This Is Not News

I’ve been watching numerous people on liberal/progressive blogs get worked up over the Senate Democrats’ proposal for a nonbinding resolution against Bush’s escalation plan, arguing that it was a purely cosmetic bill that accomplished nothing.

The weird thing is, today, Senate Republicans filibustered the nonbinding resolutions. The Republicans who sponsored the bills even joined the filibuster. Now, if this nonbinding resolution is no big deal, why would the Republican leadership go to such great lengths to stop it? Yeah, it’s mainly a PR stunt. But perception becomes reality so often in politics, maybe PR matters.

That said, the big confrontation is going to come up when Congress has to take action on Bush’s request for more funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. If Congress is going to substantially affect Iraq policy before 2008, funding measures are probably the only they’re possibly going to be able to get past filibusters and presidential vetoes. We’ll see who gets tagged as an obstructionist then.

OK, so Philadelphia has a big mayoral election coming up. Technically the election is in November, but right now no one has even announced they’re running on the Republican side. So the Democratic primary in May is probably for all the marbles.

Now, due in part to our last mayoral election involving an eavesdropping device discovered in the mayor’s office, the city instituted campaign finance reform that limited the contributions candidates could receive. This was a big deal in Philly, where officials routinely hit up unions, companies, and wealthy supporters for tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

Then a millionaire named Tom Knox announced he was running for the nomination, and that he’d spend his own money as need be. He put $2 million into a getting-to-know-me campaign. And a recent Daily News poll shows that he’s rocketed up to second in the polls. Within days, a Philadelphia councilman was working on a bill to suspend the contribution limits if anyone put $2 million into his or her own campsign. (Wonder where he came up with that number.)

The councilman that introduced this bill already has close to enough cosponsors to get it passed. The councilman is also apparently a supporter of Bob Brady, the congressman and city party chair who recently entered the race. Brady apparently supports the measure, while several other mayoral candidates do not.

I would hesitate to point this out, but in Philadelphia politics it really tends to matter, since voting often breaks down along racial lines: Brady and Knox are the two white candidates in the mayoral primary.

It’s worth checking out Young Philly Politics, where the debate and discussion have flown fast and furious. Members of Council comment on the site.

I’m going to punt a little bit with tonight’s entry, and provide a couple of links that I think make for an interesting contrast.

Here’s the Library of Congress page on the Bill of Rights. You can even check out the two proposed amendments that were rejected (at least initially).

And here’s the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948.

I think if you read these two documents back to back, you get a pretty clear idea of how some people’s conception of what constitutes a right has changed. In no way am I diminishing the ideas in the Bill of Rights, but I kind of conceptualize them as a way of saying “Leave me alone” to the government. The UN Declaration goes beyond that – by the time you get to the part about rest and paid holidays, you can see that the view here depends on the idea that human beings have certain minimum requirements for a life of dignity and liberty.

And right there I think you have one of the most significant political and moral debates of the 20th and 21st centuries.