The New Perversion

In the last two weeks the sheer volume of bluster and bravado swirling around the federal courts has been dizzying. In the attempt to drum up public support for some less-than-moderate judicial nominees, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist R-Tenn. intoned “The filibuster was once used to protect racial bias, and now it is being used against people of faith.”

Yikes. The Republicans, particularly those who are less than secular in their power bases, have attempted yet again to reduce a complicated issue to empty rhetoric.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans found themselves wondering how people could despise the American way of life, the pursuit of freedom and liberty that we enjoy. Many Americans found answers in the roots of American hegemony and the foreign policy objectives that supported this dominion. However, it became quite clear that, in the eyes of the in-party, questioning the vagaries of American foreign policy was against the very fabric of American values. If one disagreed with the Bush Doctrine then one was anti-American.

In effect, by labeling those with the gall to question American global hegemony—whether in the academic sphere, the press, or the United Nations—anti-American, the in-party found a remarkably effective way of squelching dissent.

During the current debate over the filibuster, the Republicans are employing similar large stroke tactics to paint the opposition into the corner and strong arm their agenda through. To fill openings in the federal courts, the President has appointed a number of ideo-conservative nominees, most of whom are committed to overturning Roe v. Wade and to other conservative objectives. Congressional Democrats, as the minority party, plan to use their right to filibuster—prolonging debate indefinitely to block the nominations—a right that has been enjoyed for more than a hundred years. Republicans are threatening to remove this right.

In order to galvanize support for such an unprecedented change, Republicans are yet again appealing to their base through the lowest common denominator by telling conservatives that the opposition to the removal of the filibuster from Congressional rules is an attack on people of faith. According to those like Dr. Frist, questioning the impetus behind such a thinly veiled campaign of political opportunity driven by the spur of corruptive power is anti-faith, a convenient categorization that both rouses the roots of the right and silences dissent.

The parallels are striking; if one doesn’t like the concept of unilateral action and pre-emptive war, one is simply anti-American. If one isn’t comfortable removing a hundred year old legislative rule and right of the minority so a party can ramrod through some judicial gerrymandering, one is persecuting people of faith. This is both corrosive to democracy in that it aspires to impeded and outright remove the articulation of opposing viewpoints from the process and that this type of reductionism is being used to tear down the freedoms of Americans.

Attempting to stifle dissent through gross exaggeration and perpetration of “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric is nothing new in the upper echelons of the Republican Party. Playing the faith card in order to galvanize against a legislative privilege, however, represents a new perversion of our political leaders. Students should be concerned, not only because it threatens our freedom to dissent and operate freely in a secular academic sphere, but because it threatens to shepherd judges into power who will influence our lives and narrow our freedoms as individual Americans long after Dr. Frist has been replaced in Washington.

Matthew A. Busch ’07, a Crimson editorial comper, is an economics concentrator in Leverett House.