Who's Elitist Now?

David Corn

November 23, 2004

It's become a favorite Republican talking point, especially in the weeks since the election: Democrats—those secular elitists—have no "moral values" and are out of touch with the American people. But Republicans are not exactly walking the walk, says David Corn. Examples abound in Congress recently of GOPers taking the rules into their own hands, flouting the conventions of democracy and browbeating anyone in their ranks who dares to speak otherwise. Elitism? Sure, it exists in politics. But not where you've been told.

David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

Republicans and conservatives are fond of decrying Democrats—especially liberal Democrats from, say, the Northeast—as elitist. And this has become part of the post-election debate over so-called values: those high-falutin’ liberals just don’t get values, especially Middle American values.

That’s a mischaracterization. The Blue Staters pledge allegiance to values—just a different set of values than those adhered to by social conservatives who want to banish homosexuality from public life, bring creationism and prayer into public schools and criminalize abortion. After all, isn’t the right to privacy a values-driven concept? And the belief that gays and lesbians should be allowed to form civil unions (if not marriages) is predicated on values, as is opposition to the death penalty. The values-versus-no-values debate is a phony concoction (that just so happens to benefit conservatives and GOPers). There is a values war going on. It is a clash of competing values—not a face off between a values-free elite and the non-coastal masses. And, thankfully, we slug it out in the political arena and not on fields of armed combat. At least not yet.

Where elitism has reared its ugly head recently is in Congress. The Republicans who hold the power in the House and Senate have arrogantly decided they know what’s best and damn the public.

Exhibit Number One : the crack-up of the intelligence reform bill. The bill was pronounced dead or near-dead this past weekend when House Speaker Denny Hastert decided not to bring it up for a vote. Had he done so, there is little doubt it would have been approved in both chambers. But the legislation probably would have won passage with most Democrats and fewer than half of the Republicans voting for it. That would not have looked good for the GOP. Additionally, several Republican hawks were openly trying to torpedo the legislation. Doing the Pentagon’s bidding, they have complained that the legislation—which would create a national intelligence director who would oversee the entire federal intelligence bureaucracy—would grant the NID too much control over military intelligence. The Defense Department, which now controls up to 80 percent of the $40 billion-a-year intelligence budget, doesn’t fancy that.

So we have a majority of Congress and the president in favor of national security legislation—which is based on the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and which has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill—and a handful of obstructionists thumb their noses at everyone. That sure isn’t textbook democracy. “These guys are going to have blood on their hands,” Beverly Eckert, an angry 9/11 relative said. “It’s reprehensible when partisan politics interferes with the safety of America.”  And Kristen Breitweiser, a leading 9/11 widow, complained, “"One would have hoped that 3,000 lost lives on 9/11 would have been enough of a catalyst to effect change. Apparently not. This really comes down to a turf battle, and what's really upsetting is that it's the same turf battle we had months ago." (Bush has claimed he wants the bill okayed, but Sen. Pat Roberts, the GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that some of the opposition to the bill “is from the White House.”) When Republicans grouse about the Democrats using the filibuster in the Senate, the Democrats ought to point out how well the House Republicans deploy congressional rules to impede popular action.

On to Exhibit Number Two: The Republican leaders of Congress certainly flaunted their we-know-best hubris when they slapped together the $388 billion spending bill. They shoved into this must-pass bill various measures that deserved full debate but received little or none. These included a provision that granted the chairmen of the appropriations committees the power to review the tax returns of any individual or corporation and another that could restrict a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. (Of course, the legislation also contained a host of congressional pork—$250,000 for asparagus technology; $150,000 for the Coca-Cola Space Center in Georgia.)

The overarching sin was that the Republicans quickly cooked up a bill thousands of pages long that virtually no legislator had the chance to read—and that no taxpayer had the opportunity to review and protest before passage. This is top-down policymaking, with the folks in charge working behind closed doors and refusing to operate in a manner that would permit citizen input. The House Republicans failed to pass nine of the 13 appropriations measures that fund the entire federal government. So instead of using a process that entails hearings, discussion and debate, a few of them huddled in a room and concocted a gargantuan spending measure that had to be passed to prevent a government shutdown. How elitist is that?

Exhibit Number Three: Sen. Arlen Specter. His fellow Republicans, egged on by social conservatives, forced Specter to grovel in order to become the next chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. Specter, who supports abortion rights, basically had to pledge he would take a bullet (or fusillade) for whatever judicial appointees Bush hurls at the Democrats. And his offense was merely to have stated aloud an obvious fact: a judicial appointee who is solidly opposed to abortion rights will have a tough time winning confirmation. (The Democrats hope so!) For taking a stand that actually reflects the public will—exit polls in the past election showed a 55 percent majority wants abortion to be always or mostly legal—Specter was hammered by his comrades. Isn’t seeking to impose your own values on the majority an elitist exercise? The Republicans can claim to have a 55-to-44 edge over the Democrats in the Senate. (Sen. Jim Jeffords remains an independent.) But during this previous election, Democratic senatorial candidates attracted more votes than Republican senatorial candidates, 41.6 million to 39.1 million. That hardly supports the argument that the GOP speaks for the people.

You want more evidence of elitism? Take Tom DeLay (please!). He has been admonished four times by the bipartisan House ethics committee—a lap dog that doesn’t bark unless a thief pokes it in the snout, tugs on its tail, and screams, “I’m stealing your favorite pull-toy”—and he gets to keep his leadership job. How many average working folks receive such preferential treatment? And when DeLay is threatened with an indictment, his pals in the House change the rules for him. What relativism. And I foolishly had thought relativism—at least according to Republicans—was the exclusive domain of those liberal, secular elitists who actually bothered to study hard and win degrees from the nation’s top colleges.

So spare me talk of elitist Democrats who can’t recognize values and are too haughty for their own good. The Democrats have problems, but lacking values isn’t the issue. Meanwhile, the congressional Republicans are practicing their own form of condescension. They have been consolidating their power in anti-democratic fashion in order to inflict their self-proclaimed values and their self-serving priorities upon large blocs of Americans. And their effectiveness in doing this is enough to make any elitist envious.