Debate Update

Debate Update:

Things are not going well!

FreedomWorks’ August Recess Call to Action encouraged grassroots citizens to attend Congressional town hall meetings and listening sessions. We asked everyone to voice their opinions and communicate their opposition to the President’s proposed hostile takeover of the American health care system. Apparently, the very act of showing up and having an opinion is, in effect, to act like a “thug.” Opposing President Obama’s policy agenda on health care is, in and of itself, unacceptable, and has no place in our democracy. Bottom line: it’s “disgusting,” according to our friends on the left.

We didn’t know this. Evidently, we also didn’t know best practices in a respectful, dignified policy debate, but our leftist friends were kind enough to “take FreedomWorks to school”, so to speak.

Specifically, “school” included phone call blitzes from MoveOn.org and the AFL-CIO that jammed FreedomWorks phone lines and filled up staff voice mail boxes. Callers’ consistently used profanity, vulgarity, ever-popular references to “Nazis” and “brown-shirters,” racial slurs targeting an African-American staffer, and even veiled threats of violence and bodily harm.

Making a point about the unity of first and second amendment rights is this fellow, who lawfully brought a gun to a place where the President would be speaking. I personally think it would be healthy if the government trusted rather than feared its citizens, but the relationship should work the other way according to Ezra Klein.

What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship.

Is it unthinkable? Consider today's Day By Day.

The White House is actually hiring union thugs to attend rallies to counterprotest. Those thugs have actually attacked American citizens, describing those citizens as terrorists. The White House response, after the attacks, praised the union's efforts, while making no reference to the attacks and no attempt to cool their behavior.

Other bad behavior by the administration is less worrisome, like stacking town halls with cute little plants and selling out Medicare to Big Pharma. Hiring union thugs, though, crosses one of those lines of trust. It's not unthinkable now that a union ally of the President's might come bust your teeth, because you had the temerity as a citizen to carry a sign protesting government seizure of control of our health care. Following as it does government seizures of our banks and auto industries, some people want to protest: but they find allies of the President physically threatening them if they do.

Nancy Pelosi said it's un-American to try to drown out the opposition.

I have a memo from SEIU Local 2001....

“Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.”

The relationship between citizen and government has passed the point at which it's "unthinkable" that "one party" might "beat or kill" the other. Both sides have reasons to fear actual violence.

Let's look at the reasonable fears of the President's supporters, too. It appears there has been an increased use of the fellow's favored Jeffersonian rhetoric. The rhetorical point Jefferson was making was honest enough: he believed, based on his own experience and a reading of English history, that liberty could only survive if it was regularly defended. Such defenses took the form of cyclical wars: his own Revolution, the Jacobite wars, the English Civil War, etc., all the way back to the wars against King John that established the Manga Carta.

Such violence was easy for Jefferson to contemplate coolly, having just finished his own generation's participation. On what might prove to be the front side of such a cycle, it's hard to be as sanguine. Some are worried, noticing the increase in death threats against this President. They are worried enough to declare that the law should be set aside:

Now, this guy is carrying a legal weapon, says NBC News' Ron Allen. The local chief of police has no objections. Open carriage of licensed handguns is legal in New Hampshire, and the man is standing on the private property of a nearby church (!) that has no problem with an armed man hanging around.

But let's be clear: anyone watching the mounting rage over, of all things, health care — perhaps one of the most boring and complex policy subjects — has to worry that these people are going to try to kill Barack Obama. That's not an extrapolation from unhinged rhetoric, or a partisan reading of the imagined intentions of our political enemies. It's a rational reading of the anticipated behavior of a man who brandishes a gun at the location where the president is expected to imminently arrive while holding a sign that openly advocates his assassination. And the astonishing, breathtaking, maddening fact that he hasn't been violently taken to the ground by large men wearing suits and earpieces is an open encouragement to anyone else so inclined to give it a shot.

Now, I understand the fear. I regret that the author is so frightened of his fellow citizens that he refers to them as "these people," and suspects them of plotting murder. I hope that we can change that sense in the future.

Nevertheless, notice that the call here is to void the law entirely. It doesn't matter what the state law is; what the local police think; what rights the man may have under state and Federal constitutions; or what the property owner wants. It makes no difference that a handgun is no threat to the President's convoy anyway, as it is armored far above the level a handgun could penetrate, and guarded by men with M4 carbines, body armor, and endless backup immediately available. The man should have been taken down, the argument goes, and violently. The fact that he wasn't is worrisome -- apparently more worrisome than a rank violation of the law by Federal agents would be.

Here's some good news: The Secret Service, and the local police, did the right thing. Their obedience to the law in no way resulted in any threat to the President, as they were aware of the man and quite capable of dealing with him. Nobody trusted anyone else: the man didn't trust the unions, the Secret Service didn't trust the man, the President doesn't trust the protesting citizens. Everyone was anticipating violence from the other parties involved.

Nevertheless, the system worked. The rights of the people were respected both by law enforcement and by the unions, the President came and went without incident. Trust wasn't necessary. It's a wonderful thing, but something that we can't always expect to have. Therefore, the system doesn't require it.

Ezra Klein is wrong. The system we have isn't predicated on trust. It's predicated on checks and balances, and the assumption that tyrants and bad-actors will sometimes be in charge. Every part of the system works this way, not just the relationship between Congress and the Executive, or the two and the Supreme Court. The government isn't required to trust its citizens: it's permitted to defend itself from any who rise up against it, as the Constitution gives it explict permission to suppress rebellions, and the Secret Service has authority to perform its noble and nonpartisan duty.

By the same token, citizens are not required to disarm themselves and submit to beatings by hired union thugs in order to exercise their rights of assembly and petition. If you're going to insist on fielding union thugs whose clear and stated intent is to disrupt protests, you have no right to complain when citizens avail themselves of lawful Second Amendment rights in defense of their First Amendment rights.

It is for just such a moment as this that these checks were created. The hope is that they will prevent a war, by ensuring that both sides have something to lose by starting one. As someone who deeply hopes to see no more violence arising out of this business, I hope that both sides will begin to back away -- but it is both sides that need to do so. The White House, having money, power, and informal armies of "purple shirts," has to back off if they want to see rhetoric cool on the side of the citizenry. If they don't want citizens to feel they need a gun to attend a protest, they ought not to take steps making it likely that a citizen might receive a beating for attending one.

We could yet reach Jefferson's cycle, if the escalation continues. These checks and balances, though, are letting it operate relatively smoothly even at this high level of tension and distrust. Compared with what similar levels of tension and distrust look like elsewhere, the American way looks pretty good.