Washington – In 1957, during hearings on the first of the great Civil Rights bills to pass Congress, Rep. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina appeared before the House Rules Committee.
Rivers was a mean, unrepentant segregationist, a thoroughly despicable man. But wily as a serpent.
“You are being asked to succumb to a disease which carries with it the germs of your own destruction,” he hissed. “Today it is the South and the Negro problem. … Eventually it will be personal property, real estate, probate, domestic relations, water rights, timber, grazing, marketing, sanitation, highways and criminal laws of the 48 states of the Union.
“Then you will have complete and absolute federal domination over every aspect of our social and economic life in this nation,” said Rivers.
At the point of federal bayonets, slavery was abolished, segregation shattered and the South remolded. No one profited more than Southerners.
It was a stirring, just use of national power. As was Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Depression. And our war against fascism. And the long twilight struggle vs. communism.
But Rivers was right about one thing. We have witnessed a titanic expansion of federal authority in the last 50 years, with few signs lately that power is flowing anywhere but toward Washington.
Better folks than Rivers have warned us. Men and women, when cast as parts of big machinery, lose their way. They identify what’s best for their institution – their tribe, their royal family, their corporation or faith – as what’s best for us all. They rationalize the loss of liberties.
Ask Tom Paine. Ask Clarence Darrow. Ask Barry Goldwater.
Yet at this moment in American politics, there is no debate about the reach of government in our lives. There is only a tussle between Big Government Republicans and Big Government Democrats over who will control the levers of power.
Last week, the Pew Research Center released the latest version of a survey it has conducted for two decades.
When Pew started in 1987, Republicans belonged to two subgroups: free-enterprise business folks and social conservatives. Neither bunch was anything but skeptical of federal intrusion.
The latest survey, however, shows how today’s Republicans have embraced federal power. The free-enterprise folks don’t much mind it, while the social conservatives, and a new class of pro-government Republicans, demand it.
Was it just 10 years ago that Newt Gingrich seized the speaker’s gavel with a vow to revise and decentralize the government? And that Bill Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over”?
For a bit more than two centuries, our brave little nation has conducted an experiment. We have rejected the ways of caliphs and kings, valued the individual over the collective, and attributed the source of power – as Ronald Reagan used to remind us – to “we, the people.”
But don’t let anyone fool you. There’s no guaranteed outcome to that experiment.
The president says our democracy is blessed by Providence. Maybe so. But the blessing does not release us from the test of free will. We must run the experiment again and again, proving ourselves in each generation. So far, we have succeeded because those who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 gave us an exquisite Constitution – a marvelous clockwork of checks and balances that counters the abuse of power by distributing it among three branches of government.
And one of those checks is the Senate’s authority to approve or reject nominees to the federal judiciary. It is being debated here this week, and likely will be so for the next four years.
The Constitution gives little instruction about the role of the judiciary, less about the Senate’s confirmation power, and nothing about a tactic the minority party has traditionally used as a check on power: the filibuster.
Like all tools, the filibuster can be used for good or evil. In the days of Mendel Rivers, his racist Senate colleagues used it to delay for years the final, full emancipation of black Americans. But in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” actor Jimmy Stewart won our hearts with a lone, principled filibuster against corrupt political bosses.
True conservatives should think long and hard before launching the “nuclear option,” curbing the filibuster rule, diluting minority rights and adding to executive authority.
The era of big government isn’t over; it’s upon us with a vengeance.
Is this really the time for the Senate to neuter itself? To cast away, for political expediency, a precious and hard-won check on power?
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday. Contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
