While
Bush Sleeps, Who Really Governs?
By David Lytel,
Managing Partner Democrats.com
George W. Bush wants to make sure we all
know that being president is a piece of cake. A day at work for Bush is
like a day on vacation for any of the rest of us. He gets a late start,
spends time at the gym and takes a nice long afternoon nap. So this leaves
the messy business of governing the country to others. But who, exactly,
has Bush gotten to mind the store while he takes it easy?
A peak backstage at the presidential
theater is truly frightening, since what you see isn’t even
representative of the Republican Party, let alone the country at large.
The Republicans managed to put the Supreme Court in a position to decide
the election only by holding together its four factions – Wall Street
fat cats and the super rich, the Main Street small business types, the
cultural conservatives who are concerned about moral decline and family
values, and the angry white men who feel that gains in status achieved by
women, minorities, gays and others come at their expense.
However, that coalition is not what has
been asked to govern the country. What should be alarming even to
Republicans is the degree to which a very small cell of right wing
ideologues has been put in the drivers seat by a president who is happy to
take a nap in the back seat.
I’m referring to the laughably mis-named
“Federalist Society,” which is a group of no more than maybe 25,000
right wingers who are using the language of democracy to try to fight
against some of democracy’s greatest achievements.
The Federalist Society wants to dust off
and resuscitate the long discredited doctrine of “states rights,”
which you may dimly remember was the rallying cry for the
ultraconservative racists and white supremacists who opposed our
nation’s great achievements in civil rights and equal rights for women.
A great new report called
“Slouching Towards Extremism: The
Federalist Society and the Transformation of American Jurisprudence” was
published recently by the Institute for Democracy Studies. Some
highlights:
“Federalist Society leaders are determined… to begin the process of
institutionalizing a comprehensive agenda challenging every aspect of a
democratic judicial system.
Targeting the courts, the law schools, and
the American Bar Association, the Federalist Society has emerged as an
increasingly powerful coalition of conservative and libertarian legal
activists developing broad-based challenges to fundamental principles of
constitutional law.
Backed by millions of dollars from leading
right-wing and libertarian foundations, the Federalist Society is quietly
and successfully shaping the emerging jurisprudence.”
The Federalist Society is one of the
principle organizations by which the right wing conducts its assault on
the democratic foundations of our legal system. The Federalist Society is
the vehicle for a new generation of right wing ideologues who are
determined to use a “states rights” rationale to defend special
privilege for wealthy white people and re-establish official
discrimination against everyone else.
The Federalist Society membership list
reads like a Who’s Who among powerful right wing intellectuals. They
include U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Renquist, Antonin Scalia,
Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas, senators
Spencer Abraham and Orrin Hatch, former Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr,
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Attorney General John Ashcroft,
Solicitor General Ted Olson, former FBI director C. Boyden Gray, former
Attorney General Edwin Meese and lots more.
This ruling clique is so out of step with
America that they believe such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of
Education, which outlawed school segregation, and Roe v. Wade, which
upheld a woman’s right to control her own reproductive system, were
wrongly decided and must be overturned.
They oppose effective environmental
protection and fight against even the small measures that have been
enacted to address the massively unequal status afforded women,
homosexuals, and racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. – all under
the banner of “states rights.”
I have to say that the Federalist
Society’s approach – infiltrating and taking over key institutions of
government – reminds me most strongly of how the Communist Party or for
that matter the Nazi Party went about undermining democratic institutions
from within until public support for them had vanished and the remaining
veneer could be swept away so a people’s dictatorship of the right or of
the left (take your pick) could be put in power.
You almost have to marvel at the
tremendous discipline of the right wing fanatics, who now have public
office and recognition from the news media to add to their tools for
controlling the public agenda. Unless progressives begin to bend down and
pick up the tremendous potential power we have to organize a potent
opposition we are very likely to find ourselves blocked from returning to
power by zealots who have proven that their ultimate commitment is not to
God or to democracy but to seizing and holding power by any means
necessary.
The key question is how can we use the new
tools of activism to help the Democratic Party unlock its inner majority
and build a center-left coalition that is the 21st century’s dominant
political force. I, for one, am up to the challenge. |
