Ashburn and tyranny of the minority
| Wednesday, Feb 25 2009 12:29 AM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 01:21 PM
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In the midst of last week's budgetary battles, Roy Ashburn occupied and comforted himself with a biography of his political hero, Ronald Reagan. While Sen. Ashburn might have taken solace in the understated pragmatism of the 40th president, perhaps what he should have read instead was John F. Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."
Therein, he would have encountered a familiar situation: politicians such as John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster who felt the heady tug of party loyalty but decided instead to support a policy that furthered the politics of compromise instead the zealotry of rigid ideology.
Lifelong supporters of Daniel Webster reviled him for his support of Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850. For supporting Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, John Quincy Adams received an anonymous letter from a fellow Federalist which said, "O, Adams, remember who thou art. Return to Massachusetts! Return to thy country. Assist not in its destruction! Consider the consequences! Awake -- arouse in time." Webster didn't want slavery but he wished to avoid a Civil War at all costs. Adams didn't want to ruin the commercial vitality of New England, but he felt a war with England would have been more ruinous.
It is clear that Ashburn detests much of what was in the bill he ultimately voted for. He clearly agrees with fellow Republicans that California's Banana Republic malfeasance is a case study in the excesses of rule by rigid liberalism. Governance by unionization, taxation, regulation, and frenzied environmentalism has wrought a state that now sits at the crossroads of perpetual financial and social paralysis. The bill he approved doubled-down on a number of the same bad habits that created this crisis in the first place, such as raising taxes and borrowing at the expense of future tax payers.
But what Ashburn did took more courage than the mountain of "no" votes elicited from his colleagues. In a pluralistic society that promotes a two-party system, progress transpires not in the vacuum of rigid idealism, but through the messy machinery of legislative compromise.
There are large and painful cuts in the budget he approved. It is a small, albeit very small, step in the correct direction. And while Republican purists would have liked more, it is not from a lack of conservatism that Ashburn concluded that releasing criminals and crippling education is more than a little bit short-sided.
Any student of the legislative process understands that presidents and governors are frequently forced to support good law that is unfortunately attached to bad provisions of earmarks and pork barrel profligacy. I imagine some of Ashburn's harshest critics said very little when President Bush went six years without vetoing a single bill.
Governing means choosing among an array of imperfect choices. What Ashburn's detractors are really saying is that they would have only voted for the "perfect bill," a bill of nothing but severe spending cuts. As a member of a party that is in the extreme minority, Ashburn assumed the posture of mature statesmanship by recognizing that this perfect bill would never materialize. It didn't materialize for Daniel Webster and it didn't materialize for John Quincy Adams.
Leadership means showing up to make the difficult decisions when nobody else will. As a Republican, I am not sure I would have had the courage to vote for the bill. But the fact that it was a difficult decision means that we should respect Ashburn for his courage -- even if that respect is cloaked in the civic gloss of a respectful disagreement.
Jeremy Adams is a government teacher at Bakersfield High and an adjunct lecturer in CSUB's political science department.
