenville, Rep. Trey Gowdy said "Is it OK for me too say 'God bless you?' Is it OK for me to say 'God bless the United States of America?'" Evidently Gowdy has been spending time in some alternate universe in which this is not OK. He must have missed the endless repetition of those words by speakers at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

At that same rally, one of the sponsors said that he is often asked where he wishes to take the country back to, and the answer was "all the way back, right back to the Constitution." Another, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, said when they are criticized for wanting to go back, conservatives need to reply "you need to have more faith in a 223-year-old document called the Constitution than you do in the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

It should go without saying that no one should want to go all the way back to the version of the Constitution that existed 223 years ago. That document explicitly protected slavery: it allowed the unrestricted importation of slaves for another 20 years, it provided for the return of runaway slaves, it treated slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of representation.

Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee the right to vote to freedmen in 1865? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not require the states to recognize the Bill of Rights? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee women the right to vote well into the 20th century?

No doubt they would answer that of course they don't want to go back to those parts of the Constitution. But they also do not offer those qualifiers. If asked, they'd say no. But they don't volunteer that information. To do so would be to admit that the Constitution was, from its beginnings, flawed. And that's a problem for them.

For reasonable people, it is easy both to respect the Constitution and its strengths, while bemoaning its failings. That is what adults do: they see complexity, they see shades of grey.

Far too many American conservatives, however, have elevated the Constitution to the status of Holy Writ. Some even claim that it is divinely inspired. How can the Constitution be divinely inspired if it is also flawed?

I realize that saying that the Constitution is not perfect is sacrilege to some ears. But that is precisely the problem.

When we take the work of fallible men and transform it into a sacred text, and argue that all we need to do to return the nation to a state of grace is to "go back to the Constitution," we convert political debate into theological dispute. That is what is wrong with the increasingly religious language that today's conservatives employ when discussing the Constitution.

We hear a lot these days from Republicans about "American exceptionalism." But in fact, that's not what they mean. What they really are insisting on is American perfectionalism.

That is the inevitable consequence of turning American history into a Bible story. It is not enough that the arc of the story be a positive one. It must have a creation story in which the hand of God is explicitly credited with establishing the nation. God's creation is not just exceptional--it cannot be questioned. It is not merely striving (in the actual words of the Constitution) to "create a more perfect Union." It is, in some fundamental sense, already perfect.

While its leaders may be wrong--as conservatives insist Obama almost always is--America never is. Its ideals are perfect, and there is never any reason to "apologize" for anything. There is never any reason to doubt.

We do not honor the Constitution by distorting it. If we wish truly to honor the Constitution on this Constitution Day, we should remember the humility of the men who wrote it and their explicit recognition that it was--from the beginning--assumed to be a flawed instrument.

Part of the Constitution's genius is that it contains within it a mechanism to change it. I can think of no more eloquent statement of imperfection. The very people who wrote it took its imperfections for granted, and provided the means of correcting them.

The amendment process was an invitation to improve, an invitation we the people have exercised 27 times in our history in our quest to become "more perfect." That phrase is our challenge. It does not ask of us smug self-satisfaction at our own perfection. It demands that we always ask how we can make our Union more perfect.

For people who insist on America's perfection, there is only one answer to our current problems: "go back." For those who know that no work of man has ever been perfect, the answer is "go forward."

The Highwaymen of South Carolina

[Y]ou will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"--Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860, Address at Cooper Institute

Lincoln was speaking of the secessionist fire-eaters who would, with South Carolina in the lead, try to destroy the Union later that same year. Last night, that same attitude was on vivid display in the United States Congress, and once again, South Carolina played a prominent role.

All seven Republican members of Congress from South Carolina voted against Speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling bill. The bill passed the House by the bare minimum, with 22 Republicans voting against it and no Democrats voting for it. It then went to the Senate, where Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham joined the Democrats in voting it down.

Although they voted with the Democrats, they did so for different reasons. The Democrats opposed the bill primarily because it would return us to this debt ceiling nightmare again in another six months. The highwaymen of South Carolina did so because its spending cuts were not draconian enough, its demand for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution not iron-clad enough.

On the CBS Evening News last night, the four freshmen Republican House members from South Carolina (the veteran Joe "You lie!" Wilson excepted) were featured in a story about opposition to raising the debt ceiling.



They spoke with apparent sincerity about the need to make fundamental change. Jeff Duncan spoke about the potential problems of the future: "I've got three young boys ... and I don't want them ten years from now to say, 'Dad, when y'all were at the brink, what did you do?' ... I don't want to have to answer him, 'I didn't do enough.'"

Touching as that is, it shows no concern at all for the very real consequences of failing to compromise. When asked about the potential disaster of failing to raise the debt ceiling, Trey Gowdy, who is my representative from the 4th Congressional district, rather self-righteously dismissed the question: "What is one person's intransigence is another person's deeply held conviction."

What Gowdy is really saying is that he values his own "convictions" above the national interest. He will follow his convictions, and if the result is financial disaster, and another Great Depression, that's not his responsibility. He is only responsible to his personal convictions.

Gowdy's refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions is stunning, and as I've noted before (here and here), typical of the baneful influence of South Carolina's most famous senator, John C. Calhoun.

In the same speech quoted above, Lincoln succinctly summed up this mindset:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This attitude is deeply, fundamentally, undemocratic. That is what is so dangerous politically about the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Above and beyond the financial dangers, we are facing a test of our political system. That system values process over any specific outcome.  Whether they realize it or not, these freshmen representatives, and the rest of the Tea Party radicals, value results over process.

There is no need for the nation to be staring into the abyss of financial chaos. Like the pre-Civil War fire-eaters, they have created a crisis, confident that they can get their way--one, by the way, which they know--they know--they cannot get through the normal democratic process--by putting a gun to the nation's head.

They blithely, like Lincoln's highwayman, tell us that the rest of us will be to blame if we force them to wreck the economy because our "deeply held conviction" tells us compromise, not blackmail, is the right way to go.

There is an extremely important principle at stake here: that the American government should not be forced to function with a gun to its head. If the highwaymen get their way, they will do incalculable damage to the nation's political system. It is well past time for leaders in both parties, not just one, to recommit to process over results, and put an end to this unnecessary, dangerous, and manufactured crisis.