Prior posts: Part One is here, and Part Two is here. (The latter, in particular, contains a roundup of blogosphere coverage, as well as national media coverage (hint: there ain’t hardly none) of the whole affair).
It has now been just over one week since Alaska’s At-Large Representative Don Young ambled into the House chamber, took the floor and proceeded to defile the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (just three days after the 198th anniversary of his birth) by falsely attributing to the Great Emancipator the following words:
Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.
More on the flip.
Rep. Young’s hit-and-run sliming of Lincoln and of the majority of Representatives who voted to express their opposition to the Bush/Cheney/McCain Surge (as well as the solid majority of Americans who hold the same view) has, astonishingly, largely escaped the notice of the national media – although in fairness, they’ve had their hands full just keeping us informed on Britney’s latest head-shaving episode and the drama surrounding the ultimate resting place of Anna Nicole Smith’s mouldering corpse.
And to be fair, after it was pointed out to him that Abraham Lincoln never uttered such words, and that the purported "Lincoln Quote" was instead invented out of whole cloth by the Washington Times, Rep. Young, stand up guy that he is, did send his press secretary out to assure us that now that he knows those aren’t Lincoln’s words, he’ll stop falsely attributing the words to Lincoln – but that he "continues to totally agree with the message of the statement." Lest we think that his "total agreement with the message" that Congressional "saboteurs . . . should be arrested, exiled or hanged" means that he believes that Democrat opponents of the war "should be arrested, exiled or hanged," his press secretary assured the American people that Young was "not advocating the hanging of Democrats." Well, at least I'm glad we cleared that all up...)
A diarist yesterday, Redstar, called our attention to the reaction of Liberals in the Canadian Parliament in "This is What a Real Opposition Looks Like,", and quotes from the CBC’s coverage thus:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was shouted down with cries of "shame, shame" during question period Wednesday after he raised a media report that said a Liberal MP is the son-in-law of a man police allegedly interviewed in connection with the Air India bombing case.
One suspects that they wouldn’t have taken too kindly to Prime Minister Harper (or any other Conservative MP) taking the floor to declare that Liberal MPs who oppose Harper’s (or the Queen’s) foreign policy views should be hanged, either.
But from our ever so meek and mild Democratic Leadership, we’ve heard nothing regarding Young’s incendiary, anti-American, eliminationist rant on the House floor.
It's characteristic of the House of Representatives that (unlike the Senate, where even a single Senator wields enormous power) not much gets done without the blessing of the Speaker and/or the Rules Committee. In the case of censure, however (the origins of which lie in Article I, Section 5, clause 2 of the United States Constitution, providing that "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member") the rules and precedents of House procedure render it potentially a "Question of the Privileges of the House," and as such a "privileged" matter. As a result, a lone Democratic Member of Congress could at least force a debate (and possibly a vote), even if Speaker Pelosi just wants to forget the whole mess and move on in the spirit of bipartisanship, since after all we’re all about changing the tone in Washington and keeping those angry, angry, dirty hippie bloggers from harshing our mellow.
I know some of you contacted your Member of Congress shortly after Rep. Young’s reprehensible remarks were uttered on the floor -- please use the comments below to let us know if you’ve gotten any response back (even if it’s just a very generic form letter thanking you for your interest in the very difficult questions surrounding Iraq).
And if you haven’t done so already, please contact your Representative to suggest that he or she support a privileged motion to censure Rep. Young for his "unparliamentary" remarks.
Finally (and frustration with the passivity complete absence of the Democratic Leadership on this issue notwithstanding): lest anyone thinks that it's now much too late to do anything about this, because there have now been seven intervening 24-hour news cycles (so that any attempt to focus public attention on this will be ridiculed by the Washington press corps as ‘old news’ that ‘everybody knows about’ but that everybody except the uncivil dirty hippies of the left-blogosphere have ‘all moved on’ from), I’d counter by reminding you that the House left town on recess shortly after Friday’s vote on the non-binding resolution, so there’s nothing that could have been done in any case. It would be thoroughly reasonable and responsible for the House to take this up immediately upon their return to DC next Tuesday, and we can and must continue to exert pressure on Democratic Members of Congress to support a resolution of censure.