These are people of the land,

I recently received an email from a Conservative friend (yes I do have them! Both Conservatives and friends – don’t look so surprised!) accusing the Democratic party of being a party of lawyers and essentially the worst thing that’s ever happened to politics, while the Republican Party is the real working man (Joe the Plumber anyone? Sarah ‘Hockey Mom’ Palin?). As a liberal, registered Democrat who once considered a career in law I must respond to this. My initial reaction: how dare our lawmakers know the law! That might mean they won’t let people get away with things like torture and domestic spying!

“ Barack Obama is a lawyer.
Michelle Obama is a lawyer.
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer.
Bill Clinton is a lawyer. Every Democratic nominee since 1984 went to law school”

The email goes on to claim that the Republican party is made up of people who do ‘Real Work’ – businessmen, exterminators, economists – and that the Democrats “mock and scorn men who create wealth like Bush and Cheney or who heal the sick like Frist or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.”

As a future history teacher and a registered Democrat, I find that last statement incredibly insulting and ignorant. Lyndon Johnson’s first job was a teacher.

The email then continues to say that the lawyers see these people — good hardworking ‘Mericans — as enemies of America.

In our War on Terror we like to proclaim that we are taking the moral high ground, that we are the victim. However, not one of the tactics used in the war on terror have actually made us more secure from terrorism and in fact some threaten the very civil liberties Republicans – and all Americans claim to cherish.

We have authorized the use of interrogation techniques that ,were they used against us, we would be screaming for international courts to do something about the Geneva convention. We have invaded two Middle Eastern nations with the excuse that we are trying to protect ourselves from terrorism and spread democracy. We have ignored the actual causes of the terrorism and the culture of the area. We are trying to establish a democracy in an area with no cultural history for democracy. If a people has no historical or cultural basis for democracy it will not be successfully transplanted. A “Democratic” regime may last a few years, but it will ultimately regress to its authoritarian routes (witness the Russian Federation).

The next claim goes something like this, “Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.”

But pharmaceutical companies drive up the price of pharmaceuticals and release them to the public without fully testing them. Are people properly informed about the risks of a new drug?. Have you listened to the end of a pharmaceutical commercial, you know the bit where they detail all of the possible side-effects? They speak fast enough to cram them all into the remaining commercial time slot, and yet not slow enough that anyone can actually understand what they are saying and they are printed too small on the screen for anyone to read them.
Oil companies are not great citizens. Oil has sparked one of the longest running wars in our history (They have worked to maintain their monopoly on our energy and therefore our need for cheap oil has kept us tied to the regimes of the Middle East, some of which fund either directly or indirectly the very terrorists we claim to fight. For all of the cries for “Energy Independence!” precious little has been done.

Due to Globalization, many manufacturing jobs have left the United States. Globalization is not the result of lawyers but of economists and businessmen, the very people the Republican Party claims to exalt. Before you attack others for their actions, examine the actions of your own compatriots.

Bankers and investors created our current economic crisis – and previous crises. Rampant speculation on the stock market caused the crash of 1929 and over-drawing and printing of money led to the nullification of the Gold Standard and the rapid decline of the dollar. Through either intentional misleading or mismanaging or accidental misleading and mismanaging, banks and investors manipulated home buyers into agreeing to mortgages they could not possibly repay which contributed to our current crisis. I’m sorry we think it is appropriate to hold business accountable for their dealings. We’ve tried laissez-faire more often than not it leaves us in a worst position than we were before – that is if ‘We’ is the average American and not the executives and ruling elite that make up the Republican Party.

Kindly enough, the email includes a brief job description of lawyers: “Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits… overturn precedent…” and continues to state that while such practices are fine for study of law, they do not work to govern a nation. I fail to see how trying to successfully represent the American people, and win cases on their behalf and to work for new laws is a bad thing. Clearly the current system isn’t working, and if the system does not work you must pass laws to change things.

The trend towards “polarization” was not started by the lawyers but by the Republicans. Thanks to Gingrich and the mid-1990s we now have a system where neither party is willing to work with the other to accomplish anything.

The email then goes on to attack the omnipresence of lawyers in American society (which I agree has not been very helpful) and references criminal prosecution being used as a continuation of political struggle, citing “the lynching of Scooter Libby.”

When a government employee such as Scooter Libby leaks the identity of a government agent involved in highly classified work, it endangers the agent. If a Democrat had done such a thing the Republican Party would be clamoring with calls for a conviction of Treason but since it was one of their own, well you’ve got to protect the Good ‘Ol Boys.

Their next complaint is about the ACLU interfering in methods of interrogation for suspected terrorists and efforts to obtain information: When a regime uses techniques that banned by a treaty of which the United States is a party than yes, the ACLU should intervene. We have no right to unilaterally act in ways which we would be railing against were they used against us. All things being equal, any party that used water-boarding or other forms of “enhanced interrogation” against us would be accused of war crimes if we were the victors.

Finally, they claim that we cannot expect reform and change from the very organization supported by the lawyers responsible for the current system. My response is this: Nor can we expect change and reform from businessmen and investors and bankers, the very people responsible for our current predicament. The record of the Republican Party is one of doing what’s best for their business man cronies, regardless of its affect on the average American. With the 1980s came deregulation and an economic philosophy that contributed to our current situation. In the 1990s under a Democratic president, we were prosperous and had a miraculously balanced budget. The next Republican president turned a $230 billion surplus into a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit by the end of his presidency.

With a track record like that, I am inclined to give the lawyers – or at least the party that really has the economic interests of the average American at heart – a chance.

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~ by thesituationreport on March 16, 2010.