A Speaker Who Speaks for a Few

The inability of Republicans in the House to agree on a Speaker has halted the business of governing the country. The media loves the uncertainty, the rumors, the up-and-down candidacies as political theater. The deep politics is more disturbing.

The Speaker holds great power in the House. The Speaker presides over debate, deciding who may speak and controlling the flow of discussion. The Speaker rules on all points of order, selects most of the members of the Rules Committee, and appoints members of select committees and conference committees. The Speaker determines which committee will consider new bills.

In 1792, the Second Congress wrote rules about presidential elections and specified that the Senate President pro tempore would become President in the absence of the elected President and Vice President, with the Speaker of the House next in line. This line of succession was changed in 1886, when cabinet members replaced Congressional leaders. After Franklin Roosevelt died in office, a new Presidential Succession Act was passed in 1947, which restored the Congressional leaders as next in line, but switched their places, putting the Speaker next after the Vice President.

Congress believed that the Speaker in such a national emergency could rise above the politics of his district, of his region, of his party, and lead the whole nation. Speakers have been men, and one woman, Nancy Pelosi, who developed leadership during Congressional careers, faced national issues, and worked with Presidents of both parties.

Now the so-called House Freedom Caucus, representing the people who made his job so impossible that Speaker John Boehner announced that he was quitting Congress, who were uncertain that Kevin McCarthy of California was conservative enough, are demanding a Speaker for themselves. The Freedom Caucus includes about 40 Republicans, enough to prevent any Republican they vote against from winning the Speakership.

Who are these few dozen House Republicans? They are nearly all men, who sit on the far right in Congress. They include most of the most conservative Republicans; their center is far to the right of Republicans in the House. Their founding members had belonged to the Republican Study Committee, which since 1973 has operated within the House as a “conservative watchdog” on the right side of the Party. It now has 170 members, about 2/3 of the whole Republican caucus. That was too big a tent for the Freedom Caucus, who did not want to work with Republicans more moderate than themselves. In January, they announced their split from the Republican Study Committee in the midst of a House debate about funding the Department of Homeland Security. The Freedom Caucus threatened to shut down Homeland Security funding if their demands were not met.

Despite their defeat in that contest, now they are after a bigger goal, the Speakership itself. They prepared a questionnaire for possible Speaker candidates. “Would you ensure that the House-passed appropriations bills do not contain funding for Planned Parenthood, unconstitutional amnesty, the Iran deal and ObamaCare?” was one question. The Freedom Caucus insists on “full repeal of Obamacare” and impeachment of the IRS Commissioner.

They insured that McCarthy could not win the vote by endorsing Daniel Webster of Florida on Oct. 7, who has been in Congress only 4 years. His reelection is threatened, because a court says his district has been gerrymandered to produce a safe Republican district and must be redrawn.

What do other Republicans say about these rebels of the right? During the DHS funding fight, Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York called them “this self-righteous delusional wing of the party, which leads us over the cliff.” Republican Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania repeated the term “self-delusion”. Trey Gowdy from South Carolina, rated in the middle of the Republican Party, said, “I think the House is bordering on ungovernable right now.”

California Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican whom Heritage Action gives a 90 percent conservative rating, much higher than the average Congressional Republican, recently quit the Freedom Caucus. He characterized their politics as “a willingness, indeed, an eagerness, to strip the House Republican majority of its ability to set the House agenda.”

The so-called Freedom Caucus represents the Republican voters who have put three people with no government experience among them at the top of the polls. They don’t like government, period. With a fervor unmatched in recent American history, they hate everything that our government has done since Barack Obama was elected. They hate anyone who plays any role in governing, even a conservative one.

Should we allow one of them so near the White House?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 20, 2015

It Can Take A Long Time

My dogs spotted a squirrel the other day and couldn’t help lunging forward, even though they knew they were leashed. That made me think about men who treat women the way dogs treat squirrels.

Some men want to physically engage every woman they see who fits their image of sexy. They interrupt everything, get too close, use their hands, and won’t take “no” for an answer. When it doesn’t work, they try it again with another woman. Over and over again they manhandle women, because they think about them as the dog thinks of the squirrel, as lesser but attractive beings who must be chased.

There used to be lots of guys like that. When I grew up in the 1960s, they attracted everyone’s attention. Other guys watched them in awe and wonder at their boldness. At a time of much less free love, no matter what their success rate, they gained a reputation as very good at what they did. Their form of masculinity was taken for granted as an acceptable variant, not for every man, but worthy of respect and sometimes envy.

Other men, observers of this uninvited and unwelcome pursuit, were torn between two conflicting masculine imperatives: the ancient code of chivalry obligating men to protect women in danger, and a very modern respect for tough, aggressive, egotistical and physically dominant forms of serial conquest. The hunters may not have been universally admired by other men, but they were not recognized as the creeps we now see.

Before the 1960s, there were a few voices decrying the connection between female inequality and male sexual violence. As early as 1641, the Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay colony included a prohibition against wife-beating: “Everie marryed woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband.” But as late as 1970, male predators could still assume that few would try to stop them.

We still see men like that, but their days of unashamed hunting are gone. They are much more careful in their use of their hands, and perhaps more sophisticated in employing wealth, status, connections and unscrupulousness as persuasive arguments. But two things have really changed. The social approval of men which had surrounded them has turned sour. And the willingness of women to tolerate the boors is disappearing.

The species of predatory men is in decline, here and across the globe, because they were defeated culturally and politically. As our attitudes about men and women moved toward equality, laws were passed which attacked the hunting rights of men. The first significant national legislation to reduce violence against women was passed in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act. That law attracted bipartisan support, but the next year conservative Congressmen tried to cut its funding.

Neanderthal Man is not yet extinct. Their species keeps getting infusions of new life, mostly by the fundamentalist wings of the West’s major religions. Conservative politicians give a nod toward traditional male superiority every time they lionize openly misogynist commentators, like Rush Limbaugh.

Men will continue hunting women for the foreseeable future. Changing cultural assumptions developed over millennia is a slow and frustrating business. The ideological argument that women should be equal to men may have won the public debate, but human habits go much deeper than rational discourse. Those who demand gender equality occupy the moral high ground, but below, in the bushes, the struggle goes on. Conservatives still fight rearguard actions against equality in pay, in child care, and in politics itself. One third of Democrats in Congress are women, but only one tenth of Republican legislators.

None of the momentous social-cultural-political shifts of my lifetime are over. Each step toward equality faces obstacles which have been built over centuries. The more that ancient texts are revered, the harder it is to find a path to equality. But the progress during my lifetime has been breath-taking.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 13, 2015

Bugs in the Volkswagen System

It looks like the biggest corporate scandal of 2015 will be the cheating by Volkswagen on emissions tests, which might come to be called Volksgate. The scale is breath-taking. Since 2008 Volkswagen made 11 million diesel cars designed to cheat on emissions tests. These cars could never have passed the tests. They produce 10 to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides.

Cheating on an unprecedented scale was a simple business decision. Volkswagen executives had spent billions to develop a new diesel engine, but executives realized it could not meet the pollution standards of many nations, including the US and Germany. They could have scrapped the new model. Instead they put a software “bug” into the cars’ computers.

The fix was clever. Emissions tests are done under controlled laboratory conditions. The software could sense a test was being conducted by monitoring speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the position of the steering wheel. Then the engine was put into a kind of safety mode, where power and performance were reduced, cutting down on emissions. Back on the road, the engines were switched to “normal”, chugging out nitrogen oxides. The secret switch is called a “defeat device”. Meanwhile, VW created a huge advertising campaign about its cars’ low emissions.

Staff in the EPA already suspected something was wrong in 2014. An organization devoted to reducing air pollution and slowing climate change, the International Council on Clean Transportation, commissioned West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels Engines and Emissions to test VW diesel cars. The results showed very high emissions. The EPA questioned Volkswagen, who claimed the results were just a technical problem. Only after another year passed did VW admit it had bugged the cars.

The dishonesty of the top leadership at Volkswagen will be expensive for them – who wants to buy, or even drive, a Volkswagen now? The international bank Credite Suisse estimates the scandal will cost the company from $30 to $80 billion, about the same cost as BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

But it’s also expensive for us. There are 500,000 American cars which have been spewing poisonous gases into our atmosphere. Their owners had no idea, but now their cars have lost significant value.

There is a reason for the legal limitations on nitrogen oxides. Every year they kill nearly 6000 people in London alone, and 50,000 people in the US by weakening the heart. That’s now, many years after those and other deadly emissions gases have been limited in the US and Great Britain. Since the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1963, emissions of major pollutants including nitrogen dioxide have been reduced by 72%.

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press wrote an article published in many newspapers across the country, including here in Jacksonville, quoting scientists who estimate that the extra pollution from VWs will probably cause an additional 5 to 20 American deaths every year. That number comes from complex computer models which consider data about which VWs have been on the road, regional air movements, and disease studies, along with estimates of how much pollution the cars actually spewed out. Hence the large range from 5 to 20 as an estimate.

Who knows how many people will be sicker, what additional medical bills will be incurred, how many hours of work will be lost?

Republicans today hate the EPA, even though it was created by President Richard Nixon. Donald Trump said in 2011 that “the EPA is an impediment to both growth and jobs.” Carly Fiorina says the EPA must “roll back” regulations. Jeb Bush has proposed a sweeping rollback of regulations on the environment and the defunding of the EPA. Ted Cruz has introduced a bill in Congress to prevent the EPA from regulating nitrogen oxide, as well as many other pollutants.

Regulations and regulators save lives. Just between 1980 and 2000, reductions in air pollution led to an increase in life expectancy of 7 months. The government workers in the EPA saved future lives by discovering VW’s cheating.

That truth is buried by conservatives under constant attacks on the EPA. They are right that regulations cost businesses money. Reducing air pollution and preventing oil spills are expensive for giant corporations, who pass their costs to the consumer.

Would we rather live in Beijing, where normal people wear gas masks, people are warned not to go out on bad days, and schools are building artificial domes to keep children away from the air? Should we go back to more polluted air and shorter lives?

Without regulations on our food, our water, and our air, America would be less healthy. Why do Republicans want that?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 6, 2015