'The Two Great Classes—Tramps and Millionaires'

In response to recent items on current partisan politics as a slow-motion coup, here are messages from two readers with extensive first-hand experience in politics. First we have Mike Lofgren, for many decades a Republican Senate staffer, whom I have quoted before and whose book on what has happened to American politics, The Party Is Over, comes out this summer. He writes:

Our great-grandparents would have recognized the current Supreme Court and the Citizens United decisions for what they are: the institutions of government in the grip of what they then called the Money Power.

Witness the 1892 Omaha platform of the People's Party ("the populists"), reacting to court rulings such as that of the 1886 court session, when a court headnote on a case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, laid the foundation for "corporate personhood" and established the precedence of corporate prerogatives over citizens' rights. The populists' Omaha Platform called out the high­est court, along with the rest of the political apparatus, as rotted by money:

"We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized. . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauper­ized labor beats down their wages. . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the pos­sessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injus­tice we breed the two great classes - tramps and million­aires."

That last line commands the admiration of anyone attentive to rhetoric. So does the passage as a whole. "Even the ermine of the bench" !

Next we have Charles Stevenson, who was for decades a staffer to Democratic senators before becoming a professor at the National War College. He writes:

- I used to think that increased party polarization was simply the result of the growing ideological unity of each group, a process reinforced by redistricting into safe seats.  Now I think that a better explanation is a combination of a capture of the GOP by a radical fringe and the defeat of congressional institutionalism by partisanship.  Newt Gingrich was the godfather to both movements, starting with his rejection of the bipartisan 1990 budget deal and continuing with his strategy of "destroy[ing] the House in order to save it" by undermining public confidence in the institution....

- Congressional norms have also changed, most dramatically as you've noted in terms of the abuse of the filibuster. But they've also changed in terms of defending the congressional institutions and their proper Constitutional roles. Few members any longer assert congressional war powers against a President of their own party. Committees - and conference committees --are routinely bypassed by the leadership to avoid messy compromises. Some congressional leaders seem to put partisanship above lawmaking. Bill Frist [R-Tenn] had little Senatorial experience or respect for the institution when he was picked by the Bush administration to be GOP leader. Mitch McConnell openly announced that his goal was defeating Obama in 2012, rather than something like "using the votes we have to limit presidential excesses."

- Another development that has poisoned our politics is the fact that each of the last 3 presidents has been viewed as fundamentally illegitimate by a large segment of the opposition - Clinton first because of his narrow victory in a three-man contest, then because of his lying under oath about his sexual activities; G.W. Bush because of his minority popular vote and the Supreme Court ruling; and then Obama because of questioning his birth certificate.

- I don't think we should eliminate the filibuster because I can foresee partisans on both sides wanting to prevent what they consider a radical appointment to the Supreme Court or a narrow majority vote approving use of torture or ending civil liberties in the event of another terrorist attack. I'd be happy with a rule change forbidding filibusters on "motions to proceed" and requiring the opponents to produce 40 live bodies in order to sustain a filibuster each day.

The "tramps" illustration above comes from the very useful "Tramps and Millionaires site," as does this Charles Dana Gibson illustration of another side of turn-of-the-19th-century American life.



Forgive me for including this sample message that just came in, as part of the very large harvest of non-supportive response that I find in the inbox on getting off a plane:

I'd like to know how many of your "knowledgable legal observers" that say Obamacare is constitutional have a connection to an Ivy League school?  I'd wager most of them do.  As such I consider whatever legal opinion they spew forth as hopelessly tainted by an ultra-radical left wing political agenda.

If the individual mandate was a Republican idea then I tip my hat to the right for putting such a blatantly unconstitutional provision into the bill that would force a majority of SCOTUS to rule it unconstitutional.

You get the joke if, unlike my correspondent, you know something about the educational background of conservative Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and "swingman" Kennedy. This is a fraught time in our national life, so I look for the bright side when I can.