Great Irresponsibility

Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tries to teach him that, ”With great power comes great responsibility.” During Spiderman’s origin story, after Parker gains his powers and Uncle Ben dies in his arms, these words become the guiding principal that makes Spiderman a hero. But, after fifty issues, that responsibility becomes so great a burden that Peter Parker considers giving it all up, and trying to have a normal life instead. The image above is from that fiftieth issue. There is no supervillain, just a young man battling the words of his uncle, and those words finally win.

This past week, anyone who did not already know learned that Donald Trump and the Republicans in the House do not have any sense of responsibility to anyone to go with the power they wield over all of our lives. How else can you explain the passage in the House of the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act? Despite the late addition of an amendment to provide political cover for moderate Republicans, this was not a serious effort to improve health care for anyone. Instead, there was the actual goal of making savage benefit cuts in order to try to pave the way for huge permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. There was a mad rush to get the bill passed for several reasons. For Donald Trump, the fact that his first one hundred days in office passed with no major legislative victories was galling. His ego demanded the passage of something to brag about, no matter what its merits. For Paul Ryan, the bill is his greatest victory in his nearly religious crusade against the safety net. For the Republican leadership in general, two deadlines were looming that meant they had to get the votes, even if no one had so much as read the bill they were voting for. They knew the bill was doomed if the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to score the AHCA, giving precise details of how much harm it would do. And the Republican leadership also didn’t dare let their members leave on recess, and face their constituents in town halls, with the AHCA vote pending on their return. There was to be no epiphany, no chance for anyone to wake up and realize that the nation needed them to do what is right.

The greatest danger we face now is complacency. We must not assume that the ACHA will die in the Senate. We assumed that Donald Trump could not possibly win the Republican nomination, and I like so many others wrote about that. Then we assumed that he could not possibly win last November, and again, I am as guilty as anyone else, having written about how we should handle a Hillary Clinton presidency. Finally, we assumed it was time to move on to other issues, with the AHCA dead in the House without a vote in March. Now we have a last chance to prevent this atrocity from becoming law. We must pressure Senators of both parties to craft a much better, and substantially different bill. But our job does not end there. We must then make sure that the House and Senate can not reconcile the two and pass anything that even remotely resembles the AHCA. We have the majority of the American people on our side, despite the result last November. But, as Peter Parker discovered, we have a power, and with it the responsibility to use it for the greater good. Like him, we must not walk away again until the job is done.

My song choice this week may seem to have nothing to do with this post. But Luka is about what happens when someone misuses the power they have over another person. I always interpreted the song as being about a woman, but the video suggests that Luka is a child. Either way, I am calling out Trump and the House Republicans for abusive behavior towards the American people, and I stand by that:

Do the Math

Politics, in the end, is a branch of mathematics. The candidates must decide how to attract voters and donations to their causes. These calculations involve millions of voters and dollars. But much smaller numbers can be just as important.The political math I have been thinking about lately involves the numbers one and two.

One is the size of a possible Democratic majority in the Senate. It could be that close, so every seat will be essential. I live in New Jersey. We do not elect a Senator this year, but we are also a solid blue state. I can usually vote my conscience. But, to gain a Democratic majority this year, not everyone will have that luxury. It might come down to what happens in Indiana, for example. Evan Bayh is nobody’s idea of a progressive, although his voting record is better than I would have expected. But a victory for him is a progressive victory. To see why, you first have to understand that Indiana is not going to elect a true progressive to the Senate. Remember, this is a state that thinks having Mike Pence for their governor is a good idea. But if a Bayh victory means the Democrats control the Senate, the Democrats would gain the chairmanships of all of the Senate committees. Surely some of those chairpersons would be progressives. Beyond that though, a Democratic Senate would mean that Clinton could nominate a more progressive judge to the Supreme Court than she would if the Republicans retained control. A Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman would allow this nomination to get out of committee to be voted on by the full Senate.

Two is the number of terms a president can serve since the ratification of the 22nd amendment in 1951. Lately I have been seeing a lot of posts advocating term limits for the House and Senate. A recent one also called for cutting the lifetime pensions for Congressmen from the current level of, if I remember correctly, $117,000 a year. Two assumptions are involved in this. One is that $117,000 is a lot of money. To most members of Congress, it is not. The majority of members of both the house and Senate are millionaires. More to the point, many parlay their government experience and connections into high paying lobbying positions when they leave congress. Cutting the pension would only create a greater incentive to do so. The second assumption term limit advocates make is that outgoing legislators would be replaced by better people. That’s just silly. If that were possible, the person you wanted replaced would not have been elected in the first place. Term limits are also a blunt instrument, forcing out both good and bad people. Again, I live in New Jersey, and we had the good fortune to have as our Senator Frank Lautenberg. Lautenberg was elected to five terms, and he had one of the most progressive records in the Senate over that time. It does no good for me to sit in New Jersey and call for term limits as a way to remove Mitch McConnell from his Senate seat in Kentucky. It is up to progressives in Kentucky to mobilize and work for McConnell’s defeat. Otherwise, whoever replaced McConnell might not have the power that his long service has brought, but he or she would be no better otherwise. In the House, term limits are a particularly bad idea. A person could only serve for a total of four years, all of which would be spent campaigning for that lobbyist job. A much better way to counter the power of entrenched legislators is to be in the habit of casting meaningful votes in Congressional election years. Progressives have been terrible at this recently; we were almost invisible in the 2010 and 2014 elections, allowing Republicans to gain and extend their majorities in those years.

Related to this last point, and also a matter of numbers, is the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Most experts predict that the Democrats will not be able to take the House this year, because there are too many safe Republican districts. These are the result of gerrymandering. We can deplore it all we like, but we as progressive voters must learn to do more. Gerrymandering happens when redistricting is done every ten years. At that time, each state draws its districts to favor the party that controls the state house and state legislature. These posts are decided in odd-year elections, and we progressives have been almost completely absent in these elections. In 2015, Bernie Sanders was calling for his political revolution, but his supporters did not show up to vote. The Tea Party never makes that mistake. They made a point at first of always voting, even when the available Republican was not conservative enough for them. Over time, they were able to take over the process, and elect the candidates they wanted. As a result, their electees controlled the redistricting process in much of the country in 2010. We have only until 2020, when the next redistricting happens, to try to reverse this trend.

All of these political equations yield the same result. We must vote meaningfully. As things stand, that means supporting some candidates who are not perfect. But as we become the likely voters that are the pollsters’ sole concern, we will start to have more candidates we can feel good about. In the meantime, we must understand that our votes for the least bad candidate in one place can empower a better candidate somewhere else. They can also create more chances to get better candidates elected. To unseat those who have gained the power to block action on our issues, we must do the hard work of actually winning an election against the odds. Even if Bernie Sanders had actually won the nomination and the presidency, that would not have been enough to solve these equations. That will take time, commitment, and patience.