Some Light Reading For A Saturday Night

You can read the entire 1,990-page House health reform bill, H.R. 3962, here. I've been skimming through it using the word finder tool. This will be a good way to pass time during commercials and halftime of the Gator game.

C-SPAN is Rockin' Right Now!

If you're near a TV right now, take a look at C-SPAN. The House is moving towards voting on the health care reform bill later today. But first they have to clear several parliamentary formalities. Right now, I'm watching the Republican members interrupt everything they possibly can with objections and "parliamentary inquiries." And the Chair, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan), has to answer every one of their BS objections. So you end up having a Democratic Congresswoman, who has the floor, trying to read her one or two-sentence statement of support for the bill, while a Republican Congressman from Georgia yells, "I object! I object! I object! I object!"

The Chair has to stop and basically tell the Congressman to shut up, though of course it's wrapped in parliamentary language. And the process grinds on.

I just think it's especially illustrative of what Republicans stand for to see them doing whatever they can to stop, or at least delay, this bill. The American people are about to expand their access to medical coverage and rein in insurance companies. Republicans object indeed!

Update: Here are some videos of what I was talking about.

"Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards"

Billy Bragg says,

"If you've got a website, I wanna be on it."

You got it, Billy.

A Year Ago This Week

Ah, the first Tuesday of November. Where were you at this time last year? I just dug up the story, posted below, of my election-night celebrating in downtown DC. An edited version of this actually got printed in my hometown newspaper, in a county where 60% of the votes went to McCain/Palin... Oh snap!

:::

Last night Katie and I literally danced in front of the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, with thousands of other people. It was about 2 am. There were drums. Flags. Chants. High fives with strangers. If George was home, he heard us. If he looked out a window, in any direction, he saw us.

We sang to the president:
"Na na na na, na na na na, hey-ey-ey, goodbye!"
And,
"Hit the road jack, and don't you come back no more..."

All over northwest DC, from the Capitol to the White House, even deep into residential areas, drivers layed on their horns. People on the sidewalks jumped up and down. An unceasing ringing of horns and shouts, a constant rhythm of chanting and drums echoed down the streets. And it went on and on. Intersections near the White House were blocked. People were standing on their cars, hanging out windows, waving flags. The police were smiling.

When we finally started heading home, we thought we had left the celebration area, only to drive upon a spontaneous parade of several hundred people marching down 16th Street. Again, drums pounding away. Jubilation. The marchers took up all the southbound lanes, heading toward the White House to join the thousands already there. They stopped for a while to dance in the tunnel under Massachusetts Avenue, where the drums were thunderous.

The size, scope, and duration of the celebration was impressive. Fox News described it all as a couple hundred kids from George Washington University who had "texted, so to speak," their friends from Georgetown. No, it was EVERYONE from at least Capitol Hill to Dupont Circle. We were there around 2 am. The party had been kickin' for a while and showed no sign of slowing when we left.

Did George Bush look out his window? Did he see the entire city dancing, euphoric at the thought of him leaving office, excited to have a president we can be proud of?

George Bush and Karl Rove tried to create a "permanent Republican majority," an alliance between big business and social reactionaries that rested on a foundation of greed and fear. Instead they learned that you can push the people around for a long time, you can knock them down, rob them, deceive them, turn them against one another. You can push people around, but eventually...

PEOPLE. PUSH. BACK.

As America grows more democratic, it grows more Democratic.

There's an excellent post over at OpenLeft.com today that looks at how the 2008 election might have turned out in several different alternate histories. Specifically, they slice up the real 2008 results to see how much of the vote Obama would have gotten if you rolled back each layer of voting rights expansion over the last 200 years.

The chart below shows four things:

1) Six sequential "eras" of American voting rights,

2) Which group(s) of people could generally vote in each era,

3) What proportion of the 2008 electorate was made up of that group,

4) How much of that group's votes went to Obama.

Colonial Era: Adult white protestant landowning males

12% of the 2008 electorate. 31% voted for Obama (if you use an income cutoff of $50,000 as a substitute for "landowning").

Jeffersonian Era: Adult white landowning males

21% of the 2008 electorate. 40% voted for Obama.

Jacksonian Era: Adult white males

32% of the 2008 electorate. 41% voted for Obama.

Women's Suffrage Era: Adult whites

69% of the 2008 electorate. 43% voted for Obama.

Civil Rights Era: Adults

95% of the 2008 electorate. 52% voted for Obama.

Post-1971 Era: Even more adults (voting age lowered)

100% of the 2008 electorate. 53% voted for Obama.

It makes intuitive sense that Obama only "wins" when you add in the Civil Rights Era expansion of voting rights. But does it strike anyone else as profound that his numbers go up with each expansion of suffrage? The chart shows that the more democratic America gets, the more Democratic America gets. (Note clever use of lower-case d vs. capital D!) In the long run, given that the parties shift over time, it's more accurate to say that as the country grows more democratic, it grows more progressive.

An interesting follow-up to Open Left's article would be to look at specific progressive legislative victories that were accomplished in each era as a result of a previous expansion of suffrage. For instance, would the victories of the late 1800s and early 1900s--like the direct election of Senators and the creation of a progressive income tax--have been possible without the earlier, Jacksonian expansion of voting rights to include non-landowning white males? Would FDR's New Deal programs of the '30s and '40s have been possible without winning women's suffrage in the '20s? It's also worth noting that each expansion of suffrage listed above probably would not have been possible without the one that came before it. It's a kind of progressive/democratic momentum at work. It's slow but powerful.

Next, let's not make the mistake of thinking that history ended yesterday. The progression of democracy shown in the chart above was the product of the strikes, marches, canvassing, community organizing, pamphleteering, soap-boxing, and campaigning by people who were variously called progressives, radicals, liberals, democrats, and populists. At every single step they were opposed by people who were called conservatives. (This, as much as anything else, demonstrates what conservatives throughout history have been trying to "conserve": undue political power and the wealth that goes with it.)

Should we think that this 200-year tug-of-war between ("small d") democrats and conservatives magically ended right before our current era? Of course not. The conservative movement still has a stake in making America less democratic by restricting our voting rights. Let's look at some specifics. (The list below ain't comprehensive.)

Voter registration - Virtually across the board, Republicans seek to make voter registration as hard as possible. As you can imagine, there are millions of little ways to go about this. Meanwhile, Democrats generally want voter registration to be as easy as possible. Some of the recent progressive victories have been the motor voter laws from the '90s and the number of states that allow people to register the same day as the election.

The act of voting - Republicans also want to make the act of voting and the day of the election as inconvenient and time-consuming as possible. If it were up to them, you'd have to show seven forms of identification at your precinct. They say they're just concerned about preventing fraud. Really they know that studies show that ID requirements are more of a burden for poor and minority voters than for richer and whiter voters. There are also a whole number of lies that Republicans drag out every two years at election time. In recent elections, we've heard of advertisements in black neighborhoods that gave the wrong date for voting. We've heard of announcements going out that voters may be arrested at the polls if they have outstanding traffic tickets or child support payments. In each Democratic campaign I've been involved with, most of the "ground game" in the late stages is spent telling people that it's actually much easier to vote than they've been led to believe.

Disenfranchising criminals - Republicans are also big fans of disenfranchising felons. (I've never understood how we ever allowed this; it just seems like our most fundamental right.) So they make a felony conviction take away someone's voting rights, then they make up what qualifies as a felony. Combine this with other structural inequalities and it adds up to 5.3 million Americans and 13% of black men who are unable to vote. That is absolute gold for Republicans. But Democrats and liberals are always working at ways to restore voting rights for felons and even to register voters in prison.

Disenfranchising our nation's capital - More than half a million residents of Washington D.C. still have no vote in the House of Representatives or in the Senate, despite the fact that we pay federal taxes, fight and die in wars, and are Americans. There is currently legislation moving through Congress that would give DC a vote in the House. I'll let you guess which party is for it and which one is against it.

Importing a voteless underclass - Conservative economics--always seeking a more slave-like workforce--brings undocumented workers across our southern boarder. If disenfranchising felons is gold for Republicans, then importing an entire population of workers who have no rights must be platinum. Think of it: cheap labor, the ability to break union organizing drives with the threat of immigrations enforcement, and the knowledge that the workers cannot vote. But true to its historical legacy, the American Left is working to make these workers into citizens, voters, and union members. And the right wing really, really hates that.

This post ended up being longer than I intended. But I think it's plain to see that the 200-year American tug-of-war between democracy and conservatism continues.

How Obama's Doing: A Brief Progress Report

I wonder if the Left just inherently more pessimistic about our political fortunes than is the Right, at least when it comes to partisan and electoral prospects. It sure seemed like there was a lot of gloating from Republicans in Bush's early years. But right now, in the circles I travel, there is a lot of nail biting over the future of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress.

I think, all in all, Obama is doing quite well. Consider where we are with the health care debate. Obama decided to jump into this fight in the first year of his first term. And unlike the Clinton Administration in the '90's, Obama decided to let Congress take the lead in crafting the legislation. So for months and months we've followed the ups and downs of every committee debate and ever Senator's proclamation of support or opposition. We watched, gape-mouthed, as conservatives took over summertime town hall meetings and shouted down their representatives and blocked civic discussion. It worked so well that the energy industry talked about emulating the tactic to block climate change legislation. For some of us, in those dog days of summer, it felt like maybe the wheels were already coming off Obama's wagon.

But once again, it turned out that the hits Obama was taking were part of a rope-a-dope strategy. The screamers ran out of breath, dropped their stupid signs ("Keep government hands off my Medicare!"), and went home. And what do you know, a solid majority of the public still supports creating a public insurance option to compete with for-profit plans. In fact, support for the public option is up 5 points since August. And Obama has an approval rating around 56% (which of course is higher than the proportion of votes he got in November).

Oh, and we're about to pass a landmark health reform bill with some version of a public option.

Let me stress this: Congress will pass major health care reform legislation in the next couple of months. President Obama will sign it into law. And this will be the most sweeping health care reform in a generation--since the creation of Medicare. We won't get everything we want--the public option may be watered down with one of the several compromises on the table--but it will still be a significant achievement. And this will all be accomplished in President Obama's first year in office.

Then, after passing sweeping health care reform--which, remember, President Clinton failed to do--President Obama will point and say, "See, this is 'change you can believe in.' This is why we came to Washington. To do big stuff." And that seems to me like a damn good start on his re-election campaign.

If you remember, at the beginning of all this, Republicans were talking about turning health care into Obama's Waterloo. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint (R) said darkly:

"If we're able to stop him on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

That now looks like the exact opposite of what's actually going to happen. Not bad for a rookie president.

BTM Is Now Searchable!

You can now search past Better Than Machines posts with the Google search bar over on the right. I just noticed that Blogger offers this as a formatting option. Not sure how long it's been available, but it's about time, since Blogger is owned by Google.

Have you ever stopped to consider the vast reach of Google's tentacles? On any given day, I search the Internet using Google Inc.'s search engine; I email using Google Inc.'s email service; I write and disseminate radical political articles using Google Inc.'s blog product; I check the weather using my personalized Google Inc. homepage. Right now, I'm even playing a game of Google chess with a friend.

I don't think this is necessarily worth raising a stink over. (In other words... Dear Google Gods, Please don't smash my blog.) I'm not aware of any Googleopoly horror stories--probably just because I haven't looked. But Google is a corporation. It's not your friend, even if you've heard of their magical campus where all the workers are enlightened hipsters. Eventually--if it's not already--Google is going to be a problem.

In the meantime, you can now use another one of their products to search for your favorite BTM posts! Woohoo! (I like this oldie.)