The most important reason why I choose to be a Democrat is that I believe in the moral values proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States of America. I believe that moral values are and should be closely connected with politics because the purpose of politics should be to work towards a country and a world civilization that exhibit the moral values that are necessary to make the world a decent place to live for people. Paul W. Kahn said something similar in “
American Exceptionalism and Human Rights”: “Our deepest politics, that which defines our political self-understanding, merges into our understanding of ourselves as a people under the rule of law”.
Specifically, our
Declaration of Independence says that all people have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that it is the purpose of government to secure those rights, and when government becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of the people to abolish their government. Our
Constitution represents an attempt to put those rights into practice, starting with its preamble, which notes the purposes for establishing the United States of America as a country, including the need to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. The first ten amendments to our Constitution, known as the
Bill of Rights, established specific rights for the citizens of the new country, and were meant to put into practice the unalienable rights specified in the Declaration of Independence.
For me the difference between the two major parties in the United States today is not a matter of mere preference. Rather, it is a difference – and I realize this sounds harsh – between a Party that stands and fights for the moral values proclaimed in the founding documents of our country and a Party that has little or no respect for those documents and the values that they proclaim. I don’t mean to imply that individual Republicans aren’t decent people. But certainly the leaders of today’s Republican Party demonstrate through their behavior values that are not at all consistent with those proclaimed in our founding documents.
In providing examples of the different value systems of the two major parties, I frequently refer to the presidential administration of George W. Bush and to our current Republican Congress. Why is it fair to refer to a single presidential administration in comparing the values of two political parties that are represented by tens of millions of American citizens? Because the agenda of that presidential administration has been supported by a rubber stamp Republican Congress for several years now; their values have had profound effects on the current state of our country and our world; and that administration, that Congress, and those who continue to vote for them (or not) will have profound effects on the future of our country and our world, perhaps for generations to come.
The right to an opportunity for a decent life (or economic justice)Things that are essential for a decent life for American families and individuals include wages that keep families out of poverty, medical care and an opportunity for a good education.
Both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution say that it is the responsibility of government to secure the opportunity of its citizens to obtain those kinds of things. But the Republican Party believes that government should not involve itself with those issues. Instead, they say that the so-called “free market” provides for those opportunities.
I started to write this post a few days ago, and right from the start I went into a discussion of the Democratic Party’s belief that a major purpose of government is to help people in need, versus the Republican Party’s vehement objections to that idea. By the time I finished writing about why the “free-market” model is unfair and totally inadequate to address many important needs of American families, why government is needed to address those needs, and how the dismantling of pro-family and pro-people programs by a Republican Congress and President have hurt our country, the post was so long that I couldn’t add any more to it, so I posted it as a separate article. So I won’t repeat those arguments here, and instead I’ll just reference that post, which I titled “
How Republican “Free Market” Ideologues Are Ruining our Country”.
Suffice it to say here that the
poverty rate in America is increasing under the Bush administration, 46 million Americans have
no health insurance as of 2004,
infant mortality has risen under the Bush administration for the first time in more than 40 years, the
cost of a college education is sky-rocketing so that many teenagers and young adults can no longer afford to go to college, and millions of Americans work full time and yet cannot rise above the poverty level because of a minimum wage that
has not risen (and therefore has lost much ground to inflation) in almost ten years.
What have our Republican Congress and President done about all this?
This post summarizes Congressional voting on several health care issues, including such things as expanding Medicare enrollment and prescription drug benefits. Here are ratings by the American Public Health Association (APHA) of the health related votes of Senatorial candidates running in close elections this November:
Republicans: DeWine (OH) – 0%; Santorum (PA) – 0%; Kyle (AZ) – 0%; Allen (VA) – 0%; Talent (MO) – 0%; Harris (FL) – 0%; Chafee (RI) – 75%; Kennedy (MN) – 0%
Democrats: Brown (OH) – 100%; Ford (TN) – 86%; Menendez (NJ) – 89%; Nelson (FL) – 100%
Would you think that with all the enthusiasm of Republicans for our war in Iraq that they would at least be inclined to support health benefits for veterans? Well, if you said yes you’d be wrong. A March 2006 bill for increasing much needed veterans’ health benefits was
voted down in the Senate with only two Republican votes (Snowe and Specter) for the bill and only one Democrat vote (B. Nelson) against it.
A bill to increase the current poverty-level federal minimum wage was
voted down in the Senate, with 100% of Democrats voting for the bill, along with 8% of Republicans. And a bill that substantially
reduced bankruptcy protection for American families (who are usually pushed into bankruptcy either by the loss of a job or by a catastrophic illness)
passed with every Republican Senator and House Representative voting for the bill, along with 42% of Democratic Senators and 37% of Democratic Representatives.
Holding corporations responsible for their actionsThe Democratic Party believes that, in addition to helping American citizens directly, government also has a responsibility to regulate powerful corporations in the public interest. Furthermore, they recognize that the Earth’s natural resources are finite, that many of them are non-renewable, that the well being of the world’s population depends on them, and that if care is not taken to preserve them the consequences will be catastrophic for future generations.
In the case of the energy industry and many other industries, government regulation is required in order to reduce pollutants that impair the health of Americans and contribute to potentially catastrophic global climate change, and to prevent monopolies which reduce competition and raise prices beyond the means of many Americans. The
Energy Policy Act of 2005 substantially relaxed controls over the energy industry. As expected, we find substantially more Republicans than Democrats voting for this Act in both the
House (87% vs. 20%) and the
Senate (89% vs. 57%). Similarly, on a Senate vote on corporate average fuel economy
(CAFÉ) standards in 2002, only 12% of Republicans
voted for improved fuel efficiency, compared to 62% of Democrats.
Other examples of sucking up to corporate interests include the failure to pass an amendment that would have allowed Medicare to
negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry (95% of Democratic Senators voted for it, compared with 11% of Republicans), a law to
limit the possibilities for class action lawsuits against corporations (100% of Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted for it, compared to 41% of Democratic Senators and 25% of House Democrats), and the job outsourcing Central America Free Trade Agreement (
CAFTA), which 88% of House Republicans voted for vs. 7% of House Democrats and 78% of Republican Senators voted for vs. 25% of Democratic Senators.
Military interventionThe Democratic Party recognizes the catastrophic consequences of war, in terms of lost and ruined lives and debt burdens that preclude the possibility of other much needed government functions for current and future generations of Americans. Therefore it is inclined to believe that war is justified only for self-defense and to stop impending catastrophes such as
genocide, as discussed by former General and Democratic presidential candidate,
Wesley Clark.
The Republican Party has a much more cavalier attitude towards war, as demonstrated by the Bush administration’s lying and
manipulating intelligence data to provide an excuse for war in Iraq, accompanied by almost total
Republican Congressional support for those efforts. That cavalier attitude is further demonstrated by the way Republicans talk about war. They tend to speak only in terms of “winning” and “losing”, as if war is some sort of a game, the purpose of which is to prove the machismo of those who order thousands of men and women to their deaths. And to further compound this cruel attitude towards war they automatically accuse Democrats of cowardice whenever they express objections to military intervention. The reasons for the objections do not matter, and most Republicans are not at all interested in discussing the merits of the objections. They simply see any objection to war by a Democrat as one more opportunity to gain political points by
imputing cowardice to the Democrat.
It is hard to understand how they get away with this. Does anyone seriously believe that it takes courage to order other people into battle? To the contrary, it takes much more courage to vote
against war, when doing so often jeopardizes one’s political career, given the enthusiasm with which Republicans jump all over Democrats who do that. As George McGovern once said, it
took more courage for him to speak out against the Viet Nam war as a junior Senator than it did for him to fly combat missions during World War II. And yet the Republicans who are so eager to accuse Democrats of cowardice, including all the
Chicken hawks in the Bush administration, have rarely actually participated in war, except to give orders to others from their comfortable offices in Washington D.C.
Rights of accused personsAmendments V,
VI,
VII, and
VIII to our constitution require, respectively, that a person cannot be held or punished for a crime without being charged, has the right be informed of the nature of the charges against him and to face and answer one’s accusers, has the right to a fair trial by a jury, and shall not have to endure “cruel and unusual” punishment. The purpose of each of these amendments is to ensure that government does not engage in arbitrary punishment against people. Whether or not the individual in question is an American citizen is not the issue. These are basic human rights recognized by our Declaration of Independence, as well as by
international law, and all human beings are entitled to them.
Yet the Bush administration continuously denies those rights to those whom it accuses of terrorism. It holds terrorism suspects indefinitely without charging them with a crime, under
barbaric conditions. It
insists on the right to torture those suspects or render them to
secret prisons where torture is routinely practiced. And our Republican Congress for the most part simply accepts all this. When Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) on the Senate floor
roundly criticized the inhuman conditions under which these people are held, he was lambasted by Republicans, as exemplified in
this speech by Karl Rove.
Election integrityFor various indefensible reasons, most Republicans believe that it is ok to have our votes counted by computers using
secret vote counting code, with no means of determining whether or not the vote count is accurate. After all, these are private companies that supply the machines that count our votes. What right do we have to regulate or investigate their activities? – or so goes Republican logic.
In 2000, after George Bush’s brother, the governor of Florida,
illegally disenfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans from voting in the presidential election on the grounds that they were close computer matches to felons, after a Republican orchestrated
riot in Miami-Dade County stopped the vote counting there, and after various other types of
election fraud as well, five Republican Supreme Court “Justices” stopped the manual recount of the votes in Florida on grounds that
had no Constitutional justification whatsoever, thereby declaring George W. Bush our 43rd President.
In 2004, electronic voting machines using secret vote counting protocols replaced the punch card machines in much of Florida. This time there was no need for a hand recount, nor could there have been one had it been needed, since the electronic voting machines produced no material record of their vote counting. In south Florida a multitude of voters reported seeing their
vote switch from John Kerry to George Bush, in many cases repeatedly following several attempts to vote for Kerry. This was
after a Florida computer programmer working for a voting machine company had been told by his boss, who had been told by a Republican operative to write a vote switching program. The programmer, Clint Curtis, later
testified before Congress that he was told by the Republican operative, Tom Feeney, that the program was needed to control the vote in south Florida. A state investigator, Raymond Lemme, later told Curtis that he had traced the problem “all the way to the top”, but unfortunately Lemme coincidentally was
found dead in a hotel bathroom two weeks later, having purportedly slit his wrists.
On that same Election Day, in Ohio, the only other state that would have given John Kerry an electoral victory, numerous “irregularities” were discovered, including the same type of electronic vote switching noted in Florida and the
purging of probably more than two hundred thousand legal voters from the voter rolls. Representative John Conyers (D-MI), minority Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, led an investigation of these numerous irregularities, but since the Republicans refused to cooperate in any way, the resulting
100 page report was produced only by Democratic staff.
One would hope that all of this, and much more, would lead Congress to work towards a more accountable voting system. Yet little or no progress appears to have made in that direction, with Republicans in Congress steadfastly blocking efforts to enact a federal law such as the
Count Every Vote Act, that would ban or minimize secret electronic vote counting in the absence of a paper trail to verify the vote count.
The right to privacyMany controversial privacy issues involve a balance between privacy and some other value, upon which reasonable people may disagree. To make things simple here, I’ll talk about a couple of privacy issues that involve no other values to balance against.
What could be less controversial than the right of adults to engage in consensual sex within the privacy of their own home? Well, believe it or not, that is a very controversial issue to George Bush’s
favorite Supreme Court “Justice”, Anton Scalia. Writing a minority opinion in
Lawrence v. Texas, involving an appeal against Texas’ anti-sodomy law, Scalia said that the Court’s decision entails “a massive disruption of the current social order” and “dismantles the structure of constitutional law …” If George Bush or another Republican gets to appoint one more Supreme Court justice, Scalia’s opinion on this issue, as well as on Roe v. Wade, is likely to hold sway.
Then there is the issue of George Bush’s
warantless wiretapping of American citizens, which
clearly violates our
Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches. Bush would like to have the American people believe that his warantless wiretapping program is part of his “War on Terror”. But he has never explained to the American people how the “War on Terror” prohibits him from obtaining warrants for his wiretapping, which are clearly
required by law. Oh, sorry, he did explain that – it’s because sometimes, in order to catch a dangerous terrorist, time doesn’t allow him to obtain a warrant. But since the law allows for retroactive seeking of warrants, what can time have to do with it?
Anyhow, what is just as scary as Bush’s wiretapping program itself is the fact that our Republican rubber stamping Congress, rather than investigate the issue, initiate impeachment hearings, or even consider censuring Bush, feels that it’s more important to
change the law in order to bring him into compliance with it.
Our First amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and of the pressThe
First Amendment to our Constitution is absolutely necessary for the functioning of democracy. If people cannot criticize their government, and if a country lacks a free and independent press there can be no democracy. The primary individual action of democracy, voting, is dependent upon the information that we have, which in turn is dependent upon the free speech of others, especially the press. Without that, citizens have no basis upon which to make the decisions necessary to uphold a democracy.
But we are now gradually losing the right to free speech. The intolerance of the Bush administration to bad news or criticism has resulted in “
first amendment zones” whenever Bush goes out in public, and journalists who don’t play ball with the administration are
denied access. Dick Cheney accuses Iraq war critics of “
abetting terrorists”, and our administration is now justifying the need to
criminalize the reporting of news that it considers unfavorable to itself. The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force has even spoken of
testing out new weapons for use in crowd control of American citizens.
Our Republican Congress not only accepts all this, but they support the Bush administration in their efforts to destroy our First Amendment and therefore our democracy, thus emboldening them to complete the process.
As a corollary, our current national press corps is but a shadow of its former self, in many respects having become more of a
propaganda machine for the Bush administration and other Republicans than a free press. This is evident by their failure to report on major concerns about our election system or the administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war, and by numerous other major failures. ABC’s recent
revisionist history of the September 11th attacks, just two months before the November mid-term elections, is perhaps the most obvious evidence yet for the hidden agenda of our so-called free press.
Final thoughtsDo our Republican leaders really believe that “free market” ideology is so sacred that our government shouldn’t work to provide for the general welfare of our people? Do they believe that corporations should have free reign to do as they like, even to the extent of being protected against lawsuits? Do they believe that our Bill of Rights should be ignored or destroyed, and that the votes of American citizens should be counted by secretly programmed machines? I don’t believe that they really believe all that. Rather, I believe that they simply pretend to believe those things, and maybe even force themselves to believe them because they are richly rewarded in campaign contributions and with other perks for doing so. In short, they are morally bankrupt.
Many DUers have accused the Democrats of being simply a light version of the Republican Party. Though there is probably some truth to that accusation, I believe that overall it is not justified. In the first place, the overall voting record of the two parties is vastly different (as discussed above), as are the public pronouncements that parallel those voting records. Yes, I would like to see a more liberal and aggressive Democratic Party, and so would many other people. But I think that we should recognize that today’s Democrats, given the arch conservatism of the corporate news media, are in a very
precarious position. I for one am willing to see them move somewhat to the right if that helps them to get control of Congress and the Presidency, so as to give them a chance to break the vicious cycle on a road to Fascism that we are now in.
The bottom line for me is that the Democratic Party as a whole believes strongly in the core values that I’ve discussed in this post, and they’re willing to work, though cautiously, to see those values incorporated into the laws of our country. That is why I’m a Democrat.
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