THE SOUND AND THE FURY

       Brigitte and I have been on the road off and on for the better part of three weeks so we didn’t give the news as much attention as we normally do, except to catch the headlines.  It was a rather nice break from all that noise:  “Fast and Furious,” the Administration’s ill-advised gun operation in Mexico; Bain Capital: did he or didn’t he?  Washington Mayor Gray’s crumbling administration.  And on and on.

           What we couldn’t help but follow, even on the road, was the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act.  It didn’t take the Tea Party long to turn one of its heroes, Chief Justice John Roberts, into an unpatriotic villain and a turncoat who should be impeached.
 

It’s understandable, of course, why some conservatives might disagree with the Affordable Care Act -- although to date I have not seen any reasoned alternative from that quarter, just vague promises about the need to repeal Obamacare and start all over.  What’s hard to understand is the rabid fury on the right, as if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were tantamount to high treason and Chief Justice Roberts a Benedict Arnold.

          The Obama Administration is partly to blame for allowing the Tea Party and other right wing conservatives to define the health care law and let the worst misimpressions become settled fact.  It’s no wonder people are frightened by that caricature of the ACA as a massive Government takeover that will bankrupt the country and turn this country into a socialist welfare state like France and all those other European countries across the pond.   Meantime, instead of pumping out information on what ACA really is designed to accomplish -- as well its current benefits already in effect -- the Administration remains strangely passive. I don’t get it.

          Meanwhile, the House of Representatives, responding to its base, is so busy voting to repeal the ACA it doesn’t have time for much else.  In fact, just to make sure everyone understands its opposition to ACA, the House has voted 33 times to repeal it.  No exaggeration; 33 times.  You can’t make up stories like this, leading Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein to observe:  “Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign.  But 33 times?  If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?  Well, it makes you the 112th Congress,” he quipped.

              What puzzles me that the goal of the health care law is no longer part of this acrimonious debate.   It’s all about the alleged cost – and some of the GOP cost estimates being trotted out on the campaign trail are fictitious, to put it kindly.  The fact that 50 million Americans (the health care law would cover only 30 million) are uninsured doesn’t seem to bother the opponents of health care.  Or that people with pre-existing conditions can be denied health insurance.  These beneficiaries are our fellow citizens, aren’t they?

Which brings me to my last point.  You often hear opponents of health care putting the issue into the context of welfare, a code word if I ever heard on.  And I hadn’t heard the word “moochers” for years recently until I heard it in the context of those who would allegedly most benefit from the Affordable Care Act, in the eyes of its critics.  And, now, just to make sure people don’t miss that point, Mitt Romney goes before the NAACP and gets booed when he pledges to repeal Obamacare.  As Washington Post columnist Melinda Henneberger rightly observes: Romney got just what he came for.  Now, he can let his friends in the Hamptons know he stood up to the welfare folks -- he the same guy whose Massachusetts health care law served as the model for the ACA.   Go figure.

The irony of this is that there are more whites on welfare than African Americans.  A greater percentage of African Americans, sure, but that’s not surprising considering the social and economic obstacles they have had to face and still face in many sectors.

The point is that the GOP can’t resist the racist slant when it comes to an election so they resort to the old bugaboos to get their base riled up. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s “welfare queens” and the Willie Horton charge leveled against Michael Dukakis in the 1988  campaign, to Newt Gingrich’s clumsy attempts during the Southern primaries, the beat goes on. 

This too shall pass, but it’s going to be a long summer and fall. 

          Gerald E. Lavey

A SUMMER SNOW JOB

       Creating jobs for the American workforce is one thing.  Doing a job on the American people is quite another.  Mitt Romney and the GOP like to conflate the two.

         The central theme of Governor Romney’s presidential campaign is that as a businessman he knows how to create jobs and that as President he will get the economy humming again and put America back to work.

         Really?  How’s he going to do this?  Dramatically reduce government spending, cut taxes on the so-called job creators (aka the super wealthy) and reduce the stifling regulatory burden on businesses: the same, tired troika of the GOP political arsenal that has been around for decades.  Even though experience has demonstrated over and over again that this is patent nonsense and the worst kind of political flimflam, the GOP keeps trotting it out every election cycle.  Why?  Because it works.   

             If the GOP really wanted to help put people back to work, it would have passed some form of the President’s job bill that he submitted to Congress early in the year.  It has a number of features supposedly dear to the heart of Republicans.  It includes, for example, tax credits to encourage businesses to hire unemployed veterans; preventing up to 280,000 teacher layoffs; and keeping first responders including firefighters and police officers on the job.  It also calls for modernizing at least 35,000 public schools across the country, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure: roads, railways, and airports, all of which would be a rich source of jobs.

         But, when your number one aim is to make sure the President is not re-elected to a second term, creating jobs can wait.  Even for a President who has cut taxes seven times for small businesses, the real job creators, and one-third of whose stimulus package consisted of tax cuts, and submitted a jobs bill that includes tax credits for job creators. First things first.

         Sound too cynical? I don’t think so.

         A case in point:  There’s a transportation bill currently languishing in the House that would put millions of unemployed construction workers back on the job.  The Senate passed a bill, with Republican support, but the tea-soaked House has held the bill hostage by linking to it “three controversial non-transportation issues: expansion of offshore and artic oil exploration, approval of the Keystone pipeline and relaxation of restrictions on use of coal ash,” as reported by the June 14 Washington Post.   

Besides the jobs issue, another arrow in the GOP’s campaign quiver is the charge that President Obama has driven government spending through the roof.  That isn’t true, of course, and recent statistics bear that out.  The fact is that the Republican controlled House has rejected virtually everything the President has sent to the Hill, except the Affordable Care Act which was passed over strong GOP opposition when the Democrats led the House.  And, now that may well be overturned by the GOP-controlled Supreme Court.

            The irony is that if the GOP had cooperated even minimally with the President, his spending record might be a credible issue to run against.  But, if you cut the wings off a bird and then complain that it can’t fly, you damage your case.

This thing could get curiouser and curiouser during the summer and into the fall, so stay tuned.  Meantime, go easy on the tea – it damages the brain -- and watch out for snow.   

Gerald E. Lavey

IT’S A TOSS UP

       As an American Catholic, it’s hard to decide which organization is the more frustrating– the U.S. Congress or the Vatican.  They both provide an enormous amount of material for bloggers, so I should be grateful.  At the moment, though, I think the Vatican is in the lead.  This could change tomorrow, so stay tuned.

         These two bodies are not dissimilar.  Both are dominated by self-important old men who have forgotten their original charter.  Both bodies have favorability ratings in the single digits.  The last time I checked, the Congress had an approval rating below 10 percent.  I don’t recall seeing a recent survey of Catholics on how they regard the Vatican, but it’s got to be at least that low. It’s too bad, for my purposes, that the members of Congress are not required to wear togas to match the quaint, irrelevant garb of the Catholic hierarchy.  The similarities would be even more striking.

         The latest incident that put the Vatican in first place in this exciting race to the bottom is its condemnation of a book entitled “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” whose author is Sister Margaret Farley, a respected theologian and “long-time Yale University scholar who recently retired,” as reported by the Washington Post.  This was a book published in 2006.  Until the Vatican spoke up, the book was ranked 142,982 by Amazon.com.  Now, in just a matter of days, the sales ranking jumped to No. 16 – and climbing.

         In 2011, the Vatican did a similar favor for Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University.  Dr. Johnson’s book, “Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in Theology of God” published in 2007, went relatively unnoticed except in academic circles until the Vatican announced that it found many of the book’s conclusions “incompatible with Catholic teaching.”  As a result, many regular practicing Catholics couldn’t wait to read it and jumped on-line to order it.  It’s a wonderful book, by the way, as I am sure is Sister Margaret Farley’s, which I ordered from Amazon.com yesterday.

Readers must wonder, as some of my Catholics and former Catholic friends have asked me, “Why are you still a Catholic?  Why don’t you just leave the Church?”  My answer is that I wouldn’t think of leaving the church, which is an amazing organization that daily goes about doing the work of the Gospel around the world, often despite the Vatican.  The Catholic Relief Services, to cite just one example, helps people in need in nearly 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality.  Its website states: “Although our mission is rooted in the Catholic faith, our operations serve people based solely on need, regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity.”  In other words, they are Catholic, in the real sense of that word, meaning universal, all-embracing

         I would guess these workers in the vineyard pay little, if any, attention to what some Vatican watchdog agency says or does.  They’re too busy doing the real work of the Church.   

Actually, it’s an exciting time to be a Catholic.  I remember in the late 1950’s and early 1960s the excitement that so many of us felt when Pope John XXIII convened a Vatican Council to bring about an “aggiornamento,” i.e. to bring the Church up to date.  He wanted to “throw open the windows” to let fresh air in, he said.

Well, the Church is going through another “aggiornamento,” not by Papal design or Vatican initiative, but by the actions of Catholics – led in so many cases by the quiet example of Catholic nuns who were harshly criticized in a Vatican report earlier this year. The Vatican agency rebuked the nuns for adopting the ways of “radical feminism” and not paying enough attention to traditional Catholic teaching on such matters as abortion and gay marriage.

In a masterful and eloquent response to the Vatican criticism – as the June 6 New York Times reports -- a “group of Roman Catholic nuns is planning a bus trip across nine states this month, stopping at homeless shelters, food pantries, schools and health care facilities run by nuns to highlight their work with the nation’s poor and disenfranchised.”

Touché – once again proving that actions in the form of a good example speak louder than words.

Unfortunately, the Vatican will probably miss the point.  They’re too busy frantically closing the windows to any wind of change while failing to notice that the roof is coming off.

         Gerald E. Lavey