To the Vinland Station
When I saw the 65-34 tally on the Senate version of the hide-and-torture bill, I of course immediately wondered, So who the heck didn’t even vote? The answer is: Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME). (Via TPM Muckraker.) Her breakthrough book will be called Profiles in Storage.
UPDATE: jlw points out in comments that Snowe was at the funeral of her aunt, the aunt who raised her from girlhood. Facing a foregone conclusion on the vote, that seems acceptable. It’s a better alibi than any Republican except Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, the only Republican Senator to vote against the bill. Not Susan Collins, not Chuck Hagel, not Richard Lugar, not Arlen Specter nor any of the GOP’s putative grownups.
Comment by Valerie Emanuel —
September 29, 2006 @ 5:14 am
We are witnessing history here–the death of American democracy.
However, I’m sure any history books yet to be published will praise this era after the new Ministry of Propaganda rewrites them.
Comment by Heffalump —
September 29, 2006 @ 7:22 am
She’s just doing her part to represent the millions of Americans who just don’t give a damn. Hell, the apathetics are wildly underrepresented in this vote; if the percentage of Americans who cared about democracy was accurately reflected in the number of senators that showed up on the floor, they’d never reach quorum.
Comment by Jason —
September 29, 2006 @ 8:51 am
I was wondering the same thing when I heard the count. I thought, who would be absent for this? I am shocked that it is the usually thoughtful and moderate senator from Maine. Not so surprised that there are some cowardly Dems in the Senate still.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 29, 2006 @ 8:52 am
Well…within a decade of the establishment of the United States of Amertica, John Adams, or all people, pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Those two acts are infamous, but very few people know how truly odious they were. They were hideous.
They were an even grosser violation of our basic constitutional rights than the current bills we are lamenting. And this was more than a decade before Chief Justice John Marshall decided “Marbury v Madison.”
So there was no real judicial review of those monstrosities. IN a way, it may actually be better that the Congress of taht time could not “count on” the Supreme Court to bail them out of their political folly.
Of course, in those days, the Supreme Court actually took its constitutional responsibility seriously. It truly regarded itself as a co-equal branch with the legislature and the executive. Not a subordinate one, as seems to be the attitude of certain justices today.
Comment by jlw —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:08 am
Just to be fair, the funeral for the aunt who raised Senator Snowe was held on Thursday.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:19 am
OT Fanboy comment: Robert Downey Jr. has been inked to play Tony Stark in the upcoming Iron Man movie.
Comment by Anodyne —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:54 am
I recognize that the period leading up to and including the passage of Torture/Detainee Bill was salient. I think I understand why many people here feel consternation, outrage and a sense of loss at this moment. That said, I’d like to make a personal observation. Among the many reasons people forecast is to contemplate and to draw attention to possible outcomes that they perceive as particularly odious. When such outcomes are projected in the distant future or were considered low probability events before some “Black Swan” event occurred, it’s usually necessary to predict a series of cascading and reinforcing intermediate actions or systematic failures to explain how we will arrive at the odious outcome. A fair number of diaries and comment threads at sites like Kos and the Free Republic are devoted to such communal forecasting, which tend to result in sympathetic reactions from insiders, and dismissive and derisive reactions from outsiders. I offer this observation (which is simplified and potentially in err) about how people think and communicate in social settings under emotional stress neutrally, and not as a rarified criticism of slippery slope arguments.
For the moment we seem to be engaged here in contemplation a dystopian future; highlighting certain benchmarks that we expect to obtain and identifying people and processes that have and will fail along the path. While I acknowledge the possibility and I’ve catalogued some of the dots to look for along the way to an American style authoritarian regime, I’m still having some difficulty connecting them. It might help if someone could offer up some possible events that, if they were to occur in the near future, would serve as a counterfactual. Can anyone help a brother out?
Comment by IOZ —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:11 pm
OTIS B. DRIFTWOOD (entering, applauding): Bravo! I made it. How soon does the curtain go up?
GOTTLEIB: The curtain, Mr. Driftwood, will go up again next season.
MRS. CLAYPOOL: You’ve missed the entire opera!
DRIFTWOOD: Well, I only missed it by a few minutes.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
Back on topic –
Alberto Gonzalez to judges: President Bush is a dictator. Contradict him at your peril.
Comment by jlw —
September 29, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
Honestly, Anodyne, I think the slide to authoritarianism has been inevitable since the large protests over Bush v. Gore back in December 2000.
The protests that didn’t happen.
And indeed, the shape of authoritarianism in the U.S. will be mostly palpable in things we don’t see and events that don’t happen: trials of high-profile arrests in the “War on Terror,” strong denounciations of the President’s policy from leaders of the nominal opposition party, willingness on the part of corporate-owned media to persue stories critical of the Executive. There’s an awful lot of the absence of this stuff already, and future generations may place the start of American Authoritarianism (if that’s what transpires) at a much earlier date. The stuff that an opposition is made of seems to be gradually fading from the memory and vocabulary of the American public, much like the memories of Clementine were wiped from Joel’s mind with the Lacuna machine.
This probably isn’t what you are looking for, but I don’t see this as something that will be marked by clear signposts. It’s a degenerative process, like atrophy or arthritis. It’s a boiled frog. It’s a thousand cuts.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
September 29, 2006 @ 4:03 pm
Anodyne:
Far too much of doom and gloom forecasting is primarily motivated by a desire to be able to say “I told you so.” Teacher’s-pets liberals like me are particularly prone to this trope (c.f., most people’s dislike of Chomsky). Here’s my favorite chestnut (which is nevertheless “eerily prescient”™):
History will regard December 12, 2000 as a more calamitous date for the United States than September 11, 2006.
Comment by Bret —
September 29, 2006 @ 5:59 pm
American Authoritarianism (if it even exists) should be traced back to FDR and his “New Deal”. The two did far more damage to American Democracy than the current president, his suspect victory, and his current policies.
Comment by Joey —
September 29, 2006 @ 7:13 pm
Jim,
As an aside, E. Volokh’s post on the torture bill is a perfect example of your observation from a couple years back:
The showy moral hand-wringing (and God knows what other appendages) is in fine form today from the learned prof. Feh.
Comment by Avram —
September 29, 2006 @ 7:35 pm
What, Bret, not Lincoln?
Comment by Nell —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:31 pm
Jim, it would be good if you could update about Sen. Snowe. Thomas Nephew went through the same sequence.
Comments don’t seem to allow links right now, but it’s the Thursday roll call post at Newsrack.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 29, 2006 @ 11:13 pm
Nell: Done. We were watching Doctor Who until just now. Thanks for the reminder.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 29, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
Anodyne:
I think in some sense you may be misdiagnosing at least some of the depression. I’m not so much worried about future events as I am upset about past ones, though the two are tied together. Events like the one yesterday demonstrate that the country lacks a series of protections against tyrrany or dictatorship that I thought we had. It’s a bit like unexpectedly finding out that you have no health insurance, and that you may not have any opportunity to get some, when you know that there’s a high incidence of cancer in your family. You might not get cancer, you may get insurance, but the risk of illness is significant and the protection you thought you had is non-existent. And that’s scary.
Comment by Barry —
September 29, 2006 @ 11:28 pm
I swung over to Eugene’s post, and can confirm. From (very) occasional visits, he struck me as the sort of guy who’d pontificate on almost anything, because he took Econ 101, and therefore could identify the ‘correct’ position on everything. Sort of like an obnoxious econ professor, but with far less actual knowledge.
So, in the end, he’s just another right-winger with enough brains to not come out in favor of what the powers-that-be are gonna do anyway.
Comment by Robert the Red —
September 30, 2006 @ 6:31 am
We are at the formal beginning of the American Principate — where the President rules entirely as he wishes, with only token opposition in the legislature. That goal is the guiding light of Cheney and Bush, and we have now reached the state where the Congress has formally endorsed this. That is, we have abandoned the Republic. It has not come all at once, but it is over now. Perhaps one of the stupid catastrophes the Bush administration is setting us up for will wake the nation up, but perhaps not — spin can work pretty well these days, so that catastrophe becomes primarily another opportunity to consolidate power.
The American Republic: 1776-2006.
Comment by thoreau —
September 30, 2006 @ 7:21 am
My only hope for America is that we wind up with a Democrat in the White House and Republicans still running Congress. The Republicans have always been better at opposition than the Democrats. The Republicans will take one look at the Democrat in the White House, realize that they handed over the keys to the kingdom, and hopefully grab those keys back before the Democratic President realizes what he (she?) can do with those keys.
Likely? Probably not. But I don’t see any other scenario. A unified GOP government will not lay down its powers, and I don’t think a unified Dem government would either. A Dem Congress would spend its time trying to prove that they can be nice to the GOP President in order to show their “strength” on national security issues.
Sadly, even with a GOP Congress and Dem President, the odds are that instead of trying to confiscate the powers that they handed over to Bush, the GOP would instead investigate the Dem President for using those powers the “wrong” way. And then they might learn just how many wrong ways there are to use those powers.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
September 30, 2006 @ 10:10 am
Anodyne: The strongest, clearest possible sign that the US has pulled back from the lapse into tyranny would be President Bush’s submitting to a law restricting his ability to do something we know from prior public statements that he wants to do and regards as important. It doesn’t really matter for this purpose what the thing is; it could be something related to war-making, or domestic policy, or trade, or anything at all. What would matter is the president’s acknowledgement by his actions of limits on his power.
Tristero over at Digby’s blog makes what I find a persuasive case that the real turning point was six years ago. There’s something to that. Certainly, if Congress had not passed the military commissions bill, I cannot imagine Bush saying “oh, well, okay then” and stopping anything he really wanted to do as far as interrogation and all is concerned. I can’t point to any cases between the Supreme Court’s decision in 2000 and now that suggest a general inclination toward acknowledging any authority other than his own on Bush’s part. Bush denied the cover of that particular bill would have…done the same, insulted Congress as anti-American cowards, and gotten away with it, so nearly as I can tell.
(This is the part that continues to haunt me, and to sometimes wake me up in the night. In 2000, there were people warning that Bush and Cheney would pursue an anti-Constitutional agenda of warmongering, unlimited power. I dismissed them as shrill. I was a sap, a perpetrator of the Higher Broderism. And by the time I realized, I think it was too late. I am part of the problem, as are many of us here.)
Anyway, that would be the clear counterfactual: Bush submitting to laws he doesn’t like on matters of interest to him.