The Crime of '81
excerpted from the book
Liberty Under Siege
by Walter Karp
Franklin Square Press, 1988, paper
[THE MYTH AND REALITY
OF THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY]
The Crime of '81
p129
The President-elect has fine and potent gifts, fully commands
the arts of popularity. He is a speaker, a rhetor, a master of
euphemism and the perfect half-truth, has immense powers of personal
attraction, has about him an air of manly resolve, invincible
self-assurance, unblemished candor, yet, withal, lightness and
charm and ebullience. "There was an ease in his manner."
So Copperfield describes J. Steerforth, hero of the school. "A
gay and light manner it was, but not swaggering-which I still
believe to have borne a kind of enchantment with it. I still believe
him, in virtue of his carriage, his animal spirits, his delightful
voice, his handsome face and figure, and, for aught I know, of
some inborn power of attraction besides (which I think a few people
possess), to have carried a spell with him to which it was a natural
weakness to yield and which not many persons could withstand."
Much like Steerforth, hero of the school, does Ronald Reagan appear
in public.
Yet what brutal truncation, what cutting
back of the plant, produces that splendid blossom! What lopping
away of knowledge, of curiosity; of truthfulness, to produce that
public aura of candor and confidence. What lopping away of realism,
foresight, even the very capacity to govern. Reagan is ignorant,
deliberately, willfully ignorant, scarcely knows who works for
him, rarely asks a penetrating question. William Casey, his campaign
manager, his intelligence director, the innermost member of his
inner circle, describes Reagan as passive, friendless, "strange."
"He gave no orders, no commands, asked for no information,
expressed no urgency." So a startled David Stockman observes
at his first informal meetings with the President-elect, who will
spend two years in the White House without learning that most
Soviet missiles are based on the land. His arms control proposals
sound fairer to him if he does not know and so he never inquires.
The new budget director tells the President-elect that no revenue
"feedback" will be forthcoming from the proposed Kemp-Roth
tax cut. Reagan looks puzzled, but says not a word. What happened
to the heart and soul of his promise to the people? Reagan does
not care to know. What good would the knowledge do him? How can
he maintain that marvelous air of candor if he knows for certain
he is telling a lie?
For candor's sake and seeming, intellectual
honesty must be lopped away and with it the ability to see the
true aspect of things. A Democratic governor warns Reagan of forthcoming
deficits, to which Reagan angrily replies, "We didn't invent
deficit spending"-the idea of it is not his and so how can
he be held responsible for his deficits? "He seemed unable
to acknowledge that he might have made a mistake," Gerald
Ford says of Reagan in his memoirs. Bottomless self-deception
protects the public blossom-the self-deception of a man who spent
World War II serving in the Air Force at home describing himself
as "coming back" from the war, eager "to make love"
to his wife. "All his war-making has been in his mind,"
says Garry Wills, "and he will make it the way he wants."
An appalling capacity for repelling truth and believing falsehood
is the one truly outstanding gift of the fortieth President. "He
believes that he can think a thing true and it will be true,"
says a Democratic leader. Reagan is "not devious," so
a longtime associate says. "He doesn't deliberately alter
things. Things go into his mind and whirl around and come out
how he likes." Or the unwelcome information is simply spurned,
becomes noninformation. "If you bring him facts that don't
fit into what he wants to believe he just rejects them,"
Majority Leader Wright remarks six years hence. Or it leaves Reagan
"depressed," for harsh reality, bad news on television,
readily dispirits the ebullient popular leader. "He gets
that pained look," says an aide, "and you don't want
to make him suffer"-and wither the blossom of public ebullience.
What, then, is the source of Reagan's
wonderful air of resolve? It, too, is mainly a hothouse bloom,
artfully cultivated. "What's so incredible is Reagan's sense
of confidence, but it is like death not knowing itself,"
says an oddly poetical ex-aide of the President's. No real inner
strength supports that air of assurance, but rather a desperate
clinging to a dogma-the virtues of "the market" and
the evils of "government"-and headlong evasion of the
terrors of doubt. So Reagan, the most "ideological"
of American leaders, often calls upon Edwin Meese III, former
county sheriff, now his principal adviser, to pick out from among
a series of "options" the "Reaganite" position,
lacking the nerve himself to face contradictions and conflicts,
lacking the courage, too, to look ahead, or think ahead, to where
his dogmas might lead, preferring blind optimism, instead, the
faith, says Mrs. Reagan curtly, "that if you let something
go, it will eventually work itself out. Well, it isn't always
so." Clinging to dogma, Reagan finds unbearable the sight
of his advisers disputing; it gives me "knots in my stomach"-knots
of terror, for if "Reaganites" disagree is there not
a rip, a rent, a tear in the seamless web of "Reaganism"?
So Meese, protecting the precious blossom of confidence, constructs
"a bubble of obliviousness" around Reagan, as sharp-eyed
Stockman observes. "Whenever there was an argument, Meese
would step in and tell us to take our arguments to some other
ad hoc forum. The President would smile and say, 'Okay, you fellas
work it out."' When the "fellas" do so, endorsement
generally follows and thus affairs of state are managed.
Reagan does not govern because he dares
not govern, for reality rushes in upon governors-facts and figures,
harsh and conflicting, sparing no dogmas, bursting all bubbles-and
the Reagan blossom-resolute, candid, ebullient-would wither and
die. General Haig, newly named Secretary of State, attends his
first Cabinet meeting and discovers to his horror that Meese and
James Baker, two of Reagan's triumvirate of senior advisers, have
taken seats at the great Cabinet table. "A startling departure
from tradition," says outraged Haig; mere presidential aides,
flunkies, adjutants, seated in the place reserved for the great
sworn officers of state, confirmed by the advice and consent of
the august Senate? "Robert Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at
the height of their pride would never have dared such an act of
lese majesty." But Reagan's advisers are not mere "President's
men." They are "managers of the presidency," so
Haig belatedly discovers. Every morning at nine they meet the
President in the Oval Office and give him the "line,"
Stockman calls it, on what he is supposed to think about "any
significant topic in the morning's newspapers-El Salvador, unemployment,
whatever"-whatever being the vast array of public events
about which Reagan will not or cannot be bothered to think for
himself.
p135
The party leaders have gone into "retreat," have pondered
party past, present and future on Chesapeake Bay. They emerge
and announce to the world that they have been utterly repudiated
by the American people. Poll us no polls, says the Democratic
leadership. We have been swept away in a "conservative tide."
Democratic leaders profess themselves ) stunned, crushed, "shell-shocked,"
it is said, by the appalling extent of Carter's defeat, after
tearing him to shreds for four years, which shredding has cost
them control of the Senate, doubtless a genuine shock. Only one
course lies open for the popular party, swept away, as it were,
by fiat. We must give the new President-elect a free hand-and
more: a helping hand, whatever is needful. "Uniformly, in
one interview after another," so the Washington Post reports
on the morning of November 17, "Democrats from House Speaker
Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr. (DMass.) on down talked about cooperating
with the President-elect and giving the GOP a chance." Abject
self-abasement is democracy's order of the day. "We're going
to cooperate with the President," says Speaker Tip. "It's
America first and party second." Senator Byrd, in his Heepish
element, will not be outdone by Tip. "We shall be cooperative.
We shall offer our assistance. We certainly want to see the new
President succeed." At what, pray tell? At the generating
of huge strangling deficits, paralyzing the popular party for
years to come?
p136
Carter is an evident disaster; ergo, says Oligarchy, rigorously
logical, party democracy is disastrous as well. Is not Carter's
failure to get on with us absolute proof, ocular proof, proof
incontrovertible, that we must alter the system that brought the
presidency to him? Thus Oligarchy argues and thus parrot the pundits,
being pundits, in the main, by virtue of parroting. Since "the
people have acquired the power to nominate Presidents... the governments
they elect have in the process lost the authority needed to govern."
Thus the eminent James Reston of the Times. Carter failed because
he came to the 'White House without "the alliances that made
it possible for him to organize the coalitions and support necessary
to lead a government." Thus David Broder of the Post, twelve
years in mourning for the "death of the 'parties." "Jimmy
Carter, the outsider, would not have been the nominee in 1976
of an organized political party; he is what can happen when the
choice of party leader is taken entirely out of the hands of the
party elite and turned over to the people." Thus James Sundquist
of the Brookings Institute, bringing Political Science to bear
on the Great Matter. All being in complete agreement that the
trashing of democracy by Oligarchy demonstrates the preeminent
virtues of Oligarchy, a Democratic Party commission will shortly
be formed to alter the party rules so that the powerful party
few shall once again have the last word-or perhaps even the first
word-as to who will and who will not traverse the Democratic road
to the 'White House. Thus Power, as usual, dictates to Thought,
or what passes for thought in this corrupted public realm of ours,
where knaves hire fools to protect them.
p138
The President-elect and his wife are breaking bread with "the
capital's smart set" at a sitdown dinner for fifty at "the
toney F Street Club"! It is Reagan's intention to demonstrate
"that notwithstanding his anti-Washington rhetoric, he belongs,"
so Newsweek reports, agog with delight. "He will mix with
the lords and ladies of Washington society toward whom Carter
was standoffish." Two days later there is a dinner for the
Reagans at the home of columnist George Will. In attendance is
Katherine Graham, owner of the Post and Newsweek both, "empress
of the limousine liberal set," it is said. No "set"
is more loathed, loathed to the point of insanity, by the Right,
but so delighted is its "empress" with the Reagans that
she invites them next month to a party in turn, where they meet
the new Democratic Ward Heeler-in-Chief, Lane Kirkland, Meany's
heir apparent come into his legacy at last. Some thirty-two of
Kirkland's Present Danger colleagues will find a place in the
Reagan administration, seven of them founding members of the Coalition
for a Democratic Majority. Not even our fiery liberal chieftain
Senator Kennedy is missing from the great November Acclamation.
He pays a call on the visiting Reagans and emerges "talking
of the need for unity." Our prince of divisiveness crying
up unity! What firmer proof is needed than this, fellow citizens,
that Ronald Reagan, purveyor of supply-side quackery and many
another design on your liberties, merits and deserves your deep
faith and trust!
No wonder the President-elect so effortlessly
"conquered the capital he ran so long and so hard against."
The "capital" has surrendered in advance, carrying with
it the Washington press corps, which is miraculously restored
to "pre-Watergate" deference. "Lions [have] become
lambs, typewriters are beaten into plowshares and rear ends at
the White House become objects for kissing rather than kicking,"
says Jody Powell, embittered by the "double standard."
A "suddenly docile press corps," so a press historian
puts it, will cushion and protect President Reagan in the weeks
and months and years to come-no need to fear gimlet eyes-though
the President and his men work ceaselessly to undermine the freeness
of the press, which finds it must defer to its very tormentors,
for Oligarchy will have it so and the press has no inner life
or force of its own.
Bipartisan darkness descends on the public
realm, preparation for the rule of the Right.
p139
It was time to be rich again," a gossip writer exclaims,
for the rich are no longer "the rich," having become
in the gathering darkness "those who save and invest,"
fructifying the earth. Nor are the poor and needy the poor and
needy any longer; they are fast becoming in this gathering gloom
a "special interest lobby," a "spending constituency."
a "social pork barrel we can no longer afford."
The rich are not rich enough! The poor
are not poor enough! Inequality deepened still more supplies the
key to prosperity!
And so, says a Washington dowager, in
this happy season of political darkness, "You don't have
to be ashamed of what you have anymore. At the tea parties the
children come in blue velvet and the ladies in $300 suits. You
discuss difficulties with maids and you discuss social events."
In safety! Without fear of reprisal! As if she had passed through
the Reign of Terror, seen Robespierre overthrown, and had finally
reached the warm shores of Thermidor-so frightening is revived
republicanism to Power in America. For truly there is something
Thermidorean in the air this winter as wealth swarms in upon Washington
to celebrate Reagan's Inaugural and the restoration of its power
and glory. "An armada of 400 corporate jets snarled traffic
at National Airport," reports Fortune. "A far cry;"
notes Newsweek, "from the populist Peanut Special that chugged
up from Georgia for the Inaugural four years ago." No republican
simplicity will blight the occasion this time. Instead, "the
country's basic values" will be celebrated this Inaugural,
says Charles Wick, Reagan's longtime friend and master of the
Inaugural revels: four days of dinners, parties and galas, four
days of wealth on lavish display, clogging the streets in a new
lavish way. "Beautiful Reagan intimate Betsy Bloomingdale
leaped into Dupont Circle to help clear a traffic jam of limousines,"
Newsweek notes in the new Thermidorean style. It is "safe
again to put on diamonds, designer gowns and-generally speaking-the
dog," the Post assures its society-page readers. "Laughter
is in," says a party reveler, "because Ronald Reagan
has a funny bone. His friend Frank Sinatra says that nobody has
a funny bone like Ron's." Thermidorean, too, is the twelve-page
Inaugural brochure which devotes just one trifling paragraph of
its celebration of "the country's basic values" to the
swearing-in ceremony, and to the great presidential oath to "preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,"
which oath the new President, for the life of him, cannot understand
and will not bother to heed, not finding it, perhaps, quite "basic"
enough. As he completes his brief Inaugural address, blaming "government"
for all our ills, the new President points out the splendid sights
on the great Mall before him-ahead the monument to Washington,
father of our country, and "off to one side the stately memorial
to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with
his eloquence," says the new President, while at that very
moment, give or take a few minutes, Jefferson's portrait is being
taken down from a White House wall and Calvin Coolidge's put up
in its place.
p141
The President is calling for fiscal restraint. "Can we who
man the ship of state deny that it is somewhat out of control?
Our national debt is approaching one trillion dollars." Mere
paring of waste and ' abuse, a campaign promise, will not suffice:
$48.6 billion must be cut from the fiscal 1982 budget, the largest
single reduction in domestic spending ever proposed by a President.
Wondrous to behold, however, "fiscal restraint" in this
Thermidorean season! For $49 billion will be added to the Pentagon's
spending authority this year-the largest single increase ever
proposed by a President in peacetime, proposed atop a $30 billion
increase enacted a mere eleven weeks ago by the lame-duck Dixie-Daley
Congress. "I am committed to stopping the spending juggernaut,"
says the President, as he launches a new spending juggernaut on
the night of February 18. No fiscal restraint whatever but rather
a vast fiscal shift-from domestic commonweal to warfare state
...
p143
On March 4, congress receives the detailed military budget, a
truly astonishing prospectus. The $222.2 billion defense appropriation
for fiscal 1982, an immense sudden increase in itself, merely
commences a five-year military buildup, growth set at 7 percent
a year, discounting inflation; $1.5 trillion to be spent in all.
We were the most powerful nation on earth in 1980, with an annual
defense budget of $142 billion. We are to spend $367 billion a
year by 1986 in this era of "fiscal restraint" and "getting
federal spending under control"! Can a republic die of lies?
If so, we are dying.
p144
A reckless, careless, feckless economic menace, too, is this new
wanton military spending juggernaut: consumer of savings and capital,
supposedly so desperately needed; consumer of skilled labor, engineers,
scientists, research facilities, the precious tools of enhanced
productivity, supposedly so urgently needed. How little economics
there is in all this Thermidorean economic babble! The Reaction,
corrupt politics, rules all.
... And how is this vast, vile engine
of waste received in Congress? A "warm welcome" greets
it, so Congressional Quarterly reports. The $222.2 billion requested
for fiscal 1982 "would appear to be sufficient," writes
the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, one Melvin Price,
to Budget Committee chairman Jones, but the $367 billion planned
for fiscal 1986 may be-too little! The honorable Price fears the
administration may be underestimating inflation and endangering
the national security. The honorable Price does offer a word of
advice. The Pentagon must not "appear" profligate, or
the American people might take it amiss. Let Pentagon profligacy
nonappear, disappear-by secrecy, concealments, by silencing Pentagon
"whistle blowers"-patriots and precisians who cannot
bear the ghastly sight of such wanton waste, by plans already
afoot within the bowels of the Executive to turn the whole vast
engine of waste into a single seamless secret of state beyond
the scrutiny of the American people, for the crime of '81, the
crime against our sovereignty, generates an endless stream of
supporting crimes against our sovereignty.
On March 10, Congress receives Reagan's
domestic budget message-an exercise in frugality truly odious
in its cruelty, in its rank injustice, in its base and hideous
hypocrisy. Student loans to be cut by $1.2 billion-a 9 percent
reduction in hopes for a college education; medical care for the
poor reduced by $500 million; school lunch and child nutrition
programs reduced by $1.8 billion; aid to dependent children reduced
by 13 percent; working mothers of three deprived of welfare benefits
for earning a few thousand dollars a year; unemployment compensation
reduced; home mortgage loans reduced-this by a President who talks
so lovingly of the "American dream"; the disabled subjected
to harsh new eligibility requirements; the minimum Social Security
benefit-$122 a month on the average-eliminated for 3 million people;
public housing cut so drastically that existing housing may rot
from demoralizing neglect; the food stamp program reduced by $2.3
billion-an 11 percent reduction adversely affecting 22 million
Americans; the Legal Services Corporation to be wiped out entirely,
a savings of $321.3 million to deprive the poor of fair trials
and leave them to the caprice of welfare bureaucrats-this by a
President who endlessly inveighs against the evils of bureaucracy.
The poor are financing the Navy's three
fisc-squandering nuclear carriers. That is the long and the short
of it. The waning hopes of poor working people for a home of their
own or college for a child will finance the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Small farmers will lose their family farms to pay for the B-1
bomber; hunger and homelessness will defray the salaries of the
Pentagon's 75,000 needless new civilian employees. The domestic
realm will be devoured to finance the warfare state, to fatten
the great military-industrial clients of Oligarchy, whose political
action committees pour wealth into the hands of party leaders.
p151
On May 7, the Reagan budget triumphs grandly in the Democratic
House, 253 to 176; a "milestone" victory for Reagan,
the press reports; a juggernaut is in the making, the Democrats
are in "disarray"-sixty-three of them have deserted
to the President's banner. "Tip O'Neill has become Ronald
Reagan's secret weapon," William Safire of the Times writes
a few days later, has become "a boon to Republicans seeking
to portray the Democratic Party as a listless hulk," and
a demoralizing spectacle to Democrats ...
p153
"What is wrong with Reagan's tax plan has grown all too apparent
by mid-May, so apparent it stands on the verge of collapse, requires
desperate White House lying about its own budget forecasts, requires,
most of all, the Speaker's supreme feat of "cooperation"
with the rule of the Right.
The chief difficulty, no doubt, is the
business community's deep silent loathing of the President's huge,
30 percent reduction in the personal income tax-"Kemp-Roth"
in congressional parlance; supply-side economics in general, which
business leaders regard as a fraud and a hoax, "an economic
theory based on alchemy," says Peter Solomon of Lehman Brothers,
the great New York banking house, alas, not until this coming
October, corporate lips being sealed this spring by a sordid bargain.
The "business community" will keep its collective mouth
shut about the fantasy of "revenue feedback"; about
the near certainty that people will spend, not save, their tax-reduction
money; about the near certainty, too, of large and dangerous budget
deficits. In return for silent corporate mouths, the administration
has agreed to support a massive reduction in the corporate income
tax - $500 billion over ten years, 80 percent of which will go
to the largest one-tenth of 1 percent of American corporations,
"the biggest single tax break in American history"-hush
money, more accurately achieved chiefly by means of a highly accelerated
tax write-off of depreciating plants, buildings and equipment.
In return for silence over the quackery and menace of Kemp-Roth,
the White House champions of the "free market" will
avert their eyes from the fact that the corporate tax cut favors
investment in shopping centers, commercial buildings and corporate
mergers-what the U.S. economy needs least; favors Big Business
at its most inept-"social security for the disabled large
corporation," economic historian Emma Rothschild calls it;
makes good investments bad and bad investments good; comprises,
therefore, one of the most massive intrusions into the "free
market" ever contemplated by the federal government-about
which intrusion the "free market" champions within the
'White House and their "conservative" allies without
will keep their collective mouths shut. Thus are we governed in
the Age of Reaction-by silence, lies Land collusion.
p155
Three days after the resounding editorial, the New York Time Magazine
carries a deadly critique of the entire Reagan tax plan by economist
Thurow. To arguments already made by Fortune (and elsewhere in
freer, pre-Reagan days) Thurow notes that the proposed reduction
from 70 percent to 50 percent in the maximum tax on unearned income-an
"incentive" for the rich upon which Reagan and Rostenkowski
wholeheartedly agree-will not encourage "productive"
investment, but more tax shelters and real estate speculation:
gross economic folly pitilessly conjoined to gross economic privilege.
For consider this: The Reagan-Rostenkowski bonanza for "those
who save and invest" lowers the tax paid by millionaire idlers
to a level below the maximum rate paid by a laboring hind toiling
for $12,000 a year to support a family of four.
Injustice and folly odiously conjoined-the
injustice truly brutal and coarse, virtual class warfare, historian
Arthur Schlesinger calls it on the pages of the Wall Street Journal
in early June. What the President describes as "an equal
reduction in everyone's taxes" is sharply unequal in its
result. According to the Treasury Department, some 35 percent
of the total reduction will go to the wealthiest 5 percent of
the country, which already enjoys a 16 percent cut in taxes with
no visible economic benefit to the nation, as if that mattered
to anyone-from the "millionaires' relief act" of 1978.
A mere 9 percent of the total reduction goes to the lower half
of the population, whose tax burden has increased 50 percent since
the triumph of "trickledown" in 1978. The combination
of tax cuts and budget cuts will eventually make the richest one
million households richer by more than $8,000 a year and the poorest
19 million households poorer by a year-a willful deepening of
inequality in America.
p158
In late April, the 'White House declares a moratorium on the preparation
and dissemination of government publications in the name of the
new frugality. "Elimination of wasteful spending on government
periodicals" inaugurates a program of concentrating inside
the 'White House, under cover of executive privilege, unprecedented
presidential control-and constriction-of public information, our
information, without which "popular government," warned
James Madison, "is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy,
or perhaps to both"-regarded by Ed Meese, current triumvir
and future Attorney General, as "government property;"
just as he regards the American Civil Liberties Union as a "criminals'
lobby," so he says in a speech delivered this May.
'Whatever can be hidden the administration
hides. Under the direction of the 'White House the agencies of
the Executive Branch evade public accountability provisions of
the Administrative Procedure Act. New regulations are issued as
mere "guidelines" so that the public need not be notified.
Existing regulations are altered by secret internal memoranda,
not without danger of public exposure. The Freedom of Information
Act, noble child of the democratic awakening, poses the danger,
for it gives a sovereign, self-governing people the power "to
force the federal bureaucracy to disgorge rulings made without
public scrutiny and documents more politically embarrassing than
secret," so conservative Safire points out this May in defense
of the act. But how costly it is! The White House is appalled
by the expense to the taxpayer: one two-hundredth of the Bradley
Fighting Vehicles per year. This is intolerable. "Freedom
of information is not cost-free," says an Assistant Attorney
General in charge of abridging our freedom of information. It
interferes with "efficient government," which requires
unfreedom of information and much else besides. Accordingly, in
late April and early May, William French Smith, an old crony of
Reagan's and now Attorney General, issues new guidelines designed
to weaken the act and strengthen bureaucracy's power of concealment.
The candidate who promised to "get government off the people's
back" is determined, as President, to get the American people
off their government's back.
... the White House is quietly negotiating
with the House and the Senate Intelligence Committee over a proposed
executive order authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency; for
the first time in its history; to spy on the American people-an
abuse of presidential power uncovered in the democratic awakening
and now to be disabused by making it legal, or, more accurately,
by squaring it with the party oligarchs in Congress. "The
opening of a Pandora's box with respect to the enhanced opportunities
of the intelligence community to intrude into the private lives
of American citizens," warns Admiral Stansfield Turner, Carter's
Central Intelligence director, and so, in due course, it turns
out.
In the midst of these private, undebated
negotiations-for what is debated these days?-and casting an ominous
light upon them, the President who wants to "get government
off the people's back" pardons two high FBI officials convicted
last year of violating the "right of the people to be secure
in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures," having ordered warrantless break-ins
of war protesters' homes. The two criminal officials "acted
on high principles to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening
our nation," the White House proclaims on April 15. But is
the Fourth Amendment not a high principle, a principle of liberty
among the highest? So the ACLU asks the White House, which duly
supplies an answer published this May 15 in the Post. It is a
stern reminder to Meese's "criminals' lobby" of the
President's "sworn duty to preserve and protect the national
security of the United States." Behold! The American Republic
has a new presidential oath of office, an oath rewritten for the
careless, truthless man in the White House, who not four months
ago stood before the grand sweep of the Mall and took his oath
to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the
United States" and nothing more "basic" than the
Constitution, nor "higher" than the Constitution, but
it and it alone. The White House has rewritten the oath to make
it a shambles, for the difference between the Framers' oath and
the Reaganite oath is precisely this: that the former subjects
the President to the laws-was this not the "lesson"
of Watergate?-and the latter, Watergate-amended, subjects the
law to the President. The entire Reagan era of lawlessness and
tyranny lies prefigured in that oath so contemptuously redacted.
And in Reagan's request that Congress abolish the office of special
prosecutor and so put the new criminal regime out of reach of
the law.
... the pressing I question of the hour
is: How can the President's tax plan be saved? The Speaker, guileful
Tip, walkabout Tip, master of his craft, has provided the answer:
We Democrats must "win" a "face-saving tax victory."
Let us not talk of deficits; let us match the President dollar
for dollar in pursuit of a legislative "victory." "We
have the votes. Can [Reagan] take them away from us?" says
Speaker Tip, "listless" no longer, breathing defiance.
Let us not talk of injustice, unfairness, of coarse, brutal "class
warfare," of gross privilege dispensed to the privileged.
Let us in pursuit of "victory" offer even greater tax
favors for corporations, more brazen tax favors for the rich-estate-tax
reductions, gift-tax reductions, retirement accounts for the affluent,
tax exemptions for oil operators, tax breaks for truckers, scores
of tax concessions to scores of narrow special interests",
a battle of the tax cut," Congressional Quarterly calls it,
a rivalry between White House and Ways and Means Democrats to
see who can gut the fisc more deeply, who can offer more favors
to the favored. "An amazing spectacle," Congressional
Quarterly reports on June 27, "Democrats trying to outbid
Republicans for the affections of the business community"-a
bidding war, so-called, led by Rostenkowski, determined to "win"
whatever the price, such is his "training," who "did
it with the assent of the entire leadership. I think it's one
of the most insidious moves I've seen." So a liberal New
York Democrat named Richard Ottinger tells a New York Times reporter
in January 1984, on the eve of abandoning politics, out of disgust
with his party's three-year collusion with Reagan.
Yet strange to relate of this furious
fight to win: The Democrats have not the slightest desire actually
to win. Why, after all, should they take the blame for the great
fisc-devouring deficits to come? So, in the midst of this titanic
"bidding war" to gain the votes, ostensibly, of straying
southern Democrats, "top Democratic leaders," reports
Congressional Quarterly, "continue to strongly oppose disciplining
party members who might stray from the fold." Is this not
an odd way to pursue a face-saving victory? Majority Leader Wright
attends a "closed-door forum meeting" of conservative
southern Democrats "to tell its members he will protect their
right to vote as they choose." Odder yet! Party discipline,
says a leadership aide, "is not being applied nor is there
even talk of it being applied." In a word, the great "face-saving
tax victory" struggle is a complete and utter sham, a sham
so gross House leaders feel compelled to supply an alternative
explanation to satisfy the more cynical. We are trying to "broaden
our financial base," say leadership spokesmen to sundry pundits,
party operators and Capitol Hill onlookers. We are "tailoring"
our "legislative strategy to woo corporate donors,"
says a Democratic Party official. House leaders "felt they
had to bid for corporate money," a Democratic fugleman later
explains. Yet strange to relate, this furious truckling to "corporate
donors," this proffering of tens of billions in tax-break
bribes brings next to nothing to the party coffers. For even the
sordid commercial excuse for the "bidding war" is just
another party lie, as false as the "face-saving tax victory.
Two layers of lies, a palimpsest, to obscure the appalling truth.
The House Democrats have launched the "bidding war"
with Reagan in order to save Reagan's tax bill at the moment of
crisis, to save the devouring of the fisc, the shrinking of the
public realm, the crime of '81 and the shyster tyranny behind
it. This is a motive so base that selling legislative favors at
auction sounds innocent beside it, for commercial republics, alas,
accept commercial excuses, and economics often becomes, for that
reason, the first refuge of scoundrels in America.
On July 29, Reagan's tax reduction plan,
now larger and unfairer than it was before, carries the House
by a vote of 238 to 196. The New York Times editorial this morning
speaks the mournful truth:
The Democrats had their chance for glory
by exposing the economic fallacies and risks in the President's
plan. Instead they pursued him over the same cliff... They spent
wildly to pass their bill rather than his. For every tax break
the White House offered the rich and powerful, the Democrats offered
one of their own, sometimes two .... The Great Tax Cut of 1981
assures a yawning federal deficit and another rampage through
federal programs to try to offset it." But the price of "glory"
would have been steep: the end of the Reaction, quite likely.
The prospective profits of baseness seem great: party power fortified
and restored under the forthcoming reign of false frugality, political
paralysis and popular government relentlessly besieged. Truly,
the ambitions of oligarchies are as pitiless as the passions of
princes.
Liberty
Under Siege
Home Page