Our venerable system isn't always venerated

by Gene Smith, Fayetteville Observer, October 12, 2103.

Let me tell you a war story - a true one. You can look it up.

In the run-up to the Civil War, pro-slavery Southern lawmakers had worked themselves into such a frenzy that many said, and some actually believed, that the election of Abraham Lincoln would be the ruination of life as they knew it and the downfall of America. No discussion needed, end of story, last one out snuff out the lanterns.

Not that a supporting patter hadn't been endlessly recited in Congress, in statehouses, in public squares and churches and taverns. It went like this: If Lincoln won, he would not guarantee the perpetuation of slavery in the Territories, whose residents would, on attaining statehood, fill out the ranks of an anti-slavery majority that would end up banning slavery everywhere.

Because the Constitution afforded slavery some protection, the voice of the plantation South was strong in denouncing this treachery, this betrayal, this embrace of despotism. It was wrong, it was immoral, it was contra-Constitutional, un-American and an affront to the laws of God and man. You could almost forget they were talking about another in a long succession of quadrennial elections mandated by Article II.

South Carolina didn't even wait until Lincoln's inauguration to commit acts of war against its government: The election alone was provocation enough to start a bloody rebellion that would ultimately end well over 600,000 American lives.

Most likely, you've already got the point: Their great grievance against the devil Lincoln was that the system bequeathed to them four score and whatever years earlier would work, and that the system wouldn't give them the outcome they wanted.

Fast forward.

I don't believe President Obama is another Lincoln, but think.

If House Republicans want to reopen the government, they can pass a bill that does that and nothing else, see it signed into law within hours and then move on to other things.

If they want to prevent a disastrous default, they can do that by simply renouncing the use of the threat of default as an instrument of political extortion, ever.

If they do neither of those things, or only one of them, I have to assume - Don't you? - that it's because they consider something else more important.

Maybe they believe, as some of the more strident members of the caucus have long said, that Obamacare ensures the ruination of life as we know it and the downfall of America. Or maybe, as some have taken to saying more recently, it's entitlements that matter. Or tax reform. Or an oil pipeline from Canada. Or "conversation." But there has to be something, because Speaker of the House John Boehner plainly said (Here; you shouldn't have to do all the looking-up), "We're not going to pass a clean debt limit increase."

Why not? Because without threats to the public interest and the nation's economy, the system bequeathed to us so long ago will work, and Boehner's surly faction won't get what it wants.

That calculation may be correct, and maybe Obamacare really is the scourge of the century. The fact remains that if you offer both men a bare-bones bill to fund the government and a straightforward invitation to take default out of the picture forever, only one will accept. The other will work from the premise that something else matters more.

May we now put aside this silliness about moral equivalency and poxes on both their houses, along with the feigned uncertainty about who's responsible if people suffer and our recovering economy is pushed over the edge, taking the global economy down with it? No party gets everything wrong or everything right. But at this moment, it's Republicans who have taken the position that if the economy falls, it will have died in service to a higher cause. I wish they'd be clearer and more consistent about what that higher cause is.