Sometimes it helps to step back and view a whole nation as if it were a person. Right now we are told that America is in crisis, and solutions are being offered from every quarter. When a person is in crisis, the search for a solution runs into conflict and confusion. The worst scenarios run through one's imagination. Reason wars with emotion. We see the same in America today. The impulse to throw reason out the window is expressed through Sarah Palin, who makes a very nice living, thank you very much, by throwing tantrums in public. The impulse to blame somebody, anybody is expressed through the Tea Party. The cool-headed police officer or firefighter who comes to your house to handle an emergency is expressed through President Obama. As for Congress, it expresses the country's refusal to accept that a crisis exists, since for all its hot air, Congress is dedicated to doing the same thing it has always done.
Yet people do get out of crises and so do countries. They do so by discovering that they are stronger, better, and more resilient than they ever thought they were. The first rule is that when they fall, souls bounce, they don't break. I've put this in spiritual terms because leaving religion aside, spirituality has always been about the endurance of the soul and the possibilities of a higher vision. When terrible things happen in their lives, people don't immediately find a spiritual solution. They first go into shock, numbness, denial, and fear. These forces take time to dissipate. It's a slow process but a reliable one. The downturn of 2008 is fresh in everyone's mind; the backlash of the midterm elections evidenced just how shocked and afraid the public still is.
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The Israeli government must still approve the proposed United States-Israeli agreement to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank in exchange for a U.S. offer of three billion worth of military hardware, including stealth fighter jets. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds in obtaining cabinet approval, the parties will have 90 days to focus primarily on reaching an agreement on borders. Only an agreement on borders would enable negotiations to proceed by delineating which of the settlements will be incorporated into Israel proper, and which would not. The resumption of Israeli construction would then be limited to those areas that are considered part of Israel proper. The success or failure of the Obama administration's peacemaking effort hinges on whether or not sufficient progress is made to induce the Palestinian and Israeli leadership to continue with the negotiations beyond the 90-day freeze.
Unfortunately, the likelihood that such an accord will be reached is slim. Any agreement would require major concessions on the part of both sides. However, it is unclear whether the current Israeli government can muster a three-month settlement freeze, albeit in exchange for a compelling American offer, and then agree on a border that relinquishes 95 percent or more of the West Bank. Shas and Israel Beiteinu in particular will object, as will right-wing rebels within the Likud party who are appealing to Shas to oppose rather than abstain from the cabinet vote on the freeze. Shas has stated that it will only abstain if it obtains a letter from the United States ensuring that construction can resume in Jerusalem, and that the freeze would not be renewed on the 91st day. With such coalition partners, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be optimistic about the prospects for genuine movement toward peace at this stage.
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I've been agonizing for some time over how as a country we've catapulted so far beyond George Orwell's 1984, which taught us that rhetoric could be constructed to match a reality exactly opposite of the slogans uttered. We're now to the point that up is truly down, at least in political "discourse," if you could call it that. Into my mailbox comes the tome below, from a thoughtful public servant who has worked for the greater good for going on 30 years. Here's what he has to say about the Principles Of Republicanism:
What Republicans are not.--Republicans generally describe themselves as "conservatives," but they haven't been truly conservative for decades. Republicans want to conserve some things they like and don't want to conserve other things they don't like. So the term "conservative" - which suggests a general predisposition to conserve things as they are - doesn't fit. It doesn't explain what they want to conserve and what they don't. Look at their record: Republicans don't want to conserve the environment - they want to allow corporations to consume (the opposite of conserve) natural resources to enhance short-term corporate profits. They want to dismantle - not conserve - the social contract that has bound Americans together for the past 70 years in the form of Social Security, public education, publicly built highways, unemployment insurance, sound regulation of the financial system, and the economic safety net for poor Americans. They don't want to conserve the balanced, progressive tax system that has made possible the American Dream for middle-class Americans and distinguished us from third-world countries run by economic elites. Most significantly, they favor a radical restructuring of the relationship between the rights of corporations and the rights of actual human beings, that would astonish the founding fathers, who viewed corporations as a narrow legal construct designed to raise capital for building canals, not an out-of-control leviathan spending multi-millions to buy elections.
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A serious conversation has begun about making it possible for the Senate to function as our Constitution envisaged -- as a part of a balanced structure, not a complete roadblock to preventing the Congress from playing its role as a legislative initiator. Led by veteran senator Tom Harkin and sophomore Tom Udall, a group of Democratic senators -- with one incoming Republican (Indiana's Dan Coats) joining them -- have begun calling for reform of the Senate's paralyzing rules, by which a tiny number of senators, sometimes just one, can prevent action.
A variety of proposals are on the table, including a creative one by Oregon senator Jeff Merkley that would require that if the minority wanted to filibuster, it would have to do so the old-fashioned way -- by remaining on the Senate floor to prevent action. It's far from clear how deep the reforms can be and still muster the necessary 51 votes to change the rules at the beginning of the next Congress -- but it is clear that this is the strongest effort we've had for reform in decades.
The danger posed to America by the present rules gets starker and starker. In the first week of the lame-duck Congressional session alone, we had South Carolina senator Jim DeMint threaten to filibuster a vital arms-control agreement with Russia, even if his fellow Republicans were satisfied that it enhances America's national security. Never before has the filibuster been used to block vital defense legislation. And earlier in the week all 42 current Senate Republicans signed a letter in which they explicitly used the threat of a filibuster to blackmail the Senate leadership into giving them their way by extending tax cuts for millionaires and blowing a huge hole in the federal treasury. Once again, no party has ever threatened to block all legislation, however badly needed, to get their way on one bill -- and it is the current Senate rules that make such blackmail possible.
Of course back in February it became clear that the Republicans would filibuster almost everything this year in order to generate voter anger at a do-nothing Congress -- and it appears to have paid off for them.
So the real issue now is whether the Democrats can recognize that the filibuster has now become a weapon of political terror, and that you cannot afford to compromise with political terrorists any more than you can with violent ones. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune put it, the current Senate rules block the will of the voters. If the voters have elected 51 senators who want to vote on a nuclear arms treaty, then a minority should not be able to prevent those senators from doing their job -- which is to vote.
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