is a topic that connects 2 editorials in the New York Times.
The first is Paul Krugman's Wall Street Whitewash, from which I note in particular this paragraph:
Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that "in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
The 2nd is by Linda Greenhouse, long-time Supreme Court Reporter (and herself a winner of the Pulitzer), titled THe Revolution Next Time in which she discusses Judge Henry Hudson's decision on health care and demonstrates why she thinks it goes further than even William Rehnquist would have gone.
Bachus and Hudson are propagating a theological view - a wordview not subject to evidence. It is more than ideology, and their approach treats anyone who dare to disagree as blasphemers. They are willing to destroy the edifice of government in the name of their belief system.
Let's start with Krugman. I want to offer several more selections that speak to the issue I am addressing. He starts by acknowledging his own naivete in believing the financial crisis would serve as a teachable moment, reminding us that the banks and financial sector needed to be regulated. He then follows with these words:
How naïve we were. We should have realized that the modern Republican Party is utterly dedicated to the Reaganite slogan that government is always the problem, never the solution. And, therefore, we should have realized that party loyalists, confronted with facts that don’t fit the slogan, would adjust the facts.
He then goes to the collapsing commission on the crisis, in which the four Republican commissioners have acted theologically - there is no other way to describe it. Quoting Krugman again,
Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: "deregulation," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and, yes, "Wall Street."
When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.
Krugman does not mention the Commissioner, all appointed by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, by name, but a simple Google search returns the following list:
Bill Thomas (vice chairman) - Boehner (jointly chosen as vice chair by Boehner and McConnell)
Keith Hennessey (McConnell)
Douglas Holtz-Eakin (McConnell)
Peter J. Wallison (Boehner)
All four have lgng connections with Republican politics, Thomas having serving in Congress, Hennessey in the administration of GW Bush for all 8years, Holtz-Eakin as principal economic advisor to McCain's presidential campaign (after having served as director of the Congressional Budget Office while Republicans were in control), and Wallison as White House Council during the time the Tower Commission white-washed Iran-Contra.
In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble.
Krugman dismantles this thoroughly, reminding us the bubble was world-wide, and that Fannie and Freddie came to the party late, after it was well-underway, in a desperate attempt to maintain market-share.
The deliberate excluding of basic terms like deregulation demonstrates the theological approach of the commissioners, that they are unwilling to allow anything that might counter the narrative they wish to present, however unrooted in reality it might be.
Then there is Judge Henry Hudson, a man with a long Republican resume. Greenhouse is a careful writer, quite knowledgeable about the Court and the thinking of justices. She focuses on two cases cited by Hudson, Lopez and Morrison, both 5-4 decisions striking down Federal government authority under the Commerce clause, the first striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act, and the second the Violence Against Women Act.
The Rehnquist revolution to role back the power of the Federal government had begun, with eventually 11 federal statutes being overturned.
But, as Greenhouse notes, there was a limit even to how far Rehnquist was willing to apply his thinking. She thinks he would have hesitated to go where Hudson went, and support this argument she cites a case late in his tenure as Chief Justice, his opinion for the Court in a 6-3 decision on Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs on the question of whether Congress had the authority to make state governments give their employees the benefits of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Quoting Greenhouse,
To the surprise of almost everyone, the chief justice’s answer was yes. Michael Kinsley, writing on Slate, called the 6-to-3 opinion "amazingly radical" for its account of how society’s stereotyped expectations of women as caretakers "create a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination" that must be broken by enabling male as well as female employees to take time off to attend to family emergencies.
Perhaps Rehnquist was, as Greenhouse notes, influence by caring for his wife in her terminal illness, or sensitized by his daughter's role as a single mom. Here I can note that my one encounter with the Chief Justice, at Coolfont in West Virginia where my wife had taken me for my birthday, he was there with his daughter and her children.
Greenhouse thinks there may have been other reasons, and concludes her analysis of possibly why with these words:
To declare the Family and Medical Leave Act beyond Congressional authority would have been a provocative act with deep doctrinal implications for other equality-based claims, including racial equality, and it would thus have had political implications for the court as well. Chief Justice Rehnquist decided not to go there. He had, after all, made his point.
She notes she had thought of Hibbing when recently the Court considered the Adam Walsh Act, which
gave the federal prison system the power to keep "sexually dangerous prisoners" in continued civil confinement after the conclusion of their criminal sentences.
An appeals court had ruled the Federal government lacked such authority, but the Court voted 7-2 that the authority existed. Greenhouse notes that the Chief Justice voted for the Court opinion written by Breyer and signed by 5 justices (Alito and Kennedy offering concurrences) and reminds us that Roberts served as a clerk to Rehnquist. She notes
The Supreme Court reversed that decision on the basis of the Constitution’s "necessary and proper" clause, which grants Congress the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" all the other powers granted by the Constitution. Writing for the majority in United States v. Comstock, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the civil confinement provision was necessary and proper for carrying out the government’s authority to run a penal system.
Greenhouse further notes that critics of the health care law had at the time of the Comstock decision fully understood it as implying the constitutionality of health care reform.
So now let us consider theology. As a longtime student of religions, as one who has taught comparative religion, let me note the following: a religion may have a view of God and the teaching that flows from that view of God that is rigid or one that might allow some flexibility in light of new information. Those that are rigid clink to literal interpretation of sacred texts (if that sounds like Scalia with respect to the Constitution, well . . .) or a refusal to abandon the authoritative teaching of some previous master (can anyone say Ronald Reagan) even if that master was himself (and the master is always masculine) was more flexible than the application they make of his interpretation. It is to such approaches that I am applying "theological" as a pejorative term.
I use the term to mean a mindset that is fearful that allowing any expression contrary to the interpretation to which the presenter desperately clings will create a situation worse than anomie, rather one of total loss, of an impending cataclysm. Thus any other point of view must be crushed. Why? To allow it to be considered would cause the entire edifice of their thinking to collapse.
A commission examining the near collapse of the American financial system will use neither the word 'deregulation" nor the term "Wall Street." Could one be discussing the operation of the cosmos while excluding consideration of the idea of gravity? A judge considering a law either willfully or in ignorance misapplies a recent 7-2 Supreme Court decision. Is this the mindset that rejects science because it contradicts one's literal reading of the material from Genesis, a work which to the community that produced it - Judaism - has long been interpreted other than in a strict literal fashion?
Perhaps theology is the wrong wrong. Perhaps we should think of the creation of Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen, who asserts that things are as she says they are, merely because she says so.
Politics is the art of the possible. Our political system in theory involves different levels of compromise. But meaningful compromise is possible only with those who accept the principle of compromise. One thinking and arguing in the theological mindset is unwilling to compromise - horrors, one might be transgressing God's law! Insofar as the modern Republican party thinks and acts in a theological fashion - albeit God having little to do with their thinking - they distort our politics, make meaningful compromise impossible, and should be opposed at every turn.
Paul Krugman wrote about a financial inquiry commission. Linda Greenhouse wrote about a federal judge's opinion. In both cases they exposed the theological thinking and expression of the people they examined.
When I consider the two columns together, I can but shake my head and wonder whether it is time to weep for my country.
What say you?