Note: I doubt I’m the first person to make this analogy, but I can’t think of where else, if anywhere, I’ve seen it..
Crowded out by the death of Michael Jackson and the ensuing debate about his greatness and his weirdness was the House’s razor thin passage of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill on Friday. The vote in the House, where the Democrats are supposed to be firmly in charge, was a mere 219-212, with eight Republicans voting “Yes” and forty-four Democrats voting “No”. Reading about the great lengths (via) the House Democrats needed just to pass this thing in the lower chamber (they pulled a Kennedy out of rehab!) one wonders what will come of it in the Senate. Doubts abound, apparently, as this morning’s New York Times contained an article relating the climate change bill to a similar (and spectacularly failed) effort in 1993. For the sake of historical optimism though, a better analogy might be 1957.
In 1957 Congress passed, and then President Eisenhower signed, the first post-Reconstruction attempt to ensure blacks the right to vote. In order to get the bill through the Senate, where the South had routinely been able to kill previous attempts, almost all of its provisions were stripped away. The only thing left was a guarantee of the right to vote, and even that proved so toothless and unenforceable that by 1960 black voter registration in the South had either been static or had actually gone down. The 1957 Civil Rights Act was, to say the least, rather ineffective. But it passed; and in doing so it irrevocably moved the conversation about an issue which, to that time, Congress had studiously ignored.
During and after the 1957 bill’s passage civil rights advocates were split on whether or not to endorse it. It was a transparently weak piece of legislation and the fear, echoed today by environmental groups about Waxman-Markey, was that this token was all they would get. But 1957 wasn’t the last time a Civil Rights bill was passed. Indeed, as the culture of repression in the South rolled right along and the voting rolls remained lily-white the need for further federal intervention became self evident.
The problem itself was not seriously addressed by the 1957 bill, but its passage meant that the great stumbling block of outright denial had been removed from the path of later efforts. After 1957 it was no longer a question of whether or not Congress would do anything, but instead a question of what Congress would do. Lyndon Johnson shepherded the bill through the Senate and, never one to miss a sex analogy, promoted it to skeptical supporters by saying, “Once you break the virginity it’ll be easier next time.”
Now, no historical parallel is perfect. Climate change, for example, has a largely theoretical constituency whereas civil rights was about millions of minority Americans. And the negative effects of legalized repression (civil unrest and murderers going free) were far more tangible than higher global temperatures. But there are a number of striking similarities, the sharpest of which is the nearly identical conservative position of, “Problem? What problem?”
Then as now there was no real conservative alternative position. They simply wanted to ignore the problem and more or less hope that it would go away on its own. It wasn’t a realistic position in 1957 and it isn’t one in 2009, but that didn’t stop a great many people from holding fast to it.
By was of illustration, watch this video from TPM of Republican id Michele Bachmann:
She’s citing rather lofty concepts like “tyranny” and “liberty”. During his famous one man, 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill Strom Thurmond read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and George Washington’s Farewell Address. Thurmond saw civil rights legislation the same way that Bachmann sees energy legislation: as a liberal government power grab. We are quite literally killing ourselves with our current energy policies (or lack thereof) the same way that organized and institutionalized racism was quite literally killing black Americans. But the denialist mindset doesn’t see a problem that desperately needs to be addressed, it just sees another item to be crammed into its existing intellectual framework, hence, the “tyranny” talk.
That denialist position is still remarkably potent; witness the forty-four Democrats who voted against the bill. But the passage of a climate bill – any bill – will do serious damage to head-in-the-sand climate thinking. So while the Waxman-Markley bill isn’t going to stave off climate change all by itself, and may not even be strong enough to significantly reduce our CO2 emission rate, it’s still incredibly important because it will permanently take the shine off of the only argument conservatives have so far made: denial. Bachmann and her allies aren’t warning that the bill won’t halt global warming, they’re arguing that global warming doesn’t exist and that this bill is just a waste of money that will hurt the economy. But when the economic horror show doesn’t happen they’ll have lost the only argument that they’ve made.
If anything climate related gets to the President’s desk this year it will probably be even weaker than what passed the House on Friday. In 1957 as now it is the Senate where legislation, good and bad, is often altered. It may even prove utterly toothless. But it will do tremendous damage to anyone hiding behind denial and it will establish Congress as an active player in the climate debate. It may not be a pleasing or pretty first step, but it is a step in a direction Congress has never gone before, and that counts as very real progress.
End Note – Memo to Harry Reid – While flipping through Robert Caro’s hyper detailed “Master of the Senate” desperately trying to remember where the original “virginity” line was I came across this priceless quote from LBJ himself as recounted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:
“Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” Johnson said. They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s? I [Schlesinger] said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ whereupon he opened his drawer and pulled out a comparison of his voting record . . . on fifteen issues. On each one he had voted for the liberal side and Case for the conservative side. ‘And yet they look on me as some kind of ignorant southern bigot.’ He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. ‘But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic Party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.’”
