I was in Morgantown, West Virginia, last weekend visiting my mom when a neighbor called, a local professional with whose son I played high-school baseball. He asked me what I was up to these days, and after I'd explained what the Prospect was and so forth, he said (paraphrasing): “Listen, I'd like to ask you about something. I guess some people might call me an extremist or something, but I think that this country is in very serious danger. “
He did not mean from terrorism, and he went on to use the sort of language that "responsible" commentators in this town do not use.
We ran down the most recent litany of horrors, from the Terri Schiavo episode to this to that. Then I mentioned Bill Frist's latest escapade, and his remark that the filibuster is an attack on people of faith. My mom's neighbor started laughing, because, well, how could one not? It's so beyond preposterous that it's difficult to respond in any other way. But, as he and I agreed before we hung up, we shouldn't be laughing.
What's going on in the United States, crystallized for many of us more dramatically than ever in these recent weeks, is nothing to laugh about. In fact, it doesn't get much more serious. The country is in the hands of extremist zealots who want to merge church and state and do away with every piece of socially ameliorative legislation passed in the last 70 years.
The recent trifecta of shame began with the Schiavo matter. Its importance was that it showed that utterly no principle -- not even traditional, respectable conservative principles -- retains any meaning at all when it bumps up against the hungers of the religious right.
We've seen traditional, respectable conservative principles defenestrated before -- principles like fiscal prudence and opposition to budget deficits. But that, in a way, was just politics -- the principle of deficit reduction competing with the principle of tax reduction and losing.
But what's going on now is not just politics. On the surface, the Schiavo case looked like the principle of minimal federal interference in states' matters competing with the "principle" of life. Nonsense. In the afternoon I'm spending writing this column, dozens of Americans will die as their loved ones decide -- painfully, but, on balance, morally -- to discontinue life support and give them peace. Congress is doing nothing about those cases or thousands of others. And thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we know that "erring on the side of life" wasn't even a principle for Tom DeLay when his own family had to make the decision with regard to his father. The Schiavo case was entirely about forcing a minority religious point of view on the rest of us, and making it policy.
Next came the assault on the judiciary, culminating in that aroused right-wing judicial conference two weeks ago. There's no secret about what's really going on here: The judiciary is the lone branch of government that's supposed to be independent. It never has been entirely, of course, but in recent American history, most presidents and senators, from both parties, have felt at least a vague responsibility to respect the idea of judicial independence and to nominate judges who were qualified and whose views fell within certain norms. But that independence is under fresh and newly intense assault. When Tom DeLay says that something has to be done about so-called activist judges, what remedy does he have in mind? He's not saying yet, but if you think I'm being overly dramatic about this, or about the assertion above that the right wants to merge church and state, have a gander at this excerpt from an April 14 interview DeLay did in The Washington Times:
Washington Times: You've been talking about going after activist judges since at least 1997. The [Terri] Schiavo case gives you a chance to do that, but you've recently said you blame Congress for not being zealous in oversight.
DeLay: Not zealous. I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them … .
WT: How can Congress stop them?
DeLay: There's all kinds of ways available to them … .
WT: Are you going to pursue impeaching judges?
DeLay: I'm not going to answer that.
So don't take it from me. A separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution. Judicial review -- a principle that goes back not to the dreaded New Deal but to the Marbury v. Madison decision of 1803 -- represents overreach. A "no comment" on the impeachment of judges whose only crime will be to hand down decisions with which the right wing disagrees.
Finally, Exhibit C was Jeffrey Rosen's piece in The New York Times Magazine of April 17 on the conservative/libertarian crusade to end regulation and return America to its pre-1937 state. Rosen didn't draw, for me, all the right conclusions from his reporting, but the reporting was great, as it marked perhaps the first time that intellectual architects of the rollback have spoken at length in what they would call an enemy publication. They put it as clearly as they could: Government should be doing no more than it did in Herbert Hoover's day. The market will determine acceptable levels of pollution and health care and so forth.
It'll take scholars with greater knowledge than I have to spell out all the theoretical and practical ramifications of this. But I know enough to know that when church, state, and corporate power all serve one another with no checks and balances, that's not democracy. And it's nothing to laugh about.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
