Voting Philosophy: Part 3

This Election Season

Now I’m faced with what seems to be the same choice all over again: elect the lesser of two evils. To everyone else, it seems, one is far worse than the other. To me, it's not so clear.

Consider our options:

On the one side we have a challenger who was brought to the fore by a reactionary and emotionally vocal group of grassroots individuals. 

Romney is wildly out of touch with the American public and seems to only find his justification from polling and then pandering to the Tea Party activists. He chokes on his silver spoon every couple of days and then spends his time defending ridiculously stupid statements when he should be using that time to present an actual plan for our economy. He's against the Affordable Care Act, but he doesn't seem to have anything to offer to a medical insurance and health care industry that is collapsing on top of its patients.

He does seem to appreciate the role of entrepreneurs in stabilizing our economy and the fact that government too often gets in the way of innovation. But he doesn't seem prepared to recognize the dangerous role that large and wealthy companies play in setting policies in this country, policies that protect their own interest while hindering the development of overall well-being. He does want to lower the tax burdens on small businesses and the middle class, but he wants to do so by supporting those huge donors and companies that support his campaign. 

He also truly seems to not care about huge swaths of the American population. His 47% statement has been taken out of context a lot recently, but even in context, he admits that he isn't really interested in addressing the concerns of those who would never vote for him. He truly does not care about gay marriage, but he's willing to pander to the bigots who do care if it gets him elected. I don't think he cares either way about women's rights or the right to choice, but if it will get him elected, he'll cut right through the issues. (And I'm not talking about the issue of government funding abortion on demand, so don't try and color the argument that way. Women's health issues are dramatically being cut by insurance companies with no claim to religious freedom or government funding. That's another post, though.)

Romney is a politician--nothing more and nothing less. He will treat power much the same as any other that has been elected in recent years. A vote for Romney, though, will be seen as an endorsement of everything he stands for. Even if someone votes for him because they support his economic policies, their vote will be seen as an implicit endorsement or at least acceptance of his stand on social issues as well.

So let's consider his opponent.

President Obama rode into office on a riptide of enthusiasm. His message of hope and change was exactly what a worried and depressed nation needed. We had great hopes for him and his presidency. He was going to change things, right?

Well let's look at the record.

Gay marriage? Finally! We have a president who supports marriage equality. Granted, it took him until this year to actually come forward and say so. And even then, he refused to go further than to say that he personally supported marriage equality. He still holds the official position that it is an issue for the states to decide. So... a qualified success?

Healthcare? Managed to pass a huge bill that has made absolutely no one happy. The process it followed to get passed was all but completely illegal, it may actually increase the cost of healthcare for almost everyone involved, and it served as the ultimate gadfly to coalesce an unhappy right into a powerful voting bloc.

International relations? Strained at best. Obama skips out on meetings with world leaders and allies to appear on Jimmy Kimmel and the View. At times he seems to care more about posturing and electioneering than attending to the duties demanded of him as a world leader. It's not to say he doesn't care about riots in Libya or Syria, but when he calls casualties "road bumps" he comes across that way.

Increased transparency?  Obama has dramatically failed on his promises for increased transparency while claiming the mantle of the most transparent administration in history. He has actively prosecuted whistle blowers, failed to provide open documents on many issues even when ordered to do so by Congress, and he has invoked executive privilege in 4 years as much as Bush did in 8 years. Freedom of Information Act filings are routinely ignored or supplied with heavily blacked out reports that obscure the intent of the law.

No bid contracts? Actually up in the past 4 years. Guantanamo Bay? Still open for business. Regulations? Increased. Government spending? Dramatically up. The deficit? Growing at a record rate. The economy? Still tanking.

I know a lot of these issues he has little to no control over. So let's look at some things he does have control over.

Extrajudicial detention? Obama has argued consistently for the National Defense Authorization Act which allows him to ignore things like the 4th and 5th amendments. Habeas Corpus has been suspended for countless combatants and even American citizens. Indefinite detention is now a power that the president can unilaterally employ.

Extrajudicial executions? The president has authorized and defended the use of drone strikes against enemy combatants and American citizens alike. The Defense Department has defended the use of drones saying that there is no geographic limitation on the use of drones and that "US citizens do not enjoy immunity" from targeting. They argue that such executions are not illegal because they are used in self defense. Considering these practices have been used against mourners at funerals and killing rescuers for injured on the ground, one must question their reasoning and a president that would support and condone these practices. The existence of a "hit list" is likewise terrifying to me. 

Respect for States Rights? Well he says he wants to leave marriage equality to the states, right? But when he's confronted with an actual issue of states rights, Obama and his administration have failed miserably. Several states have approved medical marijuana and have licensed select dispensaries and clinics to provide the substance to those with a prescription. In response, Obama has specially ordered his ATF, DEA, IRS, and DOJ to raid these clinics and arrest anyone operating there. They confiscate goods, money, and property through asset forfeiture, costing legal business owners hundreds of thousands of dollars. All of this is done though they the dispensary operators are working legally under state law, his administration has said that federal drug law trumps the issue.

These are serious violations of civil and human rights on display. Couple these policies with Obama's financial policies, and there's almost no way I can vote for him in good conscience.

Voting Philosophy: Part 2

A New Approach to My Vote

I swore to myself that I would not give my voice to another candidate I could not support. In 2004 I voted not for Bush, because I was already disappointed in his performance. I voted against Kerry.

That was a mistake.

I felt partially responsible for the illegal, unethical, or sometimes just philosophically unwise decisions that Bush made in the next four years. Though intellectually and academically I disagree with the political philosophy that says that elected representatives are the tools of the electorate (because they clearly are their own operatives and have extreme distances between the voters and their actions), I still felt responsible. Because of the way I voted combined the way millions of others voted, Bush believed he had a moral mandate from the people to act in the same way he had been for the previous four years.

I vowed in the next election to vote only for someone I could believe in and throw my true support behind them. I wouldn’t be someone who voted against the other guy or who voted for the lesser evil. I would only give my voice, my support, my piece of power to someone who would exercise it in a way I could condone.

That didn’t mean I expected someone to come along who would never make mistakes. Every candidate becomes someone else when they get into office. They have to make hard decisions and compromise many of their ideals to get the job done.

But I wanted to vote for someone who would put the right ideals forth, who would act in the interest of all instead of in the interest of a few, who would rightly understand the role of government and not overreach into the bedroom, into personal conversations, into the private realms of citizens. I wanted a candidate I could at least believe in and who would respect what our nation was founded on. I wanted a candidate I could vote for and not be ashamed of two years into his or her presidency.

That candidate did not come.

2008 Election

In 2008, the atmosphere around the election was intense and even more partisan than I remember the 2004 election being. People who had never cared about politics before were ready to get involved. Friends volunteered for campaigns, donated their time and money, and got truly involved in political life.

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia studying political theory and focusing, in part, on the isolation of modern America and the increasing effects of individualism on political involvement, I was ecstatic! As a member of the voting public, I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I got swept up a bit in the fervor of Obama’s presidency. He held such promise, and he supported overturning many of the policies I hated from the Bush presidency. He swore to increase transparency in the federal government, opening up the secrecy and rooting out corruption with just the light of exposure. He said that there would be no more “no-bid” contracts for federal projects, ensuring that spending would come down and flunkies would stop being rewarded. He was going to shut down Guantanamo bay and end the detainment of anyone without habeas corpus. He was going to expand the role of science and diminish the role of favors in government decision making, address global warming, clear red tape for small business owners, and use independent watchdog groups to address political corruption!

Yet still Obama’s campaign, though dazzling in its enthusiasm and its historic significance for race relations, fell flat for me in a number of ways. There was so much talk of Hope and Change, talk of moving forward in such a momentous way, and the idea of a fresh new day for our country, that I grew nervous. Obama had no experience on the national stage, and was certainly unprepared for international relations. We had already seen what a candidate with no world experience could do in the aftermath of 9-11, that I was worried someone who ran on a purely reactionary foreign policy platform would do to already unstable relations around the world.

On top of that, the economy was already in the worst downturn most people alive had ever seen. Several industries were hemorrhaging jobs at a terrifying rate, and Congress had decided earlier that year that the best decision was to bail out every business that was “too big to fail.” My free market economic background and my (admittedly limited) understanding of the limitations of fiscal stimulus and government spending made me question a candidate who could base so much of his response to this crisis on more bailouts, stimulus, and government spending. I didn’t believe that Obama would do what was right for our country when it came to either our foreign or our domestic policy.

Granted, McCain would probably do no better. He had experience, sure, but my God did he run a terrible campaign. Sarah Palin was a mistake. Posturing over how concerned he was for our economy and then failing to show up for key votes in the senate was a mistake. His statements on immigration reform were mistakes. His inability to stay consistent with his message was a huge mistake.

Sure, he had the experience, and his foreign policy credentials were among the best of any potential candidates. Yet, the issues of the day were the economy, jobs, and the bailouts. He couldn’t stay on message and assure the people that he would be a strong leader, and he didn’t give much hope to voters desperate for just that.

The fact that Sarah Palin overshadowed him at every turn made it even worse.

I couldn’t vote for McCain, and I couldn’t vote for Obama. Whoever won I knew that I would be burned again. Neither of these men would represent me the way I wanted to be represented. They both would act in ways that I would be ashamed to admit that I had voted for them.

So I abstained.

I filled out my ballot for every other office on the ticket, but I left the office of president blank.

((But what about Bob Barr? I hear you ask. He’s libertarian and surely would give you at least someone to vote for.

I’ve met Bob Barr. Bob Barr has eaten at a restaurant I worked at as a teenager and failed to leave any tip, even after he was rude and demanding and a real ass to eighteen-year-old me. That alone would convince me not to vote for him.

However, he’s also an insufferable ass as a politician. Though he recognized what the Republican Party had become back in about 2003 and became a vocal critic of policies like the PATRIOT Act and the dangerous and politically backward policies in the Drug War, he approached them in a way I found ideologically appealing but interpersonally erratic. He relied on a number of attacks and contrary approaches to politics and has behaved in a number of political arenas as one of those crazy libertarians. I do not believe he has the temperament or composure to represent our country as President.

That and he stiffed my table 11 years ago.))

Voting Philosophy: Part 1

(In order to avoid inflicting a huge ridiculous post that no one will read in its entirety explaining my voting philosophy, I'm going to be posting over a few days exactly why I vote the way I do and why I will not be voting for Obama or Romney in the next election. If you just want the outright explanation, wait another day or so. I'll get there. I promise.)

A good friend of mine who works for the Tax Foundation and whom I met through a summer internship in Washington posted something political on his wall. He explained why he would be voting for the libertarian ticket in November, and why he thinks other people should as well. Seeing as the fellowship we both attended was sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and is an organization dedicated to the spread of free market ideas, libertarian philosophy, and principles of classical liberal thought, this was unsurprising. Seeing as I (occasionally) write in a blog called "The Sane Libertarian," it was unsurprising that I would share such views and plan to vote for Gary Johnson and Jim Gray.

However, I have gotten a good deal of response to that posting, both on my Facebook wall, through messages from friends, and even from some family members. Several of them wonder how I could, in this MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL ELECTIONS (at least that is the consensus), vote for anyone but their favored candidate. It is utterly unconscionable to many that I could "waste" my vote and support someone who will obviously not win this election. What is worse, though, is the idea that I could not use my vote to help stop the evil of whatever party they are opposed to.

Since I get this argument from both sides, and friends on both sides have asked why I am voting the way I am, I have decided to lay out some of my voting philosophy here. I will also explain why I will vote for neither Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, nor any other candidates the Democrats or Republicans nominate any time soon.

My First Presidential Election

I turned 18 in 2001 and just missed taking part in the epic, game-changing election of 2000. It was the first year I became truly aware of politics, and it couldn't have been a more exciting time. Book after book analyzing the election where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in a court case convinced me how important every vote truly is. If an election can turn on a single state and come down to a handful of votes in a single county, and then those votes can be accepted or rejected by the highest courts, then truly it matters whether every person votes.

In 2004, then, i was ready. I was in my final year of college having majored in government and philosophy, so I was more well-read on the subject. I knew the ins and outs of the electoral college, and I knew the importance of researching my candidates. I read everything I could get my hands on to learn what Bush and Kerry were all about.

I read Bush's biography and thought he sounded like a decent person in a tough job. I thought Kerry was a bit out of touch with the everyman, but that his intelligence would serve him well. I hated many of the policies Bush had pursued in the aftermath of his wars, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the compromises that had been made when it came to our civil liberties. But then, I thought Kerry would do no better. Foreign policy was the topic du jour, and I truly believed that Kerry couldn't handle the job.

So I voted to reelect President Bush.

(Cue the shaming now.)

For the next four years, I had to live with that decision. Every time President Bush passed another policy that abrogated human rights, every time he gaffed it up and diminished our international reputation, every time he backed legislation like No Child Left Behind, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, I cringed. But I also felt responsible. I had placed my name, my vote, my integrity behind this man. I had been one of the millions who gave him the power to do these things. All because I believed Kerry would have been worse.

I still believe that to be true. As painful as parts of Bush's presidency were, I truly believe that a Kerry/Edwards administration would have been besieged by worse decisions, scandals, and corruption.

But I had to admit to voting to keep in power someone I did not believe in. I voted for a man who was willing to compromise on the integrity of our Constitution in the name of Homeland Security. I voted for a man who expanded the power and spending of the federal government, even as he called himself a compassionate conservative. I voted for someone I was already disappointed in just to keep someone else out of office.

And I regretted that vote.

Women and Politics

Recent antics and debates from Rush Limbaugh and Congress have centered much of the recent nationwide political discussion on the issues of contraception, reproductive freedom, and women's rights. Their discussion has focused on the absurd and patently insulting comments by Rush Limbaugh about a single woman, Sandra Fluke, who testified that the government should force her Catholic law school to pay for her contraception. Putting aside the merits of Fluke's advocacy and the constitutionalism of a government mandate on educational, religious, or commercial entities having to pay for health care of any form, let alone enacting policies that violate their beliefs, this debate is sickening.

The debate is sickening because it has only served to focus the nation's attentions on a childish incident of name-calling. It is sickening because one side insists that government should force others to invest, pay for, or otherwise provide goods and services of any kind. It is sickening because it distracts from the very real and very terrifying escalating assault on women in this country.

A recent Facebook debate amongst my friends discussed a YouTube video that decried the "disposability" of males in our society and especially among feminist thinkers and activists. I read the whole debate and while some very interesting and worthwhile points were brought up, the whole debate began to piss me off. Basically the argument said that because men are asked to give up their seats on the lifeboat, to put women's lives above their own due to evolutionary patterns of behavior, because mothers value their sons' emotions less than their daughters' (all points that can be heavily called into question in today's world), that somehow men are shortchanged. The video whined (in pretentious academese) that men are somehow disposable.

And yet, there are those in American society that truly do believe that women are disposable.

(I'm not laying claim to any moral superiority of the following claims, but I do believe that there is a very real human rights issue emerging here. It is completely focused on women biologically and socially, and it has me furious and terrified at the same time.)

You want examples?

How about HB 954, which seeks to redefine abortion after 20 weeks as feticide and make any woman who seeks to terminate her pregnancy after that point as a murderer? It goes further as to make it a criminal act to remove an already deceased fetus from the woman by artificial means. That means a woman who miscarried but whose body did not expel the dead tissue would be forced to carry that with her until her body naturally discarded it or until she and her doctor could prove that it represented an imminent threat to her life or substantial health.

This bill has already passed the Georgia State House by a vote of 102-65 and is currently be heard by the State Senate. That fact alone is infuriating, but it is compounded by the testimony that actually helped convince my representative and many others to vote on it.

Terry England is a representative from Auburn, GA and is one of the sponsors of this bill and he testified in favor of the changes to the law. In his testimony (and I am actually shaking with anger to write this), he compared the experience that women would go through due to this bill--the experience they would have as they miscarried and were forced to hold on to the remains in their own bodies, the experience of being denied access to their own bodies, the experience of being denied the chance to make painful but necessary decisions regarding their own health and well being-- as sad, natural, and equivalent to his own experiences delivering stillborn calves on his farm.

I am not joking.

He didn't stop with that comparison. He goes on to tell of a "salt of the earth" man who says he will gladly give up cockfighting "when those folks down there quit killing babies." As a way to put it in perspective. To frame the debate. Because a "salt of the earth people" will give up killing chickens if the state government will take control of women's bodies.

I am. NOT. Joking.

I'm also not done.

There is an amendment being proposed, also here in Georgia, that will declare that from the moment of conception, from the exact moment of fertilization, an egg is a full human being. This so-called Personhood Amendment would affect the Georgia State Constitution and is being championed by Reps Rick Crawford and Barry Loudermilk. This bill will prohibit any form of abortion, any type of contraception that can interfere with "proper implantation" of a fertilized egg (which includes almost all forms of oral contraceptive, spermicide, and more), and would eliminate in vitro fertilization.

This amendment has been polled across Georgia and has incredibly widespread support.

So far, the proponents insist that women will not be prosecuted for miscarriages, but the very fact that has to be CLARIFIED is a HUGE HUGE HUGE warning sign. They have to explain that "doctors won't be prosecuted for ectopic pregnancies." SERIOUSLY?! As a woman who very much wants to have children in the next year or so, who has known women very close to me who have suffered the unexplainable pain of miscarriage, who have struggled to conceive their own children and had to question the guilt that came with being unable to carry to term, we have a government that is about to tell us that "Yes, it really is your fault when not every fertilized egg in existence comes full term to bring life into the world."

You think I'm kidding?

Consider this case:

In Indiana, a woman is currently being held for attempted feticide and murder. What really happened? Bei Bei Shuai tried to kill herself when her fiance and the baby's father, who also happened to be her business partner in the restaurant they owned and ran together, explained to her that he was married to someone else and was leaving her. He told her this just before Christmas and eight months into her pregnancy. She was devastated and attempted to kill herself by swallowing rat poison bought at her local hardware store.

She survived and gave birth a little more than a week later. Her daughter, however, suffered seizures as a either a result of the rat poison or the treatment her mother received. The child died within a few days. Bei Bei suffered another breakdown and spent a month in a psychiatric ward.

One month later, she was arrested for murder of her child.

The implications for this are staggering, especially when you consider similar cases have moved forward in five other states in this country. As Bei Bei's attorney says, “These laws say there’s one law for pregnant women and another for everyone else,” says Linda Pence, the energetic Indiana lawyer representing Shuai. “For everyone else suicide is a mental health issue. For a pregnant woman, it’s a crime."

If you want to talk about the disposability of individuals, then this is where you start. When there is a separate law for women, when we are compared to farm animals, when our lives stop being our own and our rights cease the moment an egg in our bodies is fertilized, when our right to control our own health and bodies is abrogated by those who have never miscarried or carried a child to term nor will ever understand what that means, when our lives are valued as less, then that is the moment we become disposable.

Privileges versus Rights

There was a very interesting and thought-provoking article published in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal by Lawrence Lindsey. As the former director of the National Economic Council, Lindsey's an experienced and credentialed economist, and he uses many numbers and economic debates to make his points, but at the heart of this article Lindsey tackles a question of political philosophy. Specifically, he discusses the difference between privileges and rights, and the trouble our government seems to be having distinguishing between the two.

Note: I don't agree with everything said in the article. Lindsey seems to get hung up on a few GOP talking points (the percentage of Americans that don't pay income taxes, rebuttal= even though they pay a greater percentage of their income in other taxes; the fact that the rich pay more in income taxes than ever before, rebuttal= even though in truth the rich receive far less of their wealth from income and more from capital gains and other forms of interest and speculation which are taxed far less than ever before). I'm going to concentrate on the question of privileges versus rights, here.

Lindsey begins with Geithner's implication that being an American and living in this country as a free citizen is not a right but rather a privilege. Such thinking is incredibly scary to those who defend freedom and the basic civil rights of life, liberty, and property. (Jefferson deliberately misquoted Locke so as not to inflame the already touchy subject of slave-holding in the Declaration of Independence; it would go on to be debated and included in the Constitution.) To Geithner, Lindsey argues, being an American, owning property, and earning an income are all privileges bestowed upon us by a benevolent government. We must pay for that privilege, and the rich should of course pay more.

Being an American and having the ability to earn a living in a free society, where we are protected by the rule of Law is a right, not a privilege. These rights, as understood by our Founding Fathers and defended with the blood and lives of men and women over the past two and a half centuries, are not gifts from government. We retain them as living human beings and citizens of this nation. We are "endowed by our Creator" with these "inalienable" rights, and we give to government certain limited and just powers to secure our liberty, establish justice, and insure domestic tranquility.

When government exceeds those powers and begins to think of itself as an all-powerful entity that bestows upon us "privileges" of freedom and liberty, of keeping what we earn, of live our lives the way we choose instead of the way we are told, then government has lost its legitimacy.

UPDATE: So, after I wrote this but before I posted it, I came across the fact that Geithner's quote may have been taken out of context. That takes little away from the points I've made above, though. Even if Geithner's words were not exact, the meaning and belief that being an American is a privilege rather than a right is still present in our present government's actions.

BOA Irony

I think this is what we call sweet, delicious irony.

Bank Of America Plaza Auctioned Off For Missing Mortgage Payments

Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in Atlanta, went on the auction block today, in a perfect example of things that go around you know, coming around. How does that medicine taste now, Bank of America? Your landlords missed mortgage mortgage payments and now they have to sell. We're sure that must be soo hard.

....

While the skyscraper isn't owned by Bank of America — nor is BofA the building's main tenant — but we like to think that having your name attached to a huge building in foreclosure must rankle BofA just a teeny bit. In the words of our tipster Jeff, "Is this not sweet justice?"

Not the best PR move. But it certainly is suitable.

Endorsements

Donald Trump announced today to anxiously waiting and speculating media and crowds that he would be endorsing Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination for President of the United States. Newt Gingrich, who was so sure he would get the endorsement, pouted and said that he had received signs that Trump was going to endorse him before Mitt changed his mind. Now everyone is breathlessly waiting to see who Sarah Palin will endorse.

Can someone please tell me why we give a damn?

Seriously, these endorsements from marginal, crazy people are just desperate cries for attention from both the candidates themselves and the people making the endorsement. Trump and Palin never shy away from making absolute spectacles of themselves, and the media shamelessly fawns after them, waiting to see what they're going to say.

And why do we care who Trump is going to vote for? Who cares who Sarah Palin thinks will be a good president? These people are political hacks who failed at their own bids for power.

And yet, Palin is called a "leader of the Tea Party." The candidate I worked for even sought her attention and her endorsement, knowing that simply by having her mention his name or put him up on her website would bring thousands of dollars to his campaign.

WHY?!

The only thing that should be informing our votes is what sort of role these candidates would play if elected into office. What policies will they pursue? What legislation will they veto? How will they conduct themselves in foreign affairs? Will they lead our country with good conscience or will they sell us out to the highest bidders? Will they embarrass on the global stage or will they be leaders we can look back and be proud of? What are their beliefs? Will they address our deficit? Will they limit civil rights? What kind of justice will they nominate for the Supreme Court when Ginsburg retires? What will our country look like under their leadership?

Not, "Who does Sarah Palin or Donald Trump like the best?"!!!