A Basic Right Filibustered

Once again, a minority of Senate Republicans led by Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell blocked the ability of a bipartisan majority to move a piece a legislation, this time a bill that would allow the District’s representative in the House to have a full vote on the House floor. McConnell led a filibuster of the legislation, and a cloture vote on Tuesday to end the filibuster fell three votes short of the needed 60.

It is obstruction at its most contemptible. Never mind the protestations by McConnell and the 40 other Republicans (and one member who calls himself a Democrat, Montana’s Max Baucus) about what McConnell calls the Senate’s “duty to defend the Constitution.” This was, in fact, another episode in the temper tantrum being thrown at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue by people who still do not accept the results of the 2006 election. President Bush had vowed to veto the legislation, but thanks to McConnell, he won’t have the opportunity.

Among the senators who voted to block the bill were Republicans Thad Cochran of Mississippi, John McCain of Arizona and Gordon Smith of Oregon, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR200709... [1] “>who were reportedly prepared to break the filibuster

but caved in to pressure from McConnell and other Senate leaders.

Keep in mind that this is the same Mitch McConnell who complained, when the Democrats were in the minority, about Democrats obstructing the will of the majority – even though Democrats were downright parsimonious in forcing cloture votes when compared to the Republicans. In the last two years of Republican control, there were 54 cloture votes, or attempts to break a filibuster, in the Senate. In the first nine months of Democratic control of the Senate, there have been 43, nearly all either led by or encouraged by McConnell.

It is just one of the things that makes McConnell’s sanctimonious Constitution-hugging so sickening, his taking the principle of majority rule with minority rights and turning it on its head, insisting that his band of angry right-wingers be the sole deciders of what does and does not move through Congress.

The truth is that in this case the Constitution-waving did as much to cover the true motives of Senate conservatives as Britney Spears’ outfit at the MTV Awards did to cover her newly full figure. How could the party of Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretapping, habeas corpus suspension, minority voter suppression and countless other circumventions of basic rights and the proper roles of the three branches of government, be credible as a guardian of the Constitution?

The two things that have historically stood in the in the way of the District getting full voting representation in the House are that the District is too Democratic and too black. The first reason is all but openly acknowledged by the fact that the voting rights bill never got serious traction until the District could be paired with Republican-dominated Utah, which claimed it was owed an additional House member after the 2000 Census.

The race issue is vehemently denied, of course, but lies not far under the surface. The city is still lampooned for allowing former mayor Marion Barry to have a second political life after being caught in a drug sting almost 20 years ago — he’s now a ward council member — and derided as a dysfunctional collection of crime-ridden streets and broken schools, a kind of New Orleans without the French Quarter or Hurricane Katrina. Never mind that the caricature is more wildly out of step with reality than ever, and even if it was fully accurate would not justify the disenfranchisement of a half-million American citizens.

As for the constitutional claim that the Constitution considers the District a federal enclave that explicitly is not to be treated as a state for congressional apportionment purposes, there is a competing argument that Article I, Section 5, which says that each chamber of the House has the right to set its own rules and the qualifications of its members, gives Congress sufficient authority to grant a full vote to the House. McConnell warned there would be a “constitutional tangle” if the bill were signed into law. But rather than have a meaningful Senate debate and a vote on the merits of the bill, and letting the tangle hit the courts if it must, he worked to keep that debate from happening, and thus kept the courts from weighing in.

Better instead for McConnell to rhapsodize [2] about the “hot September afternoon in 1787” when “55 men put away their quills after four months of hard work in the Pennsylvania statehouse” to craft “the wise and durable document” — a document that, among other things, considered the African slaves bought and sold on the docks of Georgetown at the time, blocks from where the White House stands today, worth counting as only three-fifths of a human being. That alone should remind us that not all that the Founding Fathers intended deserves our respect. Still, the Founders would be appalled that the flawed democracy they hatched is being further mangled by a band of conservative obstructionists who, in the tradition of 1960s Southern segregationists, have no respect for the majority of Americans and won’t allow a group of American citizens the basic right of a vote in Congress.