American Politics Journal

Blind, Stinking Panic
How the Shays-Meehan bill shows that Republicans know America would never support them in honest elections
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 14, 2001 (APJP) -- If you are interested enough in politics to be reading this, it will come as no surprise to you that the House bombed on the Shays-Meehan campaign reform bill before it even had a chance to hit the floor.

Shays-Meehan was the House version of the Senate's McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation, a sweeping bill that passed the Senate by a large margin last spring.

What happened was that the Repuglies wanted a vote on another bill first, "Ney-Wynn", a last-minute submission. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Tom DeLay) wanted a vote on this without discussion, and refused to permit the Democrats to have a few hours to even see what the measure contained.

If that sounds like banana-republic-style measures to you, reflect on the fact that this is the party that ordered Clinton's lawyers to try and defend their client in four hours -- before the formal charges were even filed -- and who stole a Presidential election blatantly and baldly. Of course they don't want to discuss Shays-Meehan! Better to put up an unexamined surrogate bill and ram it through without discussion. That's the Republican way, folks.

Aside from Republican paid shills, I wonder how many people are left who believe that Republicans have any interest in keeping America as a free and open democracy, where government is responsible to the people and is there to safeguard their interests. There are a lot of ignorant people out there who have no idea what campaign finance is about, don't know who Dennis Hastert is, and don't see why it's so important that stuff like this be discussed in open debate before Congress votes on it.

Upon such lazy and stupid custard-heads does the GOP maintain what is left of their base.

On the Internet and radio, the bluster prior to the vote was as blatantly and viciously anti-democracy as I've ever seen. We were assured by various libertarian types that campaign finance was meaningless, and that all that would happen would be that the interests presently buying our politicians would control elections through third party "advocacy" ads, think-tanks and phony religious movements.

Like they aren't doing that already.

We were warned that if we passed this bill which so "unconstitutionally" stopped wealthy individuals and corporations from bribing public officials and forced them to identify themselves as the source of the funding for their paid speech on the public airwaves, they would simply circumvent the laws in the ways described above, and the only thing we could do is "lay back and enjoy it."

We were warned that we would be "worse off than we are now."

Of course, there is the problem that if the assertion were true, they wouldn't have worked so hard to stop Shays-Meehan from reaching the House floor.

In addition to the up-or-down vote on the Ney-Wynn measure, the Republicans wanted to be able to add as many amendments to Shays-Meehan as seemed necessary. This means that the bill would have stuff hanging off it like carrion off some sort of demented Christmas tree, including measures to ban abortion, or compel teachers to have guns in class, or the assertion that Darwin was a Commie out to destroy America, or any number of idiotic, crack-brained notions devised by idiotic, crack-brained Congressional representatives in the hope of looking good for some of their more idiotic and crack-brained constituents.

The vote against allowing this was 228-203, with 19 of the more honest and courageous Republicans joining Democrats who unanimously opposed Hastert's cowardly shufflings.

That leaves about 20 Republicans who voted for the campaign finance reform measure two years ago -- essentially the same measure as the one that unexpectedly passed in the Senate this past spring -- and who found themselves in the humiliating position of seeing their pretense that they wanted CFR shown for the empty and self-serving lie that it was. Hopefully, the Democrats will spend copious amounts in each district (they still can, now) to acquaint the voters there with the sudden change of heart on the part of their elected representatives.

This all comes at a time when polls show the approval of Republican leadership in Congress to be at the lowest level since the impeachment fiasco. It comes at a time when most Americans are not only asking if George W. Putsch is fit to do the job, but questioning if he had any right to be in the White House in the first place. It comes at a time when the economy is eroding, a natural phenomenon that is exacerbated by the reckless tax schemes of Mr. Putsch, with the result being that our large and healthy surplus -- the one we were hoping would reduce the $300 billion PER YEAR we spend on interest on the national debt -- has vanished. If we cut that in half, we would have saved $500 PER PERSON - EACH AND EVERY YEAR.

Enjoy your one-time $300 tax rebate. I'm sure it will comfort you as you pay that extra thousand or so each year, financing the debt which is mostly held by Putsch's rich buddies on the Street.

Democrats need to stop being polite about what the Republicans are up to. Republicans are thieves. They are stealing our rights and freedoms and replacing them with their own privilege. Most of them are no more religious than was Madalyn Murray O'Hair -- they simply know that religion in some makes a good nose ring by which such folks can be towed.

You have fat cats telling you that freedom of speech means they have the right to bribe elected officials, and that fourth amendment guarantees to privacy mean that they don't have to say where the money is coming from. Further, they say that if we pass laws stopping them from doing this, they'll just use the money in other ways and screw us even HARDER.

That's known as extortion.

It's racketeering.

Republicans are liars and thieves, intent on using their money to gain unassailable privilege and shackling America in a caste system.

It's time to stop being polite to people like that.