Obama Says Procedures Don’t Matter

Fellowship of the Minds
Mar. 19, 2010

In an interview with Fox News yesterday, Obama responded for the first time to the controversy over a plan to use a parliamentary maneuver to allow the House to pass the Senate’s health care bill without having members vote on it. The plan is called “Deem and Pass.” (If you say “deem and pass” out loud…and quickly, you’ll see that the plan is very appropriately named. “Deem and Pass” is the onomatopoeia for Demon Pass! As a noun, “pass” means a road; as a verb, “pass” can also mean to die.)

The “Demon Pass” procedure has drawn fierce protest from Republicans, who say Demorats are trying to avoid accountability. But Obama airily dismissed their concern and expressed confidence that his Commiecare bill will pass:

“I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or Senate. What I can tell you is that the vote that’s taken in the House will be a vote for health care reform…. Washington gets very concerned with these procedures in Congress, whether Republicans are in charge or Democrats are in charge…. And the reason I’m confident that it’s going to pass is because it’s the right thing to do.”

Obama’s dismissal of the importance of parliamentary procedures is particularly galling, not just because he’s the president of a constitutional republic, but also because his specialty in law was Constitutional Law.

You see, what really distinguishes Marxists and all totalitarians from believers in democracy is how they view ends vs. means. Ends refer to goals and desired results. Means are the procedures or process by which results are achieved.

All dictatorial systems value ends over means. Utopian dictatorships justify one-party rule with the ostensible goal of constructing the perfect society, whether it is Marxist communism or the Nazi rule by the super race (Ãœbermensch). That utopian end justifies any and all means, no matter how brutal and antihuman.

Democracies are not utopian because, given human nature, they cannot be utopian. The American Founding Fathers were profoundly mindful of our flawed nature. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers No. 51:

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Since human beings are not angels, utopia is impossible because it is unrealistic. Unlike totalitarian polities, democracies therefore have no predetermined end other than the objective of constructing a government that can best function with and in spite of flawed human beings.

It is to that end that our Founders devised such institutions as the separation of powers; checks and balance; an independent judiciary; the rule of law instead of by man; and individual rights and liberties – those of freedom of speech, assembly, religion, press, and of due process (e.g., the principle of innocent until proven guilty).

Notice that every one of these institutions is about PROCEDURE — how we behave, how we do politics, how we do democracy. The Founders were confident that so long as we abide by the proper PROCEDURES, whatever the results would be right and good. In other words, a democracy lives and breathes by its PROCEDURES. If the process is corrupt, democracy itself becomes impaired and eventually dies.

Through his indifference to and dismissal of the importance of parliamentary PROCEDURES, Obama shows who he really is. It is no exaggeration to say that this man in the White House is the greatest danger to American democracy today.

God help us.

~Eowyn