The Senator’s Veto

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint.

by Moe White

Last month Jim DeMint, South Carolina’s junior senator, became one of the most powerful elected officials in America. He shares his power with former Rep. Dick Armey, who founded “Freedom Works” and its public face, the Tea Party movement.

Armey was the third-ranking Republican in the House during the Gingrich era, and he worked closely with Tom DeLay to ensure absolute loyalty from their rank and file. That method produced lockstep congressional votes for the George W. Bush agenda well into Bush’s second term, and allowed the Republicans to push through even the most controversial bills without compromise.

The country is still paying the piper for most of the Bush-era
legislation, though almost all the problems that arose from it are now
being blamed on Obama — not just by Republicans, but by a docile,
ignorant media that swallows spin as fact and Republican talking points
as headlines, and by a frustrated electorate whose anger at elected
officials is so overwhelming and incoherent that they want to throw out
even the people they just voted in.

DeMint, like Armey before him, wields his power with procedural tactics
coupled with blatantly dishonest claims and false statements designed
to rile up the public against the nation’s first black president.

Last summer, echoing the great racist Strom Thurmond’s stand on civil
rights, he proclaimed that stopping health care overhaul would be “the
president’s Waterloo.” He appeared regularly before public gatherings
as well as on television to promote his distortions of the actual
legislation. And he succeeded: Waterloo arrived with Martha Coakley’s
historic loss in the Senate race in Massachusetts, and with it the loss
of the Democrats’ supposedly filibuster-proof supermajority (not that
the Democrats knew what to do with their votes, but that’s another
story).

The next day the president, like Napoleon, admitted defeat: he caved in
to DeMint and decided to “scale back” the scope of health care. Having
long ago given up on its original core feature, providing universal
coverage, he will now take what he can get — which will likely be
nothing, from a congress that doesn’t want to give him anything and is
now terrified of the consequences if they do.

The collapse of meaningful health care reform was not DeMint’s only
victory over Obama. The same day — the first anniversary of Obama’s
historic inauguration — the president’s candidate to head the
Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers, withdrew his
name from nomination.

The reason? DeMint used the “right” of any senator to put an anonymous
hold on any nominee to any office, knowing that his fellow Republicans
were likely to stay in lockstep with him. He cited his fear that
Southers would allow TSA employees to unionize. DeMint represents the
most anti-union state in the country, so his ideology is no surprise;
but the fact that one right-winger’s supposed fear of unions should be
allowed to outweigh the nation’s security needs is appalling and
dangerous.

What’s equally astounding, and terribly sad, is that a state that so
detests unions has among the lowest income levels, weakest educational
systems, and poorest health care statistics in the country, all
problems that are ameliorated by strong union representation. But
voters there regularly elect right-wing politicians who pander to
racist fears — “big government run by northern liberals” generally
means “blacks and Jews taking over the country” — while colluding with
big business to keep those same voters from ever climbing out of
poverty (or enjoying the right to unionize).

Sen. DeMint stopped Southers’s nomination in its tracks, and with the
election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he has brought the president
his Waterloo. Now he can have even more confidence that the Democratic
majority will not be able to overcome his opposition to …anything he
opposes. And because he has great strength of will, the courage of his
convictions, and his hatred of the president to sustain him, he will
not yield.

Despite last year’s huge mandate for change, neither the president nor
the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had the wits, the will, or the
willingness to stand up against the junior senator from South Carolina,
who likes things just the way they are. In effect, they handed Jim
DeMint veto power over the president’s entire agenda, and they did it
without, seemingly, any awareness that they had just made him the most
powerful elected official in the nation.

(Since then, Richard Shelby of Alabama has challenged him for the title
by putting a formal hold on ALL SEVENTY of Obama’s nominees for federal
posts — an unheard of insult and an egregious abuse of Senate rules.
But why should that bother Shelby, with DeMint’s shining example before
him?)

South Carolina in History
DeMint is the heir of, and a throwback to, many South Carolina
predecessors in elected office. Among the most notorious is Rep.
Preston Brooks, who, in 1856, so as to “defend the honor” of his
cousin, Sen. Andrew Butler, beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with
a cane for his remarks about Butler’s support of slavery; it took
Sumner years to recover his health. In 1902, Sen. Ben Tillman followed
precedent by punching his Palmetto state colleague John McLaurin in the
face after McLaurin questioned his motives and integrity.

More recently, in 1964, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond engaged in a
wrestling match outside a Senate meeting room with Texan Ralph
Yarborough. Thurmond had gained notoriety as the 1948 “Dixiecrat”
candidate who left the Democratic Party in his determination to block
Truman’s civil rights legislation benefiting African Americans. After
his death it was learned that, as a young man, this same avowed racist
had secretly fathered a mixed-race child with his family’s maid.

Thurmond’s incredible hypocrisy naturally brings DeMint’s present-day
S.C. colleague, Governor Mark Sanford, to mind. Sanford, who has long
claimed the “Christian-family-values” mantle, sneaked off to Argentina
to be with his mistress and “soul-mate,” leaving his four sons home
with his wife over the Father’s Day weekend. The state also boasts Rep.
Joe Wilson, whose shouting “You lie” during President Obama’s address
to a joint session of congress was such a breach of protocol that even
fellow Republicans — except DeMint — condemned it. A famous television
broadcaster once told me, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” How
true that is of Jim DeMint.