17 September 2005

The Constitution, John Roberts, and the little guy

From Capital Hill Blue:
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It's been a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad month. And it's not even over.

With hundreds of thousands of people uprooted, their lives in turmoil, their misery unfathomable, we now have the spectacle of politicians caviling over what went wrong, who's to blame, what to do next, how much to spend. Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.

And we've had the John Roberts hearings. They have brought out the worst and the ugliest aspects of Capitol Hill. Rancor, suspicion and distrust are so legion that even our smartest and ablest can't talk to each other without malice. They don't even hear each other.

Thomas Kean, the mild-manner former Republican governor of New Jersey and former chairman of the bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, fretted the other day: "Extreme partisanship is a sickness in this country today. I've personally never seen it as bad as it is now."

Why?

There are as many opinions, I'm sure, as there are members of Congress, callers to radio talk shows, newspaper readers and White House pollsters.

Feel free to turn the page, but here are mine, culled from several decades of watching Washington at work. Or not.

We all love the flag, the national anthem (even if we can't sing it), our starry history, the amazing physical breadth of our country, our can-do spirit, our friendliness and compassion, our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, even our increasingly rampant materialism.

But we don't love our government. Even more important, we don't agree at all on what our government is supposed to do for us, to us or with us. Some of us want government to punish our neighbor, validate our personal beliefs and leave us alone, especially when times are good.

More than anything, that's what the Roberts hearings showed. Yes, tedious they often were, with senators talking to hear themselves talk, and Roberts talking to chew up time and show off his humble modesty. (Memo to spouses: If you're on TV while your partner is talking in baseball cliches, no painfully obvious yawning behind him/her.) But the shorthand was this: Government is no longer about the little guy.

Time after time, Democrats meandered around the notion that the laws Congress passes are supposed to help the downtrodden, the afflicted, the disabled, the poor, the uneducated, the discriminated-against, the victim. That's why they're so frustrated that Roberts wouldn't hail such congressional efforts such as the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Violence Against Women Act.

Finally, on the third day, he said it. Sometimes, abiding by the Constitution means the little guy won't win, and the big guy does.
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