The USA is not a Democracy

Right now, as I write this, the United States government is not a democracy. In different ways, both chambers of Congress operate under principles of minority rule, or at least minority vetoes. No other democracy on Earth operates similarly. Not our “Mother Country” England. Not Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, any of the Nordic democracies, South Africa, Spain, or the UK as a whole. Not even India, with all its divisive and dangerous Hindu nationalism.

Our American media have been spectacularly negligent in failing to point out and emphasize these basic facts. They continue to fail us as their chattering classes report the fateful race for House Speaker like a sporting event. What they should be reporting is how failure to preserve majority rule has led us to this juncture.

Ten years ago, I wrote an essay explaining how minority rule is a fact in the US and how it works. Not much has changed in the interim. Instead, our national division, indecision, disorder and our consequent weakness have all surged.

The globe’s sharks—Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and, yes, China and Saudi Arabia—are circling. They are waiting with various degrees of patience to see just how divided, weak and indecisive we will become. If we continue on our downward path, big wars like those that tortured the last century are inevitable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas-Israel war are just the beginning, as the weakness of Netanyahu’s bumbling right wing spreads to us and other once-strong and united democracies.

My decade-old essay on our deviance from majority rule was too long. An entirely separate blog on our minority rule is virtually unknown. So I’m going to make this post as short as I can. The defects in our system are now as clear and telling as a gut punch.

In the House, the Republicans have had an anti-majority rule for nearly three decades. It’s loosely called the “Hastert Rule” after Denny Hastert, a former high-school basketball coach who became a Republican Speaker of the House during the 1990s and 2000s.

When Republicans are in the majority and have the Speakership, no bill or proposal reaches the House floor for discussion or a vote unless it enjoys majority support among the Republican conference. When the whole House is split between Democrats and Republican nearly fifty-fifty, as it has been now for decades, this means that a majority of Republicans, or 26% of the entire House, can block any bill even from discussion, as well as passage. This procedure, in effect, gives a one-quarter-plus-one minority of the whole House a minority veto over any important business, including legislation.

To my knowledge, this rule is unwritten. Apparently Hastert or his predecessor Newt Gingrich dreamed it up out of whole cloth, as a means to enforce unity and discipline among Republicans. Democratic Speakers have occasionally followed a similar practice out of misguided “self-defense,” but with far less consistency and obstinacy.

The Senate’s defects in democracy are much better known. They are also much worse. With modern electronic means, you can search the text of our Constitution, and even our Declaration of Independence, exhaustively. Nowhere in these Founding documents will you find the words “filibuster,” or “hold” (meaning individually forced delay or veto). Yet for at least two centuries, our Senate has had a rule that lets any single senator, for any reason of for no reason, stop debate and consideration of any bill, or any presidential appointment that requires Senate approval.

In the old days, a senator had to speak to exhaustion and hold the Senate floor in order to gum up the works. (The process was portrayed in the famous Jimmy Stewart film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”) Today, all a senator has to do is hand a note of his or her objection to the Senate Majority Leader, of either party. That note has the effect of vetoing the proceedings objected to in the entire Senate. This “veto by note” arose out of the filibuster, on the apparent reasoning that it would be too trying to make individual senators stand and hold the floor for days like Jimmy Stewart in order to block the proceedings of what is self-described as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Technically, the hold note only produces a “hold,” or delay, in the proceedings. But the Senate is perpetually busy. In effect, the “hold” puts the proceeding it objects to at the back of the calendar, where it never comes up for debate or a vote. During the previous decade, the Senate changed this “every senator has a one-person veto” by allowing most Executive and Supreme Court appointments, but not legislation or appointments of judges to lower federal courts, to clear the Senate on a simple majority vote.

Thus do the “Hastert Rule” in the House and the filibuster-cum-holds in the Senate pervert what are supposed to be majority-rule democratic chambers into a minority veto in the House and a single-senator veto of any bill and certain appointment approvals in the Senate. None of this bears even a passing resemblance to the strict majority rule that prevailed in ancient Greek’s direct democracy or ancient Rome’s representative one (aka, “Republic”).

If any Roman senator had tried anything like our single-member veto, he would probably have met Julius Caesar’s fate. Yet right now, today, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, is holding up senatorial approval of close to three hundred presidential appointments of military officers. He comes from one of our poorest, least industrialized, least educated and least healthy states. And he himself has never served in our military. His “holds” have the effect of hollowing out our military chain of command so that, if the Demagogue wins the White House next year, he can fire the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of our Joint Chiefs. Then, with the lower chain of command pre-purged by Tuberville, he can install his sycophants, cronies and lackeys. This is precisely how democracies fail, with a once-professional and non-political military subverted from within by clever demagogues.

Tuberville says he’s creating this command chaos just to keep our military from paying for abortions for females who serve. But who knows what’s really in his mind? As the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, a man is presumed to intend the natural consequences of his acts. Having the great middle of our military chain of command vacant for a new president to fill has obvious consequences, both for current weakness and future command-packing with pliable extremists.

But I digress. The simple fact is that we do not have simple majority rule in either chamber of Congress. We have a minority veto in the House and an “any senator” veto in the Senate. Both encourage obstinacy and extremism over cooperation and compromise. Both hinder even simple things from getting done.

Perhaps a future, larger Democratic majority in the Senate can get rid of the filibuster and holds once and for all. But that’s unlikely anytime soon for the simple reason that filibusters and holds increase each individual senator’s personal power. Those from backward and economically weak states like Alabama gain power far out of proportion to their states’ contribution to the nation’s strength. With minority rule, the weak lead the strong.

All this bears on the current contest for House Speaker. After the second post-McCarthy vote, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries of New York led Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, by thirteen votes. Jeffries had a plurality, but not yet a majority of the whole House.

Jordan is not just an ordinary Republican, if there remains such a thing in this age of extremism. He’s a perpetually enraged champion of extremists and division. Legislatively speaking, he is a midget bomb-thrower. If made Speaker, he will no doubt observe the “Hastert Rule” religiously, thereby converting our House into a “just say no” body without principles, programs or direction. In contrast, if Rep. Jeffries wins, he will seek bipartisan consensus where possible, as he has done under Speaker Pelosi’s mentorship. If as successful as she, he will produce legislation acceptable to a bipartisan majority and move the nation forward.

It bears noting that making Jeffries Speaker will not give Democrats free reign because they constitute only a minority of the House. All a Jeffries Speakership will do is dramatically increase the chances for bipartisan compromise.

A few other facts are worth recalling. First, in a real democracy, good things can happen with small margins. As Speaker, Pelosi got “Obamacare” through the House with only three votes to spare. All who have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or under the federally-subsidized expansions of Medicaid that it made possible, owe their health care to the tiny majority rule that Pelosi, as Speaker, carefully cultivated.

Under former-Speaker Pelosi’s leadership, President Biden and Speaker-candidate Jeffries accomplished extraordinary things, even in our time of extreme polarization. President Biden signed several Covid relief bills, the long-delayed infrastructure bill, the badly-named “Inflation Reduction Act,” which jump-started electrifying our energy system with subsidies, and subsidies for Chip, vaccine and farm production. He and Pelosi, with Jeffries as her second-in-command, got our country moving again, by working across the aisle and passing much-needed legislation to make us stronger, more energy-independent, and less subject to the Russian-Saudi-Venezuelan cartel’s control of global oil prices.

Politics, they say, is the art of the practical. In a time of terrible division, hate and disorder here at home, Speaker Pelosi and Speaker-candidate Jeffries, supporting President Biden, made our nation stronger and better despite the opposition of pols like Jordan and Tuberville and the Fox propaganda juggernaut.

It will take an electoral revolution to put enough Democrats in Congress to restore majority rule to both the House and the Senate. That may happen next November. In the meantime, we can create a semblance of majority rule—and signal our global rivals and enemies that our division and weakness are not terminal—by bringing majority, bipartisan rule back to the House. We can do that now, by the simple expedient of electing Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker.

He needs only six more votes. Whatever it takes to persuade six more Republican House members to provide them is worth the price. The global sharks are circling abroad, as are the fascists here at home. And what our horrible last century teaches—as do Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ recent terror assault—is that weakness, division and extremism invite invasion, war, devastation and hard times, not to mention accelerated planetary heating.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Black Leaders Matter

There’s a lot to bewail in this time of terrorism war, discord, planetary immolation and general chaos. Our Rogue ex-president has escaped justice for all his long, lawless and bullying life. He threatens to recapture the White House and take “retribution” on those who oppose him.

If he wins the presidency again, our democracy will end, and many of the best of us might flee. He would replace our dedicated public servants with cronies, sycophants and lackeys, just as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Castro did before him. His path to tyranny is well-trodden and clear.

Who stands in his way?

Republicans in Congress have failed to do their jobs. Our media have failed miserably to promote facts and truth. On the pretext of being “objective,” they have compared flawed small-d democrats with extremists, would-be tyrants, demagogues and oligarchs bent on a tyranny of “freedom”— their freedom to enrich themselves as they subjugate the rest of us.

Thus have our media equated extremism with politics as usual and truth with lies. They’ve profited from amplifying disinformation and nonsense, treating them all as part of the business commodity of “news.” They promote what brings them profit—what’s surprising, startling, terrifying and enraging—with far too little regard for civic virtue or foreseeable consequences.

So who still stands between us and the Abyss?

Besides President Biden and his team and our (barely) Democratic Senate, there are just four lone prosecutors. Their names are Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis.

Three are Black, and two are Black women. Day by day, surrounded by “security” they would rather not have in their lives, they bear the onus of death threats, vilification, and mindless enmity. They toil long hours with the sordid details of the Rogue’s many assaults on decency, honesty, and civic virtue as they do the hard work of restoring the Rule of Law. Our collective future hangs on their daily grind.

That’s not all. Our two top military leaders are Lloyd J. Austen III, our Secretary of Defense, and General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs. Both are Black

You don’t have to ask whether they are qualified. Since Harry Truman integrated the Army in 1948, our American military has become the biggest meritocracy in our nation. It’s a place where men and women denied other options can rise to the top by displaying brains, competence, courage, and dedication in the service of our country. And if you doubt that, then you must at least acknowledge the simple facts of life: Black leaders still have to be twice as smart and work twice as hard as their white counterparts to reach the top.

In this dismal time, there is something more: a unique symbolic value in the Blackness of our two top military leaders. Here at home, and perhaps everywhere, white supremacy and right-wing extremism go hand in hand. Having superbly qualified Black leaders in the top two spots in the world’s strongest military will move white supremacists and many right-wing extremists to self-select out. Many of them will leave military service on their own initiative, without the need for chain-of-command purging, litigation, or special effort of any kind.

Let them practice their vile ideologies in rogue militia drills with small arms in the hills of Idaho. Our heavy weapons, and our nukes, will stay in loyal, safe and steady hands, led by top Black commanders. (This is yet another reason to break the one-man embargo on military appointments by Republican Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who never served himself. These reliable top leaders must be able to pick subordinates they trust, in order to insure a complete non-extremist chain of command.)

None of this is an accident. Nor is it God working in mysterious ways. It’s simply cause and effect.

For the last four centuries, Black people and their ancestors have struggled mightily, often alone, to taste the fruits of freedom and equality and enjoy the pursuit of happiness as our Founders promised—albeit not to their ancestors. Since our Civil War—still our history’s bloodiest—they have striven ceaselessly for the benefits it promised but never fully delivered. By and large, they have met rejection, marginalization, exclusion, and often atrocious white terror.

But they have kept at it. Yes, they have had their Black Panthers and their revolutionaries. But they have mostly kept their Eyes on the Prize: full, peaceful acceptance as equal citizens in our flawed but still workable democratic republic. As they have overcome formidable obstacles and begun to enjoy some success, they have never lost sight of the value of what they seek, unlike many of the rest of us.

So this white geezer can only marvel at a beautiful irony. Our democracy’s prospects for survival as a democracy—and the continuation of our Rule of Law—now hang largely on the work of four harried but devoted prosecutors, three of whom are Black. Our efforts to keep extremists from infiltrating our military now rest on the command—and the symbolism—of our two top Black military leaders.

For all his hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson would have savored this irony. He gave us the goal, but not the example. Now, people whose likes he once enslaved are bringing us all home.

In Jefferson’s day, science was just beginning. Today we know, with the certainty of modern microbiology, that all human DNA is 99.9% identical. We are all essentially the same at birth. That’s what Jefferson, unconsciously and unknowingly, signaled when he wrote “all . . . are created equal.” What matters is what’s in our heads and hearts, not the color or texture of our skin, hair or eyes.

As the extraordinary Black leaders of our time struggle to restore our democracy, I feel deep gratitude and admiration. In my minds eye, I see a long line of eminent Black ghosts standing and cheering their lungs out. They include Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, MLK, Thurgood Marshall, and Colin Powell. They include also Emmett Till—with the wide, innocent young eyes of his famous photo—as special emissary for the thousands of victims of white terror.

But most of all, I savor the irony of descendants of the most oppressed among us rising with devotion, skill and valor to advance our sacred national values and keep us from the fate of other mighty democracies that fell to venal forces. Under their leadership, we can avoid the fate of ancient Rome and the Weimar Republic. Those of us whose ancestors have struggled for four centuries to grasp the sweetest fruits of democracy and decency are not about to let them slip away.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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