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Let me get this straight. Actually, not me, but rather Nebrtaska’s congressional delegation.
To wit: I buy a flagpole at my local hardware store, maybe a nice 12-footer. I schlep it to Washington, D.C., where I attach Old Glory. Then, as part of mob intent on undoing a free and fair presidential election — essentially trying to overthrow the government — I storm the Capitol, viciously beating police officers on the way into the building with my hardware store flagpole.
For my felonious efforts, I am convicted in a court of law and imprisoned, but I’m pardoned by the president and released. Now I’m in line to receive a cash payout for my troubles, something about the previous administration’s “weaponization” of the justice system. I’m thinking a crooked number and six zeroes should assuage my pain and suffering.
Go figure.
No word yet on the “pain and suffering” calculus of the anti-weaponization fund’s eligibility requirements. Would buying a cup of coffee at about a half more than one paid at Christmas qualify? How about needing a small bank loan to fill a gas tank? Go ahead, scoff. But given the president’s decision to wage an unpopular war with muddied goals, millions of family budgets can no longer keep up.
To their credit, none of Nebraska’s five members of the U.S. House and Senate have publicly signed on to the idea of doling out money from a $1.776 billion fund to those who attacked the Capitol and our system of government. As of this writing, the quintet’s responses have ranged responses wrapped in politispeak to a limited “nope.”
Bravo. We have, however, a note. This was an easy call. While the hypothetical above may be on the deleterious end of Jan. 6, 2021, spectrum, public support for the fund is weak not necessarily because of some of the more potentially horrific specifics, but rather because it’s simply a bad idea. So bad, a federal judge last Friday put the kibosh on it until a hearing could be held June 12.
The real issue for Congress, however, is that the anti-weaponization fund is not the White House’s only bad idea bouncing around Washington. It is the one that has garnered some recent pushback in quarters previously content, complicit or careful not to object to other bad ideas. For details, see the billion-dollar ballroom; the violent execution of an immigration crackdown; the aforementioned war with Iran; the removal (and apparent reinstatement after an outcry) of historical content in public places about Black Americans from the Tuskegee Airmen’s heroics to Jackie Robinson’s achievements; the insistence, with the Supreme Court abetting, on mid-decade gerrymandering to win congressional seats; the meddling in and misnaming of the Kennedy Center; and price-hiking, budget-busting tariffs.
The bad idea list is incomplete although we may revisit the $250 bill and White House cage thingy.
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The public discomfort with the anti-weaponization fund from some GOP members of Congress, including among Nebraska’s delegation, gives hope to the notion that partisanship has its limits, even with today’s hardened political camps. Still, the response encourages the optimists among us.
Congress has historically had a roster — albeit small — of independent thinkers from both sides of the aisle, men and women for whom party politics was well down their lists of priorities. Nebraskans remember Republican George Norris, who had a knack for annoying party regulars, so much so that two other Nebraska Republicans, Roman Hruska and Carl Curtis, threatened a filibuster rather than risk Norris being chosen as one of the then five outstanding former senators whose portraits were to be permanently displayed in the U.S. Senate Reception Room. They succeeded.
Norris, who was one of eight U.S. senators profiled in JFK’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” once said, “I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience than ride in the chariot of victory.”
Perhaps it was Norris, perhaps it’s our curious, now in-name-only nonpartisan Legislature, or perhaps it’s a previous penchant for electing members of Congress whom many saw as “mavericks,” unencumbered thinkers despite the R or D next to their names … Kerrey, Hagel, Zorinksky, Exon. Whatever the reason, Nebraska once enjoyed the reputation of sending individualists to Washington with an inclination for calling out bad ideas, regardless of their origin.
Meanwhile, plenty of bad ideas remain out there, opportunities for Congress to question, resist and counter. Whether the anti-weaponization fund was a one-off or if it truly did help some find and feel their oats remains to be seen. As for Nebraska’s contingent, perhaps each should consider his or her political bloodline, one steeped in independent thinking and action.
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