Authors: James A. Michener
When a lawyer friend read the conclusions reported above, he cautioned: ‘Personally, while I agree that many punitive damage awards have been ridiculous, I find this part of the contract little more than a protection of that twenty percent of the wealthy who own eighty percent of the country. It restricts the bottom eighty percent when they have been hurt in some way by the malfeasance of the top twenty percent.’
I do not like the recommendation that we pass ‘Loser pays’ laws because, although it would make a litigant think twice before initiating a frivolous lawsuit, it would also make it almost impossible for a person with only moderate means to sue for damages to which he or she may be entitled.
About several of the remaining acts in this second part of the contract I have serious doubts, and even considerable fear that wrong actions are being proposed. I do not like the Taking Back Our Streets Act, for it calls for a drastic cut in funds for the prevention of crime, for a comparable increase in money for the construction of ever more jails, and for more death penalties. Those are regressive steps; the emphasis of funding should be on prevention rather than on punishment. We already have more jails than a democracy should have, and it has been proved that the death penalty accomplishes little except the removal from the
streets of a specific criminal—the influence on others appears to be minimal.
The proposed Personal Responsibility Act is so draconian in its probable effect on the poor and especially on poor women with children that I find it completely outside the mainstream of American history in this century. I beg the brash young colonels to restudy this proposal and awaken themselves to the ugliness of its directives, which include: (1) Discourage pregnancy and illegitimacy by stopping welfare to minor mothers. How is the girl of fourteen going to support herself and her child? (2) Deny increased funds to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children for women who have additional children while on welfare. (3) Cut spending for all welfare programs. And (4) enact a tough two-years-and-off-the-welfare-rolls provision with stiff work requirements to promote individual responsibility; any such provision is blind to the realities of American life. In thousands of instances there are no jobs, and the deficiency is going to grow. It is folly beyond imagination to believe that a mother with no husband but two small children can ‘go out and find a job.’ Only one in five hundred will be able to swing this miracle, but she will be paraded on the evening news as proof that it can be done. The president has vetoed the welfare reform bill sent to him, and I pray that the two houses of Congress will reject any similar proposals in the future and instead tackle the heartbreaking problem that I identified earlier: how to create some kind of employment for citizens trapped in the bottom levels of our society.
The proposal for congressional term limits in the Citizen Legislature Act finds me perplexed, and a personal note will explain why. I ran—and usually lost—for office five times, including a backbreaking campaign for Congress in 1962, and when I wasn’t running I worked for my party locally, statewide and nationally. From this experience I developed such a powerful addiction to
politics that until my eighties I was involved with one government job or another. I am one of the few people you will meet who ever actually voted for the president of the United States; in 1968, when Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, I chanced to be the presiding officer of the Pennsylvania Electoral College and on a sad, wintry day I cast my vote and the twenty-nine votes of Pennsylvania for Humphrey.
So politics is in my blood, and in beating the campaign trails I met far more good men and women, Republican and Democrat alike, than bad. And out of some fifteen rough-and-tumble campaigns I developed several generalizations. The work of an election is performed by no more than a comparative handful of devoted men and women. At election time millions of voters support one party or another, but it is misleading to claim they are all members of the party; they are really temporary supporters of it. The active membership of the party as an ongoing force in our national life is probably not over sixty or seventy thousand for either party. The decisions are made by this inner core; more important, the hard work of an election is also done by them, and I am immensely appreciative of the contributions these faithful workers make. I am partial to politicians and would appreciate being considered one.
I therefore cannot be supportive of any act that limits terms served in Congress, and I am gratified that both houses of Congress have failed to pass the necessary legislation to institute a constitutional amendment for such term limits. We need the guiding hand of the time-tested politician, and not long ago I was pleased when the Supreme Court decided that the individual states could not restrict the number of terms a man or woman could represent them in Congress. Limitation could be authorized only by an amendment to the Constitution. If a move is made in that direction I hope it will be soundly defeated. Congress needs battle-tested veterans.
Even among the provisions of the proposed acts that I in general applaud, I nevertheless find several clauses that trouble me. In the Fiscal Responsibility Act, I am fearful of the recommendation that Congress must ‘live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.’ I find this to be a silly, crowd-pleasing bit of sophistry. I do not fear a reasonable amount of national debt, because being unafraid to gamble on the future is one of the traits of nations that rise to greatness. I would deplore seeing us, in the next dozen years, retrogress to a position in which there is no national debt, because to achieve this we would be forced to discard many functions that a nation should perform and, in so doing, deprive our citizens of services they have a right to expect. At this moment I am sitting in my office three or four blocks from a handsome, well-stocked city library. I am more fortunate than those in other areas where, because of budget cutbacks at all levels of government, the library doors are shut and the books do not circulate. I feel a wound in my heart each time I think of what the people have lost. Why in the world does a society exist except to provide libraries and hospitals and schools and parks and playing fields for its citizens? And it can safely go into reasonable debt to pay for them.
To make my position clear, if I were somehow in charge of our nation, as soon as the proposed new laws diminished our public debt to zero, I would immediately borrow a hundred billion dollars to spend on our national infrastructure: repaved highways, rebuilt bridges, improved airstrips, state-of-the-art aviation guidance systems, new schools, enhanced transportation for the inner cities and all the other improvements we need to keep our country thriving. Nations on the upward climb are not afraid to go into debt to provide services; it is the nation that is sliding downward that insists on a perfectly balanced budget.
In the otherwise fine Family Reinforcement Act, with its proposals regarding adoption and opposition to child pornography, occurs the frightening clause ‘strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education.’ This is code-speak for the move to issue tax-supported vouchers to families who wish to send their children to private schools, especially parochial ones. Any such move should be defeated, because one of the glories of American life has been our system of free public schools. Any move that weakens them, such as taking away substantial funds for their upkeep, will prove damaging to the nation. I said earlier that if I had children of school age I would probably send them to some superior private school and pay for their education myself. I would certainly not want to burden the taxpayers of our community to gain an advantage for my offspring.
I find it difficult to understand the venom with which many of the young colonels view our nationally administered free-lunch program for schoolchildren and our distribution of food certificates to the impoverished elderly. Some critics who seek to minimize the programs or cancel them altogether grow livid as they rant about the waste, the socialism and the misguided humanitarianism in the programs, but as I remember the genesis of the free-food operations that have been so helpful to so many, they came into being largely because Midwestern farmers wanted a device whereby they could dispose of their surplus crops at a profit. Dairy farmers quickly saw that it could also be used to get rid of their unwanted surpluses, and others jumped on the bandwagon. It was an example of how, frequently, a move motivated by the crassest self-interest can be massaged until it produces an absolute good.
Fortunately, these proposals are not included in the Contract with America. Our food programs are one of the admirable functions of our national government and I do not want to see them
turned over to the states. I cannot trust state legislatures to spend wisely or even honestly whatever funds Congress might divert to them for health programs for our senior citizens and our children.
S
o if we choose wisely from the many suggestions of the Contract with America, much good could be achieved, but if others of the proposals are ever passed a great deal of harm would result. As the debate began regarding the contract, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, the religious conservatives, leaped before the television cameras to announce their own Contract with the American Family. Several of its proposals would gain approval from most citizens: elimination of current laws that place extra tax burdens on couples who marry, restriction of child pornography and a proposal to punish criminals rather than their victims.
This second contract, with the American family, has other recommendations that might gain wide acceptance, such as the right to have religious displays ‘in noncompulsory settings such as courthouse lawns, high school graduation ceremonies and sports events’ and the outlawing of late-term abortions.
But the hard core of the philosophy underlying both contracts is contained in the young colonels’ specific legislative recommendations to diminish or eliminate budgets for social purposes like education and child care, services to women and children, and money for cultural activities such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities and public broadcasting.
I find the overall spirit of these two contracts mean, vengeful and contrary to the two-centuries-old drive for social justice in America. If the provisions are rigorously enforced, the result will be an ugly society of which I would not be proud to be a part.
I am particularly depressed to find our young colonels imitating the behavior of similar young revolutionaries I’ve followed in the past. Like their predecessors in one country after another, these young men seem to have a visceral fear of women and a distrust that they manifest in harshly repressive laws against women, girls and babies. If all their laws against women were enacted, life in the United States could be hell for women and for many children.
Even though the contracts do not recommend openly that affirmative action be repealed or that justifiable quotas be abolished, I have heard spokesmen for the contracts assure listeners that ‘sanity would be restored in those fields,’ a euphemism for ‘they will be abolished.’ Curtailment of affirmative action would be a major move in the wrong direction, and the fact that the Supreme Court has recently outlawed college scholarships intended only for African Americans is a warning of the dangers that lie ahead. If I sound monomaniacal on this and similar problems regarding race, I am. My wife spent her life fighting racial injustice and I try to advance her agenda. When the president of my college suffered a heart attack and died following a racial confrontation on his very liberal campus, that very night I sent the school the royalties from one of my books, to be spent on pacifying the campus through the granting of some of the demands of the black students. I feel just as strongly today. There have been grave injustices in American life and they should be rectified.
I would hope that Congress and the American voter would be intelligent enough to pass the constructive parts of the two contracts while rejecting the destructive. Some of them
have
been rejected, but usually for reasons of political necessity rather than by any rejection on the part of the young colonels of the underlying philosophies. Sensible people should encourage Congress
to discriminate between the acceptable and the unacceptable in the remaining acts, which, if blindly accepted by Congress without fine-tuning in favor of a just and compassionate society, I fear will create a government that we will soon thereafter have to cleanse until it conforms more closely to the great traditions of our nation.
I am convinced that we are a people committed to justice, to the care of the less fortunate, to a breeze of freedom that flows over all our actions, and to the national characteristics of hopefulness and a willingness to take considerable risks in the present in order to safeguard our security in the future.
The new breed in Congress today exhibit an intense anti-art bias. Both the specific recommendations and the spirit in which the Contract with the American Family proposes them in the field of the arts bespeak a brutality and a know-nothingness ill suited to a democracy. There is ample evidence that the provision discontinuing all funds allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stems from the personal vendetta of the Republican leaders who feel—erroneously, I believe—that Public Broadcasting Service broadcasts are unfair to conservatives but partial to liberals. These men who would apparently like to transform the United States into today’s Sparta seem determined to kill off any free expression of the arts in American life by taking away all government-financed support. Their suggestion that the funds thus lost can be made up by contributions from private individuals flies against the experience of all the major European and world capitals, which fund their arts from the government coffers much more generously than we ever have. To take away the meager government funds we now provide would be disastrous and a signal that we intend becoming a nation of boors.