Bipartisanship is overrated
Calm down, calm down. I appreciate the concept behind bipartisan efforts. I just think that maybe we get too preoccupied with the idea from time to time.
All the news coverage I come into contact with (radio, TV, internet, occasionally paper) about health care reform feels overblown. All the flurry over Olympia Snowe’s personal opinion on the bill even when a 13-10 committee vote would have been sufficient… and the uproar about Joe Lieberman promising to vote with Republicans…. Everyone’s asking, will there be enough votes in the Senate to pass the health care bill? But I’m asking, why are we panicking about this so much?
It takes a majority to pass regular legislation in the Senate. That means that our country has decided, if 51/100 senators think something should become a law, it ought to be a law. Presumably it’s ideal that 100/100 senators like a law, but we realize that is virtually impossible to achieve. The more votes the better, in general, but the bar is set at simple majority. Now, there’s this other little feature called the filibuster. Senators can block a bill’s passage by speaking for as long as they choose. However, if at least 60 senators support the bill, they can vote to invoke cloture and prevent a filibuster. This has apparently resulted in 60 votes being thought of as the new bar. You don’t have “enough votes” unless you have enough to prevent a filibuster, and you assume that your opponents will filibuster if they have the opportunity. Hence all this talk of bipartisanship, and all the coddling and cooing over any Republican senator that sways leftward in a gentle breeze momentarily.
This is nuts. There are 60 senators in the Democratic caucus. Yes, one of them is Lieberman, but even 59 is still substantially above the simple majority requirement. There are plenty of Congresses in which 59 Senate votes for something would have indicated an astounding bipartisan effort. But it really doesn’t matter what party everyone is from. If that was the real requirement, the Senate could just be made up of one Democrat and one Republican (or if you like, a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, and a Green?), and as soon as the two (or four) of them agreed on something, it’d become law. No, what actually matters is that each senator represents their constituents, and having “enough votes” to pass a law is a proxy for having enough popular support for that law to make it valid democratically. The fact is, having close to 60 senators in one ideological camp is a strong, meaningful statement that that ideology has majority support in the nation. We shouldn’t presume to need any more than that.
I’d like to see Harry Reid go ahead with his 59 votes, or whatever it is now. Maybe it’ll actually be 60, depending on Olympia Snowe’s present whimsy. But even if another Democrat or two doesn’t want to vote for it, and Reid can’t convince a handful of Republicans to break party lines… so what? Make them actually filibuster. Show the country that these 57, 58, 59 senators really want to provide a better standard of living for their constituents, really do want to do something about all the people who end up having to resort to the big plastic jug health care plan, but that these clowns would rather read from the telephone book for hours and hours and hours. Please, Senator Reid, make them read recipes and recite poetry for days.
Maybe the Democrats will flinch first, and the Republicans will win via the filibuster. But they’ll have made themselves look terrifically foolish in the process, discrediting their side for the next time around. (Just imagine the PAC ads… “Here’s a picture of a little baby denied health insurance for a stupid reason… and here’s Senator So-and-So who thought that the Senate had more important things to worry about.”) But maybe the Republicans will flinch first. It’s not exactly strawberries and cream, this whole filibustering experience. And maybe, just maybe, they’re all talk. Maybe they realize how unpleasant the task actually is, and would rather not actually go through with it. Do they feel as strongly against health care as Strom Thurmond felt against racial integration? We ought to find out.
There’s a time to be conciliatory, to “reach across the aisle” and try to build consensus. But when something as important as health care reform is dragged out so long, and no compromise seems to be good enough, it’s time to go for it with whatever you’ve got. Whatever we’ve got now ought to be enough.
Bad news from Israel
I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, and can’t get it out of my mind. Sheera Frenkel reports:
FRENKEL: Every night, David, who asked not to be called by his real name, patrols this and other neighboring Jewish settlements. His mission is to find Arab-Jewish couples and break up their dates.
DAVID: (Through translator) My heart hurts every time I see a Jewish girl with an Arab. It’s extremely upsetting. I asked myself: How did we get to this situation? How did we descend to this level? It is a serious step backwards, in our eyes.
FRENKEL: David is the leader of a group of vigilantes that goes by several names, including Fire For Judaism and Love of Youth. They say they number between 30 and 40 men and patrol the streets each night. Officially, they’re on the lookout for any mixed couples, but T.S.(ph) a member of the group who often serves as David’s driver, says the problem lies solely with Arab men dating Jewish girls.
This is terrifying and unbelievable. Perhaps you, like me, have been lulled into complacency thinking that the days of Jim Crow laws and the like are behind us as a species, but this is happening today, in a modern democracy. Now, there will always be some crazy isolationist fringe groups out there, and many people certainly do disapprove of their own children dating outside of their own culture or religion. It’s not hard to imagine that a couple people would feel so motivated as to walk around outside and yell some threatening things. Some people are jerks. But while this isn’t Jim Crow, it’s happening on a large scale. In Pisgat Ze’ev alone, there are apparently around three dozen men on patrol every night, and this is happening in many other cities as well. According to NPR, at least one of those cities possesses a government-run dating patrol, not vigilantes. This is serious.
On another level, this terrifies me because the Jews I know are American Jews, and I think that the result (in the US at least) of years of oppression and minority status is that Jews are particularly aware of the importance of protecting minority rights and personal freedoms. Somehow, it seems that if anyone would understand the danger of society embracing an ideology like that of these dating patrols, it ought to be the citizens of the Jewish state.
I haven’t been able to find any evidence that any high government officials in Israel have come out opposing these patrolling mobs, or of police crackdowns against them. I hope they get their act together on this soon.
How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
Back starting Monday
Welcome to October, everyone. Sorry we haven’t been around in a while. Over the weekend, I’ll be queuing up some posts to get us back on track next week. In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with this music video. Perhaps you’ve already seen it before… but I’ve watched it dozens of times now and I’m not bored of it in the least. If you haven’t seen it, it’s high time you check it out!
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