Jeffords jumps ship
Bush's attack vessel springs a fair-sized leak
By Deirdre
Griswold
Anyone the least bit progressive has to be enjoying the
Republican leadership's dismay and disarray over the defection
of Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont. It couldn't have happened to
a nicer party.
The joke in Washington is "Who lost Jeffords?"--a parody on
"Who lost China?," the cry that went up in ruling class
political circles after the triumph of the Chinese Revolution
in 1949. The strategists for U.S. capital had actually believed
that their resounding victory over Japanese imperialism in
World War II, bought with the blood of U.S. soldiers and capped
by the incineration of a quarter million Japanese people with
atomic bombs, entitled them to dominate and exploit the most
populous country in the world.
But hundreds of millions of Chinese people let it be known
that they had another agenda when they succeeded in driving
Gen. Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland, despite all his
U.S.-supplied weapons and ammunition.
The internal struggle in Washington over who lost China led
to years of poisonous recrimination bordering on paranoia,
which peaked when Sen. Joseph McCarthy included the Eisenhower
administration in his list of years of treason and finally got
slapped down.
Nothing so earth-shaking is involved in the present case;
hence the battle-scarred veterans of factional infighting can
laugh about it.
There may be issues of foreign policy involved in Jeffords's
decision, announced May 24, to change his affiliation to
Independent and caucus with the Democrats, although the Vermont
senator didn't dwell on them. The Bush administration has made
itself enormously unpopular in the rest of the world, even with
the governments of its imperialist allies.
First the president cavalierly ripped up the Kyoto Accords
on global warming, which had been arrived at after almost a
decade of difficult international climate conferences.
Then he blithely announced the U.S. was ready to
unilaterally abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in
order to proceed with an enormously expensive, scientifically
unproven and inherently offensive attempt to neutralize
everyone else's weapons systems by building a space-based
missile shield.
Jeffords, however, stuck closer to home in explaining why he
was bolting the party that he had represented throughout his 26
years in Washington. This liberal Republican zeroed in on
public education, a woman's right to choose, energy policy and
the healthcare crisis.
He also reached into the mists of time to explain why he had
for so long viewed the Republican Party as having room for pro
gressivism. He reiterated that it had been the party of Abraham
Lincoln and the struggle against slavery, something most
Republicans seem to want to forget these days.
It was also, of course, the party that betrayed Black
liberation after the Civil War by not distributing the land to
the former slaves and by withdrawing the Union Army from the
South, leaving them disarmed and at the tender mercies of the
Ku Klux Klan. That was the period that launched the Republicans
on their career as the premier party of big business.
Jeffords's defection now tips the balance in the Senate to
the Democrats, who become the majority party in that house and
therefore the chairs of all the committees. Furious attempts
were made at the last minute to bring him back into the fold,
investing his decision to leave with more significance.
When George W. Bush squeaked into the White House with a
quarter-million fewer popular votes than Al Gore and anger over
the rigged Florida elections ringing in his ears, many
Democrats assumed he would have to nod in their direction once
in a while to govern. Gore's concession speech, coming before
the issue of the suppressed Florida ballots had been fully
settled, gave the appearance that an understanding had been
reached between the two main capitalist parties.
Bush himself spoke about "bipartisanship" and cooperation
with the Democrats.
But once in office, he first reached into the far right for
many cabinet appointments and then unveiled a deeply
conservative agenda on taxes, the environment, family planning,
workplace safety, energy, militarizing space and threatening to
make China the target of an aggressive new Asia strategy.
Had the Democratic Party wanted to put up a fight, that was
the time to do it. They would have come across as heroes to
disenfranchised Black voters, to the environmental movement, to
women, to the peace forces, to labor, teachers, seniors and
youth. But instead they hunkered down, joining the Republicans
to pass the biggest tax cut for the rich ever seen--$1.3
trillion. And, like some Halloween ghoul who passes out Tootsie
Rolls with razorblades inside, the authors of this crime
sweetened it with a $300 check to be mailed out to everyone
over the summer.
So it was left to a Republican like Jeffords to become the
hero, and cheering Democrats lined the State House in Vermont
when he made his announcement.
Will Jeffords's defection stay the rightward course of this
administration? Will it put backbone into the promises of the
Democrats? Not hardly. The Clinton administration kept ceding
ground to the right-wing offensive, and he had both houses of
Congress with him in his first term.
But Jeffords's move does indicate that there is a lot of
rumbling down below, among people who can't afford rent and
medicine and schooling even after a decade of dramatic growth
in the economy. There is deep anxiety over the violence of the
state, at home and abroad, and the growing polarization of
wealth as the giant corporations go ever more global.
The defection of a liberal Republican may make big news
today, but it will seem like small potatoes when the growing
contradictions between the working class and the billionaire
class start punching holes in the suffocating bag of capitalist
party politics.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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