The Intelligent Conversationalist

by Imogen Lloyd Webber

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  KEY TERMS: FILIBUSTER AND CLOTURE

  • The word filibuster comes from a Dutch word meaning pirate. Originally both representatives and senators could try and hold the bill on the floor to prevent a vote, but now only senators have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.

  • In 1917 Woodrow Wilson urged senators to adopt Rule 22, Cloture, which allows the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority vote. They did, and it was reduced in 1975 to three-fifths, 60 of the 100 senators.

  • Since 1980, neither party has ever held 60 percent of all the seats in the Senate, a filibuster-proof majority.

  • The threat of filibuster (like a presidential veto) normally ensures it doesn’t occur.

  • South Carolina’s J. Strom Thurmond holds the record for longest filibuster, which he used against the 1957 Civil Rights Act: 24 hours, 18 minutes.

  • If one party is threatening to change the rules, wisely say that one day they will rue the day …

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  We’re not done yet. For the bill to be promulgated, get to be a law, the president has to sign it. (S)he has ten days to put pen(s) to paper. If (s)he doesn’t like it (s)he has two options. One is the veto, when the bill is sent back to Congress, who can override the president if two-thirds of both houses agree to. The second is just not signing or vetoing it, in which case the bill becomes law.

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  NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: VETOES

  • FDR holds the record for most vetoes—635.

  • Bush II didn’t veto at all until his second term. Stem cell research was definitely not his thing. It was, however, Nancy Reagan’s, who sources tell me was furious with him when he vetoed a stem cell bill.

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  Crystal clear now why the government has issues governing?

  Keeping an eye on those (not) governing, you’ve got SCOTUS. Made up of nine justices, including the chief justice, Article III states that with “good Behaviour” they may hold the position for life. Bearing in mind SCOTUS effectively determines what the Constitution means, it’s clearly a BIG deal when one vacates the seat and the president gets to nominate one.

  Of course, like all high-level executive positions (around 2,000), the nomination has to be confirmed by a Senate majority. Quite. Disastrous nominees who never made it onto SCOTUS include George W. Bush’s “My Little Crony,” Harriet Miers; Reagan’s pot-smoking Douglas Ginsburg; and Nixon’s G. Harrold Carswell, against whom there was evidence of racist conduct.

  TALKING POINTS

  • POTUS, under Article II, Section I, of the Constitution, can make legally binding executive orders to manage the operations of the federal government. They have been used by every president since George Washington.

   Executive orders are not all created equal, so it’s a false comparison to compare a president’s number of them. It’s the content that counts. Some are innocuous—proclamations such as National Take Your Child to Work Day. Other executive orders are laws containing important policy changes: Truman integrated the armed forces; Eisenhower desegregated schools; Reagan barred federal funds advocating abortion, which Clinton reversed. National security directives (aka presidential decision directives) are not always made public in the interest of national security.

   One of the most notorious executive orders was FDR’s transferring German-Americans and Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

   Issues arise when executive orders are contrary to Congress’s liking. Normally Congress is okay when the president is wearing his or her “commander in chief” hat, since the Constitution does make the president America’s chief diplomat. Domestic policy executive orders are more controversial. To do something about it, because of the presidential veto, two-thirds of each house has to agree more specifically on how the president should act. Tricky.

   It’s rare, but SCOTUS of course can step in over executive orders. They did with Truman over nationalization of steel mills in 1952.

  • Examples of SCOTUS’s deciding lawmakers have been unconstitutional include 1996’s Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from legally recognizing and extending benefits to same-sex couples. In June 2013 SCOTUS ruled that the federal government could no longer discriminate against same-sex couples, saying that to deny same-sex couples equal protection under the law was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. Go, liberty and equality.

  • In 1935 and 1936, SCOTUS “handed down” twelve decisions voiding various New Deal acts of Congress. FDR was unimpressed and came up with a court-packing plan. Congress wasn’t having it.

  • It was the Warren Court (1953–1969) that okayed the trailblazing of civil liberties—against school segregation, limiting religion in schools, Miranda rights. Note that Earl Warren himself was nominated by Eisenhower, a Republican.

  • FISC, the United States’s eleven-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has controversially been expanding its role behind closed doors. The eleven justices (all currently appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court) work in rotating shifts (so only ONE signs most orders) and have created a burgeoning secret body of law. This court allows the NSA to do what it does. Some believe it is stretching the Fourth Amendment (prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures) to the breaking point.

   The Supreme Court hears both sides of the case, FISC only one—the government’s. Which is not the American way of doing things.

   The justices are all appointed by one justice. Doesn’t sound like justice to me, at any rate.

   FISC was originally created by Congress as a check against government wiretapping abuse.

  • An international perspective is always useful. You can point out that English-speaking nations—the Anglosphere, if you will—have a concept of liberty different from that of the nations of continental Europe. Anglos believe their rights are established by tradition and rooted in law. The Euros perceive their rights as being granted by the state.

  RED FLAGS

  • If you want to send your dinner guests to sleep, Article I, Section 7, of the Constitution will do the trick. It means that only members of the House can introduce revenue bills, ones that deal with taxes or spending. The reason being that until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were chosen by state legislatures, while representatives had to be voted in by the people. Since there were more representatives, they were thought to be more representative of the people and also likely to be poorer than the senators and thus more mindful of the right for Americans to keep their hard-earned cash.

  • If anyone is still awake and you really want to finish them off, you can talk about how impeachment proceedings have to begin in the House; it is the Senate that adjudicates them.

  • Don’t confuse Miranda rights with anything to do with your friend Miranda. They are the cop TV show rights. Exact wording can change, but the gist is always is “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

   It was created in 1966 after the SCOTUS case Miranda v. Arizona. Ernesto Arturo Miranda was arrested and tried for domestic violence and had his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights infringed on. He was later retried and convicted anyway.

   Small print: You don’t get Miranda rights until you’re arrested. Also there is an exception for public safety if federal prosecutors think a public safety threat is imminent or if you’re an “enemy combatant” and subject to military law.

   There was a Big Drama over whether Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be read his Miranda rights or not. Was he an enemy combatant? Several Fox News pundits believed they were vindicated when sixteen hours after the start of his interrogation he was read them … and stopped talking when he had been “singing like a canary until the judge showed up.”

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&nbs
p; WISE WORDS

  You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

  —Colin Powell

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  SOCIAL SURVIVAL STRATEGY

  Argument: “The English-speaking nations, the Anglosphere, have a concept of liberty different from that of the nations of continental Europe. Anglos believe their rights are established by tradition and rooted in law. The Euros perceive their rights as being granted by the state.”

  This is one of the reasons the UK-US “special relationship” exists and why you probably feel more affinity with a sarcastic Brit than a sophisticated French(wo)man.

  Crisp Fact: “Filibuster comes from a Dutch word meaning pirate.”

  This should calm a cantankerous conversation about politics, as you can then start talking about Johnny Depp’s career and how his Pirates of the Caribbean costar Keira Knightley “has done well.”

  Pivot: “Let’s talk about people and objects who do what our politicians can’t—compromise. What do you make of the cronut concept?”

  The croissant-doughnut hybrid will be something the person you’re talking to adores, disapproves of, or hasn’t heard of, in which case you can enlighten him/her. Whatever the case, you can stop talking about law in the highly likely event that you’ve run out of talking points.

  CHEAT SHEET 20—POLITICAL SCANDALS

  Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politicians’ tendency toward corruption is thus unsurprising, but the advantage of living in a democracy is that truth usually comes out sooner rather than later—and if it’s a Republican, often them in the process.

  Scandal has a long and undistinguished history, making the hit ABC television show seem positively tame in comparison. The ancient monuments of the Acropolis had as many question marks about them as the current Greek banking process. The Roman emperors had some particularly sordid predilections: Tiberius had a penchant for young boys, Nero an inclination toward incest, and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator) not only had harems of concubines but regularly turned up in public wearing drag. Not that there’s anything wrong in that per se, but his cruelty and megalomania were the stuff of legend.

  They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. Many of our politicians can’t have read their history books, for instead of learning from their predecessors’ mistakes and thus gaining twenty-twenty vision, their myopic view lets us read about their embarrassing exploits on a daily basis. And yes, the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

  We focus here on three case studies of more recent American scandals. For some reason, the politicians all seem to be male.

  TIP 1

  Vote for women. (Although between lost e-mails and all sorts of Clinton Foundation allegations, Hillary Clinton has been doing her best to jeopardize my rule before going to press.)

  Although Republicans do have affairs with women—consider the governator Arnold Schwarzenegger shagging the maid and fathering a child or Mark Sanford doing a disappearing act because of his mistress soul mate’s vintage—there is a conspicuous tendency for vociferously antigay Christian conservative types to be found in same-sex clinches. Case Study 1 reminds you of the names and shame of some of these hypocrites. Democrats have done their utmost to make their straight affairs anything but straightforward, so in Case Study 2 we see how men such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards made a valiant effort to keep their party down. Finally we end up with a case study of the standard non-sexual-corruption variety.

  TIP 2

  Congressmen, don’t use your congressional e-mail to send pictures of yourself stripping and flexing your muscles to a random soul you meet on Craigslist, as Republican Chris Lee did in 2011.

  CASE STUDY 1. REPUBLICANS AND MEN

  Millennials of all political persuasions and most of the rest of us (including SCOTUS) have concluded the ancient Greeks were spot-on and same-sex relations are absolutely acceptable. However, there are still some Republicans out there who claim you can pray the gay out. The noisier they are, the more likely shining a spotlight into their closets will reveal a sticky stack of Playgirl, not Playboy, magazines.

  David Dreier, a representative from California, was particularly vociferous in his antigay stance—so only naturally it transpired in 2004 that he was having a relationship with his male chief of staff. That same year, Ed Schrock, a Republican from Virginia, had to abort his run for a third term—something to do with a male prostitute. Then there was Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, who in 2006 was discovered sending sexually explicit e-mails to underage male pages. Not only did it ruin his career but some blamed him in part for the Republican loss of control in Congress later that year. Who can forget big Bill Clinton critic Larry Craig, a veteran eighteen-year senator from Idaho, who was allegedly found up to George Michael shenanigans in an airport bathroom in 2007? And a dishonorable mention should go to Robert Bauman, representative from Maryland, and his male prostitute moment in 1980.

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  SUGGESTED VIEWING

  Outrage, the 2009 documentary starring David Dreier.

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  There is always a path to redemption. Jon Hinson, a representative from Mississippi, who was repeatedly linked to and denied homosexual activity, eventually resigned after performing some oral action on a male Library of Congress employee in 1981. He became a gay rights activist.

  TIP 3

  Don’t have sex in a public bathroom. There are other (more hygienic) locales and ways to have non-vanilla sex.

  CASE STUDY 2. DEMOCRATS AND WOMEN

  Before the modern political party dividing lines as we know them, Thomas Jefferson kicked off the presidential sex scandal tradition, supposedly fathering a child with his slave Sally Hemings. DNA testing in 1998 concluded his denials were likely a lie. By the twentieth century, although JFK did his utmost to degenerate the office to such depths, it was Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky that ruined her life and in the end didn’t do much to his that really caught the public’s imagination. And gave politicians all over America the hope they could Get Away With It If Found Out—which is what you say the motivation today is whenever a man is caught up to no good and refuses to resign.

  Bill, of course, had public previous—Gennifer Flowers had come and gone claiming a twelve-year affair during the 1992 Democratic primary campaign. Three years or so later he was having sexual relations in the Oval Office with Lewinsky, a White House intern, which she confided to her pal Linda Tripp. Tripp recorded the chat, because that’s what you—and the NSA—do to your friends. The tape ended up in the paws of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in 1998, and the sorry sordid situation eventually led to an impeachment vote—the first since Andrew Johnson in 1868—by the House of Representatives. Although Bill had lied about the affair under oath, the Senate bailed him out. Whatever the rights or wrongs of Bill’s behavior, in a particularly startling display of duplicity, a significant number of wife-deceiving Republicans were among those who tried to get rid of the 42nd president. Examples include Newt Gingrich (had an affair with an intern himself while married to his second wife), John Ensign (later resigned for cuckolding a close friend’s wife), Pete Domenici (son outside marriage), Stephen C. LaTourette (shagging his female chief of staff), Henry Hyde (former affair revealed while fronting impeachment), Robert Livingston (extramarital affair), Dan Burton (illegitimate love child), and Ken Calvert (champion of the Christian Coalition—and caught with a prostitute allegedly going down on him in his car).

  Dodgy Democrats weren’t above reprimanding Clinton either. Especially notable was Gary Condit, a representative from California, who later had an affair with intern Chandra Levy, who disappeared and was found murdered. Years late
r an undocumented immigrant was subsequently convicted.

  TIP 4

  People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

  Clinton, by virtue of his position as president, may still be the pinnacle Democratic philanderer charlatan, but it would be remiss not to mention John Edwards, the veep on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential ticket and cheater on his cancer-stricken wife. Indeed, he became baby daddy to his mistress Rielle Hunter. The 1980s of course had Gary Hart, initially the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, who had a fling with Donna Rice, she of the splendid hair. More recently political men in New York have lived up to the cliché that men in the Big Apple are bad apples.

  Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York State and scourge of Wall Street, was undone by an IRS investigation and the New York Times then reporting he had been an enthusiast of the Emperors Club, a prostitution ring. What made client No. 9’s appearance on this client list so especially jaw-dropping is that while Spitzer had been New York’s attorney general he had himself PROSECUTED prostitution rings.

  Also doing his utmost to boost circulation for the ailing New York Post was Anthony Weiner, the congressman caught sexting over Twitter. The headline writers at the publication probably never dreamed they would ever owe so much to a conservative enfant terrible, the late Andrew Breitbart, who was key in exposing Weiner’s exposing and then Weiner himself, for reappearing—and reoffending—in public life so swiftly.