From Chris Bowers:
“To me, as a political activist, the lesson [of the AIG bonuses saga] is that we should be generating as much anger as possible, all the time, because it is about the only thing that appears to make politicians in D.C. responsible to our concerns.”
Some people, like Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri are feeling regretful over voting for the AIG clawback legislation. Cleaver actually said, “I joined the cowards,” by voting for it. Bowers is explicitly celebrating this specific fact. Whipping up anger forced a man to succumb to populist pressure and, in his own estimation, cast a cowardly vote. By turning our political enemies into cowards, however temporarily, we can get them to support our policies when they would not otherwise do so.
In one sense, this is Politics101. How do you get the other party and recalcitrant members of your own to vote your way? You put fear into them. Maybe they feel dirty about capitulating, but what do you care? I’m with Chris on this in this narrow sense.
But this opens up areas for discussion. Here’s one. If you are a member of Congress, should you refuse to vote for any bill that you think is unconstitutional? Is that part of your oath? Or, let’s say that you know that either a) the bill will never pass the other house (or that it will be vetoed), or b) that the Supreme Court will surely strike it down. Is it okay under circumstances where you know the bill will not become law (or will be quickly invalidated as law) to vote for an unconstitutional bill?
Here’s the congressional oath:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Can you be said to be supporting the Constitution if you vote for a bill you believe to be unconstitutional? So, that’s one question and let’s move on. Suppose you’ve determined that there is nothing inconsistent with your oath in voting for an unconstitutional bill you are certain will not become or be sustained as law. What would be the purpose for voting for it, then?
The obvious answer is to send a message. You send a warning shot across the bow to someone or some group of people. You tell them that you don’t like what they’re doing and that you’ll come after them if they keep doing it. In the case of the AIG bonuses, the bill will never become law but it did incentivize people to give the money back voluntarily. So, the people that voted for the bill accomplished something they probably could not have accomplished legally, and they did it through an act of intimidation.
We can debate the morality of Congress behaving this way, but we can also debate the utility. They did accomplish something…they saved the taxpayers a couple hundred million dollars. And they sent a message to other companies and to each other, as politicians.
Yet, Chris doesn’t really contemplate that the bill might be bad law. He seems to think it might actually pass through the Senate and be signed into law. And he doesn’t seem to have any qualms about that. That’s the point where he completely loses me. It’s one thing to say that whipping up all this populist anger saved the taxpayers money and that there was no other way to accomplish that goal. I might agree with him on that. It’s another to say that bills of attainder should be passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
And, as long as we’re on the subject, it isn’t necessary for a law to be unconstitutional for it to be poor policy. A Congress that governs out of fear can make very poor decisions (see AUMF-Iraq). Consider this. When Bowers says “…we should be generating as much anger as possible, all the time…” he could be saying that “Congress should be governing out of fear, all the time,” because that would be the effect and purpose of Bowers’s strategy. In fact, I can see Karl Rove, back in 2002, in the inner councils of the government, saying “we should be generating as much fear as possible, all the time.”
One thing should be obvious. Whether your goal is to entice anger or fear, if that is your goal, reasoned debate is going to be thrown out the window. You will not find me going along with any such plan.