Edmund Burke Against Grover Norquist

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jul/14/edmund-burke-vs-grover-norquist/


Edmund Burke Against Grover Norquist
Garry Wills

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The idea of committing candidates to a rigid position as a condition of their being elected seems to be catching on.

***

There is no reason other groups should not issue their own pledges, given the success of Norquist’s. This signals a return to what was known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as governmental “instruction.” Constituents issued instructions on how to vote, and candidates for office bound themselves to follow such instructions. Otherwise, it was said, how could a member of Parliament be echoing what his constituents thought or wanted? The obvious objection to this is that it makes office holders impervious to changed conditions, new evidence, the learning experience of exchanges with his fellows, personal growth, or crises of one sort or another. It would render parliamentary discussion otiose and ineffectual.

The best attack on instruction occurred when Edmund Burke, standing for election to Parliament in 1774, addressed the electors of his district, Bristol. The idea of instructions had been raised in the campaign, leading Burke to renounce their “coercive authority”:

"Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

Burke makes clear what the real meaning of the Norquist pledge is for those who subscribe to it. They are signing over their souls. This first oath they take, as candidates, makes the next one they take, as office holders—the oath to preserve and protect the Constitution—an empty gesture. That oath, sworn to God, may call for changes of position in a crisis or where better knowledge has become available. They cannot preserve and protect the country if their hands are tied and their minds closed. Their participation in congressional discussion, if that discussion affects taxes in any way, becomes a charade. This is the situation Burke denounced:

"What sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments…Authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience – these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land."

That means that most Republicans in Congress have signed a Mephistophelian pact. They have left behind their consciences in the pocket of Grover Norquist.

July 14, 2011 10:38 a.m.

[indypaul]

1. I would simply as Grover

Would you, in turn, sign my pledge that you would no longer
launder any "charitable contributions" for Jack Abramoff et. al.?

[malaise]

2. ReTHUGS are anything but conservatives

Edmund Burke
"History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn."

Therefore you cannot destroy all that was created by those who built Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure and all the federal investments in buildings, roads, national parks, etc.
ReTHUGS want to sell these cheap to themselves.

Edmund Burke
"All government -- indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act -- is founded on compromise and barter."

No comment needed here except that ReTHUGS are not Conservatives - they are reactionaries, fascists, thieves and looters.

I dare you to ask the current ReTHUG Congressfolk who was Edmund Burke. I'd start with either Cantor or that Bachmann idiot.

[pansypoo53219]

3. i read an early 1900's book of orations.(library sale-going to ebay)

i read at least 1 or 2 burke speeches and boy oh boy. i think i blogged several quotes of his. pitt the older + younger were also awesome.