I'm very active in my local Democratic party and get a lot of internal emails with invitations to meetings. Last month, one such email led me to a meeting at which I met proud "blue dog coalition" member Tim Holden, who, due to recent redistricting, is very likely to be my next U.S. Congressman. He's represented his district for many years, despite the fact that according to him party registration in his district is 60/40 with a greater number of Republicans than Democrats. It was for this reason that I still had a generally positive outlook on his voting record (he voted for health care reform but also in favor of the anti-choice Stupack Amendment; he voted for Wall Street reform but he also voted for the Republicans' balanced-budget constitutional amendment; etc.). Not ideal, but certainly not Republican either.
I will probably be voting against Congressman Holden in the primary in favor of a more progressive candidate. That candidate will probably lose because Holden already has name recognition and the backing of the House Democratic machine ($$$), and I'll probably be left voting for Holden over whoever the Republican is. The new district will be very Democratic, so I think he's extremely likely to be my next Congressman. I think he's a nice guy, but obviously as a progressive I'm not crazy about how he wears his moderateness/conservatism on his sleeve (as he no doubt has had to do for good reason for a long time in his conservative district).
Last week I got another email about another meeting with Congressman Tim Holden, now that it was all but certain that redistricting will lead to him representing the area where I live. This meeting was larger than the last one, with Pennsylvania House Democrat Mike Carroll also in attendance. But something else with far graver implications than gerrymandering had also happened in the meantime: the enactment of the NDAA.
I did a quick search online that verified my suspicion: Tim Holden had voted in favor of it, indefinite detentions without trial and all. Can you guess what I asked him about this time around?
Basically all of the questions he got other than mine were logistical in nature and dealt with the upcoming election campaign. Then, when Mike Carroll pointed out that we might not like each and every vote Holden had cast, I decided to speak up.
I explained briefly for those who may not have known that the NDAA gives POTUS the power to declare a U.S. citizen inside the U.S. to be an enemy combatant and detain them in jail indefinitely without trial. Then I prefaced my question to the Congressman this way: assuming that because he voted for it he doesn't believe it to be unconstitutional, how does that provision of the bill not violate the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to a speedy and public trial and to know what you're being accused of and to face your accuser?
Okay, maybe not the least confusing way I could have asked the question. He started to answer and stopped a couple times, and so I asked him if he could just give us a direct "yes" or "no" as to whether he felt if that were to happen to a U.S. citizen as the bill he voted for allows if that would be unconstitutional. He began to hedge somewhat and said he voted for it because it was considered must-pass, but he was against the provision I was asking about. I kept at it, asking if he's against it if he was willing to go as far as saying it's unconstitutional, but he more or less just repeated his stance that he was against that provision but the bill as a whole had to be passed.
Another part of his defense was that House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer was whipping in favor of the bill. I told him with a smirk that sometimes I agree with Hoyer and sometimes I don't. He also tried to insinuate that it couldn't be that bad because it was passed with a sizable majority, to which I responded that House Democrats specifically were split almost exactly in half on it. But at that point I could see I had gotten about as much out of him as I was going to, so I thanked him for his answer and the meeting continued.
After the meeting I went up to him to shake his hand and thank him for coming out and for answering my question. It was then that he pulled the old sausage-making argument. I told him that I was more sympathetic to that argument than a lot of people (which I think is true), but that I didn't feel it worked as a defense for something as extremely bad as the NDAA.
I told him I was a staunch progressive, but if a single-payer health care bill came up that allowed the government to take your first-born child, I would still vote against it, because the trade-off simply isn't worth it.
I told him I thought if the President vetoed it and had multiple press conferences about why (similar to what he did with the payroll tax cut extension), explaining to the American people how it was unconstitutional, he could have gotten the more Orwellian provisions taken out of the bill.
He agreed with me at first that Obama should have vetoed the bill, but didn't really have an answer other than to repeat the Hoyer-defense when I asked if he felt that way wouldn't it have made more sense to vote against the bill. Then he said Obama really couldn't have vetoed it because Congress was gone and not available to fix it.
He seemed sincere in his reasoning, but honestly, if he really saw that as a valid reason to vote in favor of the bill I find that more worrisome than if he was just making excuses and had ulterior motives. It's disturbing that the culture of those in power in Washington, D.C. could be such that an excuse like "if it didn't pass they would have said he doesn't support the troops" (Mike Carroll's suggestion, presumably what Holden was getting at by saying it was must-pass) or a procedural inconvenience could become the psychological means by which voting in favor of indefinitely imprisoning Americans with no trial in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution could be honestly rationalized for even those (few?) who are well-meaning.