The Republican Party has not made much progress in actual size since 1970, after recovering from the Nixon era corruption and oil crunch dip - partially because Carter did not manage the economy well - the Republican Party has held steady at between 29% and 33% identification. The difference is that the Democratic Party has gone from 49% identification, down to 37%. In short, it isn't that the Republicans are more numerous, it is that they are louder, and willing to break the law to turn 33% support into 100% power. They use force and fraud to fool enough of the people, enough of the time. Bush and the Republicans use this to preside over a government that is vast, loose and out of control.
Key to this is Jack Abramoff, and spygate has accelerated the falling apart of the other side of the Republican machine, the ability to buy power. Rumors are that he is not only near a deal, but is going to implicate the "wive's club".
[You may have missed my diary on the families of the fallen since it was posted last night.]
Abramoff's reach extends outward - he had Bob Ney insert negative comments about competitors into the Congressional Record, he finance indian lobbies that gave substantial sums to Republicans. He has given 127,000 personally in the last 4 years to Republicans, and
zero to Democrats. [Hat tip to
Roy Temple.
Abramoff's reach taints candidates at the source. It is part of what gives the Republicans a series of lock step DeLay clones to work with. As Bullmoose put it the phants have sold out to the company store.
Originally Abramoff was only charged with actions in connection with the purchase of casino boats in Miami, and not with political actions. Originally, he was willing to take his chances with a jury, or at least wait for the feds to get desperate. However, now it is different. He is personally out of money, he is also seeing the political investigation move forward, in part because of the investigations into coingate and DeLay's TRMPAC.
The other reason that Abramoff is feeling the heat is that other associates are starting to cut deals. It's the problem with all big conspiracies: too many people, too many payoffs, too many interested parties. It is why criminal organizations have "codes of silence", which means that you won't talk, one way or another.
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So why is this important? Is it different from the scandals of the old Democratic house?
Yes. First because the sums of money involved are so much larger. No one, not even Gingrich, could point out how the house scandals of Wright and Rostie and the House Bank did anything more than help out individual members. While a parliament, legislature or congress has yet to sit where there was no corruption what so ever, when pressed, even Republicans are pressed to find one example of money flowing to the wrong contractors. Which war did Jim Wright lead us into on false pretenses? My memory fails me.
Second because this gets at the heart of the Republican scheme to control power Rove's Republic. In this system, the government is run by a lockstep parliamentary majority, and the monetary system is rigged to keep that very narrow parliamentary majority in perpetual power.
This is the flip side of our "war without end" - which is used to make it so that that parliamentary majority has the power to control vast sums of money needed to keep support. Without hundreds of billions of dollars of Republipork in defense and homeland security, there is no Republican Majority. Spygate hits at the nexus betweeen war powers and politics - as does Plamegate - it is the point where war powers are used to keep the parliamentary system in power.
Spygate is important on its face, because it is a violation of our sense of liberties, and the agreement in the 1970's that a presidency cannot be above and beyond the law. The Church commission looked into intelligence abuses, and found numerous cases of the misuse of government power to spy on domestic dissidents. The Church commission looked into the vast array of "war powers" that the government had, and noted that we were in an almost perpetual state of war in one form or another.
The Republicans, while claiming to want smaller government, really only wanted the Cold War back, only this time with the ability to control that Cold War government. It's an old business trick, better than finding a need and filling it, is finding something people think they need and filling it, because a placebo always works. They want to claim that the old rules allowed for the kinds of abuse of power they have engaged in. For example, falsely claiming that Carter and Clinton authorized warrantless searches. They didn't. Basically the Republicans want the good old days of J Edgar Hoover spying on subversives, when the FBI was a fiefdom of the ultra-conservatives used to bribe, blackmail and bully people who wanted to stand up for their civil rights. Complete with crypto-racist swarthy enemies, and crypto-fascist rhetoric about far left terrorists.
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But, you know me, I am always trying to explain the big picture. Why is it that the Republicans need to go through all of this? Reagan broke the law, but he didn't need this kind of political corruption to hold on to power. George Bush Sr. was up to his waist in Iran-Contra - but that wasn't to benefit Republican contributors in Miami, but to help out proxies that Congress would not fund. The web of corruption only comes in with Gingrich, and with the new radical Republicanism of his followers.
The reason is simple: Gingrich wanted to have a lock step Republican majority with the intent, originally, of downsizing the government. However, the two great attempts to do this were abject failures, politically and economically. The first was the "government shut down" of 1995. The attempt to force their budget priorities on America lead to Americans realizing that government does, indeed, make their lives better. It created an understanding of "government the service organization" in the Democratic Party, and in the country.
The second massive failure was "Freedom to Farm". Remember that? How if we just pulled the plug on farm subsidies and let farmers farm, they would do so much better? Instead, falling commodity prices led big agri-business to gobble up thousands of family farms. Even in Nebraska they called it "Freedom to Fail".
In short, when tested, the theory that the upstanding hard working red states would do great without Washington on their backs - failed all the way round. And at this moment, though few people understood it at the time, there was the death of the idea of libertarian-conservatism as the future of America. Gingrich himself was gone soon there afterwards, replaced by more pragmatic men, who had only one ideology: the Republican Party was the bulwark against evil liberal intellectuals and their political allies in the unions, the cities, and among African Americans. From misguided true believers, to corrupt apparatchniks, the Republican party traced out the same arc that many other ideologically charged movements did. It took the Democrats some 70 years, the Republicans managed it in less that 10.
With the death of libertarian theory - and supply side economics, and monetarism - the Republicans were left without a theory of how the economy worked. This is crucial. Parties stay in power by handing out favors, but they get the ability to hand those favors out by creating prosperity. The Republican Party, in three bouts of power, has consistently failed to find a source of prosperity to generate the income they need to stay in power. Hence massive trade and budget deficits. They can't tax the privileged, and they have to keep building aircraft carriers to keep people employed.
Instead the Republicans decided to run a corrupt mirror of the very system they overthrew. They went from people who wanted to repeal the New Deal, to people who wanted to steal it. Key to this was replacing all of the components of the liberal system of keeping the economy going, with reactionary counterparts. Make it so that the next President, of either party, would have to stay, feet stuck in Iraq, GWOT and budget deficits - so that they would leave behind a permanent legacy. It was Clinton's failure: not that he couldn't get things turned around, but that he could not prevent the Republicans from simply grabbing the wheel.
The Republicans, in otherwords, wanted to keep the broad war powers that the old liberal system had, but dispense with certain key parts. One was the system by which inflation is taxed to pay for government. That's how government can increase the public good - tax places where people are hurriedly chasing smaller and smaller returns, and spread that money through the economy. The other was consensus.
The old constitution rested on the idea that there was a consensus for action - Depression, World War, Cold War. This gave the government broad powers to act, powers rooted in Civil War and post-Civil War amendments and decisions. These decisions stated, in effect, that in a crisis, the United States had the power to do what needed to be done to preserve the Union. Survival of the nation trumped any individual protection. According to Progressive Republican Charles Evans Hughes, the nation, during the first world war "put the constitution on a shelf and forgot about it until after the war."
This language of consensus - arguing from the great overwhelming danger, to the specific policy that meets that danger - is still being used by Bush when he justifies spygate by defense against terrorism. However, the reality of it is different. If there were such an overwhelming consensus, people like Jack Abramoff would not need to exist. If the massive expenditures that Bush has engaged in were necessary, he wouldn't be necessary - the budget would be in balance, jobs would be being created quickly rather than at a just worse than average pace for a boom in the Keynesian era, and the public wouldn't be ready to throw all the bums out of both parties.
Instead, if the Federalist Republic was constitution as contract, and the Union was constitution as covenant, and the Liberal Democracy was constitution as consensus - the new political era we live in is constitution as corruption. People selling their liberty for temporary prosperity and illusory security. The security threats are used as excuses to allocate huge sums of money, and to which feed the corruption - and the security threats are used to clamp down on any part of the system that might rattle loose.
This is why we are at a key moment. If the Repbulican revolution is not repudiated, then there will, inevitably, be a Democratic Party which is no more than a slightly less corrupt version. If the American people say, by action or inaction, that the only penalty for looting the treasury, defrauding the country and violating the bill of rights is - losing an election and going home to be very, very rich - then there is no choice but to have two corrupt parties. Where there is no moral hazard, there are no morals.
What this means is both hopeful and terrible. On one hand, the great "kill the government" movement has died, there is no one of any power who really wants to get rid of "big government". The question is whether we are going to have good government, or a government which is "vast, loose, and out of control".
[People ask me what I do when not writing Kos diaries. The answer is that I blog, I do consulting, and I compose classical music.]