On July 5th, the Senate was scheduled to vote on an important climate change bill. Senate Republicans, desperate to halt the ballot, insisted that the 492-page document be read aloud, citing it as revenge for slow Democratic movement on President Bush’s judicial nominees. Nine hours later, the Senate voted, and the bill failed 27-28.
On July 19th, a Senate bill to fund solar power initiatives failed after a Senate vote marked the ending of a lengthy Republican filibuster. Only five Republicans had voted against ending the filibuster.
In 2000, I followed my mother to the polls to watch her vote for her presidential, congressional, and local candidates. Ten years old, I remember looking through the ballot, as she taught me how to vote. With your pen, you fill in the bubble next to where it says “Democrat.”
Two days ago, on my way into the subway, an Obama campaign representative stopped me. I said I would listen to what he had to say, if he would listen to me. He told me that Obama had an economic plan to increase minimum wage and support the middle class. He told me Obama had strength and character, that he didn’t accept financing from special interest groups. He told me that Obama opposed the war in Iraq, and would withdraw our troops within sixteen months.
So I told him that I wasn’t going to vote for Obama, that I opposed any candidate who endorsed the PATRIOT Act and that America was too precious to me and to those around me to be lost among a partisan fog. I said I opposed Congress’ own special interests and any candidate for “change” that would neglect Senate votes, opportunities to change public policy, only to campaign for himself. I told the representative that I was voting for Mike Gravel and that he should too. When he looked at me, confused, and asked to which party Gravel belonged, I told him he was a Libertarian. The agent told me that someday I might grow up.
In George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” he said “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” Just so, I believe, a trust in a party, is a distrust in oneself and in one’s capacity to think. I believe, the capacity of citizens is great enough for citizens to make their own laws by majority and replace Congress. But I also believe that there is a paradox that most voters fall into: lamenting partisan actions in Washington, yet sponsoring their party’s candidates with exclusion.
We must resist that urge, and we must remember not to believe what we are always told. The opposite of partisanship is not bipartisanship. When media networks refer to congressional bills as “bipartisan,” they mean that most bureaucrats support them. They are what we ought to call bills for incumbents, and the incumbents, those with the control of our country and the mutual goal of staying in office, are a faction among themselves.
Don’t forget that your political party, if you have one, is only a brand, something of an organization or a company created to help the elite of government keep it from those who disagree with them. No matter how many times Senator Clinton insists “the Democratic Party is a family,” don't believe her. It’s corporation, much like Wal-Mart or Microsoft, that looks to monopolize your district and render your vote meaningless.
So far, our parties have only filled our government. We still have the power to vote, and it’s not one that gerrymandering and slimy diplomacy have rendered obsolete just yet. Indeed, parties reform when their representatives’ collective re-elections are in jeopardy. Even if you can’t bring yourself to vote against your loyalty and your parents’ loyalty and their parents’ loyalty before that, you can vote against your incumbent. If you don’t like what has been happening in your district, you may have the power to change it; you may be able to change who leads you. But you also may not have that right for much longer, or soon it may be useless, merely ceremonial, like it has become in Zimbabwe. So before you lose it, use it, and don’t waste it. If you have an allegiance to this country, you don’t have one to a family and you definitely don’t have one to a party. Don’t make voting a formality.
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