A Specter Is Haunting The Senate

Just about a year ago, on April 28, 2009, Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) announced his party switch from Republican to Democrat. On May 18 of this year (primary election day), the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania will have their chance to say whether they accept him as a Democrat, or if they prefer current Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA).

Specter's coming-out as a born-again Democrat was hailed at the time by the national party as another stepping-stone to their holy grail of a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. The Democrats finally obtained that 60-member caucus in July 2009 with the swearing-in of Al Franken (D-MN), delayed for months by sore loser Norm Coleman's endless court challenges, and it lasted until February 4 of this year, when Scott Brown (R-MA) was installed in the late Ted Kennedy's seat.

So did those 7 months of unstoppable Democratic hegemony usher in a progressive utopia? Hardly. That could only have happened if the Democrats in the Senate were all unabashed New Dealers, which they're not. For every progressive like Barbara Boxer (CA) or Sherrod Brown (OH), there's a corporate shill like Blanche Lincoln (AK) or Ben Nelson (NE). Even the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (VT) and self-described megalomaniac Joe Lieberman (CT), cancel each other out on most issues. With all those existing internal contradictions, welcoming Arlen Specter into the Democratic fold did not win us the Employee Free Choice Act's union-friendly organizing rules, a public option in the health insurance reform bill, or a rush of agency appointments; the long-standing vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board were finally filled in late March by recess appointment, not by a Senate vote. The only one who benefited from Specter's switch was Specter himself, who avoided a challenge from his right, in the form of Pat Toomey, in the Republican primary.

In other words, Specter's party switch was all about Arlen Specter. It was yet another act of expediency by a person whose entire political career has been notable for its opportunism.

Single Bullet Specter
Specter's first recorded act of political expediency may be his most infamous: his creation of the "single bullet" theory as a staff attorney for the Warren Commission in 1964. You don't have to be a conspiracy buff to marvel at the story behind this portion of the Commission's conclusions.

The FBI had presented the Commission with its conclusion that presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots. Three empty shell casings had been found on the floor near the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. Also, the film of the motorcade taken by spectator Abraham Zapruder with his 8mm movie camera established a timeline of the shootings, and FBI marksmen demonstrated that the bolt-action rifle found in the Book Depository could only have been loaded, aimed, and fired three times during that timespan. Since there appeared to be three sets of wounds - first President Kennedy in the neck, then Governor Connally's torso and wrist, and finally Kennedy's fatal head wound - this seemed consistent with the three shots from Oswald's rifle. Three shots, three wounds, one gunman; case closed.

Except there was a third person wounded that day in Dealey Plaza. James Tague had been watching the motorcade from a sidewalk across the street from Zapruder. After the shooting was over, a police officer came over to Tague to ask if he was all right; his right cheek was bleeding. Together they found a chip missing from the curb, and concluded that a bullet had hit the curb and caused a cement chip to scrape Tague's face. The Warren Commission didn't want to hear about this story, because all bullets had already been accounted for. If Tague had been wounded as a result of a fourth bullet, and Oswald's rifle could only have fired three bullets, that seemed to imply the presence of a second gunman, and thus a conspiracy.

Enter staff member Arlen Specter to the rescue. Specter theorized that, since Connally was sitting in front of Kennedy in the limousine, the first bullet could have gone through Kennedy's neck and then proceeded to travel through Connelly's torso and wrist before finally embedding itself in his thigh. Tying both men's wounds to a single bullet freed up the second bullet to miss the limousine entirely and hit the curb where Tague was standing. The third bullet was still available to be the kill shot for the President. That's four sets of wounds caused by only three shots. Presto - Specter had come up with a way for the Warren Commission to stick to its lone gunman conclusion!

What's incredible about this piece of history is that Specter's theory was not based on forensics, ballistics, or physics; it was only based on Specter's eagerness to come up with a story that fit the conclusion his bosses seemed to want.

First Party Switch
Hot off his Warren Commission gig, Specter went to work in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, where he soon set his sights on the top job. When the local Democratic Party wouldn't let him run for DA, he decided his ambition was more important than his party membership (sound familiar?) and ran as a Republican.

During his two-term reign as Philly's top prosecutor, Specter hired another young ambitious lawyer from his alma mater (University of Pennsylvania) named Ed Rendell, starting him off on his own successful political career. Rendell, now the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, is naturally an enthusiastic supporter of his former boss' re-election campaign.

Anita Hill
A defining moment of Specter's Senate career was his character assassination of Anita Hill during Senate hearings in 1991. Specter had angered many Republicans by voting against President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, and he was eager to win back their favor by supporting President Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas, especially since he was up for re-election in 1992. When Hill came forward with allegations of sexual harassment while Thomas had been her supervisor, Specter mercilessly attacked her through a hostile interrogation that painted her, not Thomas, as the one at fault.

Women all over the country were so outraged by Specter's treatment of Hill that it reportedly led to a record number of female candidates for office in 1992, as well as a heightened awareness of the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Specter, meanwhile, had proven that he could be a loyal Republican; Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, from which he still gives us disastrous decisions like the Citizens United v. FEC corporate personhood case, and Specter was rewarded with another six-year term in the Senate.

Not A Loyal Democrat
Shortly after his April 2009 party switch, Specter attempted to paint himself as an independent-minded maverick, pointing out on Meet The Press that "I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat." Given his history, why would we expect him to be? In fact, he reminds me more of Joe Lieberman than anyone else. In 2006, Ned Lamont challenged Lieberman from the left in the Connecticut Democratic primary and won. Rather than graciously accept the will of his party's voters and retire, Lieberman instead ran in the general election as an independent, accepting money and endorsements from Republicans, and kept his job. Specter tried to avoid that scenario by bolting from the Republican Party before Toomey could defeat him in the primary, but Sestak has interfered with his plans for an uncontested Democratic primary.

Sestak is not exactly a progressive alternative; this former Navy vice-admiral would probably be closer in policy positions to Jim Webb than Russ Feingold in the Senate. However, Sestak has already done more for Democrats in his short political career than Specter. In 2006, during his first-ever political campaign, Sestak not only defeated twenty-year Republican incumbent Curt Weldon, he also helped the Democrats win a majority in the House and enthusiastically supported Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in her bid to become the country's first female Speaker of the House. During the 2008 Presidential primaries, Sestak took time out from his uncertain re-election bid to actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, who would have become the country's first female President had she won. Anita Hill would be proud.

Arlen Specter has proven time and time again that he is willing to do almost anything to advance his own career. Last year's party-label switch was nothing more than his most recent act of expediency to try to keep his job in the Senate, and even Vice-President Biden's recent campaign appearances for him can't convince me otherwise. Let's hope that Pennsylvania's Democratic primary voters can help Arlen Specter do what he seems incapable of doing for himself - put him on the unemployment line.

Healthcare For People, Not For Profit

Below is the text of a Declaration of Health Independence and Security which was written and adopted during the single-payer healthcare conference in Wayne, PA on April 10. Click here to add your name to the list of signatures and learn how to get more involved.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for citizens of this nation and its separate but equal states to transform conditions related to the common good within our control and necessary in order to assure the basic human rights of all, recognition of our common humanity and a decent respect to the opinions of humankind compel us to declare those conditions for which we demand such a transformation.

Healthcare is a basic human right. To this end, we the undersigned citizen representatives of these assembled states, declare our dedication to the transformation of the profit-driven healthcare system into one of our shared humanity under a social insurance model–a publicly funded, privately and publicly delivered system, equally available to all. Current expenditures on healthcare can and must fund this systemic transformation.

Working in our individual and several states, we will educate our fellow residents, petition our legislators for our collective redress of grievances under the current system, and pursue passage of citizen-driven healthcare policy legislation.

We hold these truths still to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal and have certain unalienable rights. Among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that in order to enjoy these rights, access to healthcare without regard to financial or any other barriers must be secured.

Signed this 10th day of April, 2010, at Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Beating Swords Into Scalpels

Five days before the April 15 income tax filing deadline, at a time when more people than usual are pondering government spending priorities as they calculate their annual tax bill, I spent the day with a group of activists working to divert the money we currently spend on war into guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) sponsored this one-day conference in Wayne, PA, which drew participants from ten states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts, California, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). The photo above, taken by PDA National Field Coordinator Conor Boylan, shows a working group discussing efforts to take the fight for single-payer healthcare, or "Medicare For All", from the national level to individual states. As one participant from Ontario reminded us, the Canadian single-payer system began in the province of Saskatchewan, then moved to other provinces before eventually being implemented at the federal level.

If the woman at the table looks familiar, you probably remember her from the Michael Moore film Sicko, where Donna Smith was shown moving in with her daughter after the medical bills from her cancer treatments and her husband's heart attacks had forced her into bankruptcy. Donna is now Co-Chair of PDA's Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, and she helped lead most of the day's discussions, together with Chuck Pennacchio, who ran as a progressive alternative to Bob Casey in the 2006 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and is now Executive Director of Health Care For All Pennsylvania.

Ben Day, Executive Director of Mass-Care (shown to Donna's left in the photo), explained the failures of the Massachussetts healthcare reform and its individual insurance mandate, on which the just-passed federal bill was based. Rather than control costs, premiums have continued their double-digit annual increases since this Romneycare came into being. People are also getting less coverage for these higher premiums, as the commercial health insurance companies move towards high-deductible plans that increase out-of-pocket expenses.

Dan Hodges of Health Care For All California (shown to Ben's left) discussed the single-payer bills which passed the state legislature in 2006 and 2008, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dan reminded us that the public campaigns around each of these bills presented a teachable moment which educated more Californians about how health insurance companies operate as a cartel to fix prices, and how existing single-payer systems in Canada and the U.S. (Medicare) operate more efficiently and with lower overhead rates.

Vic Edgerton, Chief of Staff for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), urged us to continue building visible grassroots support for single-payer outside the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, so that kindred spirits inside the legislatures, like his boss, can have more weight behind their arguments. As President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly told a group of reformers, "you've convinced me; now go out there and make me do it."

For those who might ask how our government would pay to cover everyone, the $33 billion supplemental spending bill to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, scheduled to be voted on by Congress this month, was identified as a good healthy start. That's right, this is another supplemental war bill, on top of the money already appropriated in the regular budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite President Obama's promise that he would end this practice held over from the Bush regime.

It was invigorating to spend the day with these activists who take seriously Dr. Martin Luther King's admonition from his April 4, 1967 speech at New York City's Riverside Church: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

April 4: Remembering MLK "In The Name Of Love"

Today is April 4, a date to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967, King gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

In that speech, he stepped outside the boundaries which had been established for him as a civil rights leader and denounced the U.S. government's military involvement in Vietnam and other developing nations. He expressed his concerns that our government was on the wrong side of revolutionary movements, and that the huge sums of money being spent on wars would result in the underfunding of the anti-poverty programs which the civil rights movement had just convinced the federal government to begin:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

As both Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyers reminded us on two excellent PBS shows during this past week, the reaction against King's Riverside speech was swift and harsh. Newspapers which had supported King as a civil rights leader editorialized against his latest words the very next day, saying he had lost credibility. President Johnson saw this speech as a personal attack on him and refused any further meetings with King. Even some of King's supporters thought he would lose his focus by joining the peace and anti-military movements.

On April 4, 1968 - one year to the day after that speech - King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.

That date is memorialized in the U2 song "Pride (In The Name Of Love)":

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

Note the use of the word "they", not "he" - "they took your life". For even though the bullet that struck down King was fired by a single gunman - whoever he was, and whoever else was involved - the growing atmosphere of hatred towards King made such an act of fatal violence inevitable.

King was in Memphis in March and April of 1968 to support the black sanitation workers whose efforts to unionize were being resisted by the city government. The city's white establishment mocked the black workers' picket signs declaring "I Am A Man". After a March 28 demonstration in Memphis was brutally broken up by the police, King was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate the next day by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), who urged that "the Federal Government take steps to prevent King from carrying out his planned harassment of Washington, D.C. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Byrd was referring to King's planned Poor People's March on Washington; King was assassinated before that march took place. Senator Byrd reminded his fellow Senators that the "first duty" of government "is to preserve law and order."

Arthur Murtagh, an FBI agent in the Atlanta office, claims that when news of King's shooting reached them, there was celebration, with one supervisor yelling, "They got the son of a bitch! I hope he dies!".

The forces of law and order had apparently prevailed - and they chose April 4, the one-year anniversary of King's denunciation of the profitable but deadly military-industrial complex, to make their point.