Capitol Hill Violence | US is a democracy manipulated by lobbies

Source: Reuters

The invasion of Capitol Hill by mobs seeking to nullify the will of the people of the United States occurred because the US has too much democracy and too little freedom. US democracy is the playground of lobbies, big and small, local and states-wide to national. By manipulating democracy, these lobbies, make sure that while all of the US is their oyster, the people are robbed of their freedoms.

Take a bizarre Virginia law, for example, which made it illegal for those living in the state to dry their laundry in the open air. The law was the work of a lobby for the washing machine industry, which wanted to increase the sales of their clothes dryers to a level where every household or groups of apartments would have to buy drying machines.

When ordinary Virginians tried to regain the freedom to dry their clothes whichever way they wished on their private properties, they got helpful advice from a lobbyist. Overturning the law may not be easy because of the power of the laundromat business and the washing machine industry. Instead, Virginians should court the equally powerful environment and clean air lobbies in the state.

As a result, Virginia passed another law which permitted the use of “wind power” to prevent clothes from remaining wet after laundering. This story had a happy ending because the power of one lobby was countered with the strength of another lobby with nobler intentions. Imagine, all this just for the individual’s right to dry one’s clothes they way one wished —something that would be taken for granted in most countries.

Even as I covered the anti-war protests against the 2003 US invasion of Iraq with empathy for the peace movement, I was appalled that a church, Westboro Baptist, was picketing military funerals at the hallowed Arlington National Cemetery with placards that read “Thank God for dead soldiers.” The Westboro Baptist Church managed to win a $200,000 court settlement against one city administration which tried to stop its members from protesting.

The court said the US is a democracy, which provided for such protests by any group. In another case involving this church, the father of Matthew Snyder, a fallen soldier in Iraq, sought legal cover for the freedom to grieve for his dead son in peace without intrusion from outsiders.

An appeals court, which sided with Westboro Baptists ruled: “It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.” In other words, this church was not being ‘nice’to the families of dead soldiers, but democracy allowed deceased veterans to be protested against and their presumed martyrdom on the battlefield discredited.

US President George W Bush was a strongman who could overthrow and execute the feared dictator Saddam Hussein and rid Kabul of the Taliban rule. But his power did not extend to providing grieving military families the right to mourn their dead in private. All that Bush could do was to enact a law in 2006, the ‘Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act’, which did not end protests, but restricted them to beyond 300 feet of a national cemetery.

When Donald J Trump became US President four years ago, he began treating the government he led and the Republican Party he controlled as twin lobbies for himself. Facts are never sacrosanct for US lobbyists. Instead, they fit the facts to advance their lobbying goals and achieve the desired results. Ethics guidelines exist only in name for their practices. By this reasoning, Joe Biden may have won the presidential election in November, but with effective lobbying, the result can be changed. Trump promoted his businesses with help from lobbies. Since his loss to Biden, the President has embraced the same strategy to achieve his goal of staying on in the White House.

Trump sees his supporters who invaded Capitol Hill and attempted to stop the final certification of Biden as the next President merely as one of his lobbies. He wanted Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over this certification process, to act as his lobbyist and not certify Biden’s victory. By appointing Supreme Court judges whom he expected to be his lobbying agents — mistakenly as it turned out — he was certain that the highest court would nullify the results of a free and fair election if the result went against him. These are strategies that Trump often used in business.

As Trump sees the present situation, the people’s constitutional freedom to decide who should be their President can be circumvented by interpreting the statutes and tweaking them. That is what lobbyists do. It is not a coincidence that a succession of Trump’s campaign managers in both elections have been lobbyists, not political strategists like the managers for several previous Presidents.

aul Manafort was a lobbyist for Pakistanis, discredited Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and Congolese dictator Mobutu SeseSeko. Lawyer Cleta Mitchell guided Trump through his notorious phone call last week to Georgia’s chief election official, Brad Raffensperger, to ‘find’ enough votes to reverse Biden’s win in the state. She is a registered lobbyist who has had many clients of questionable reputation.

The all-important question now is whether the violence on Capitol Hill will change anything in the US. Unlikely. Once Biden settles in the comfort zone of the White House with no challenges to his authority from either chambers of Congress, now controlled by his party, it will be business as usual in the US.