Senator Rand Paul has recently tilted at another windmill by sponsoring an amendment that requires politicians to be subject to the same rules and laws as the people they govern. It’s a great idea, but I think the nation has gone too far down the wrong path for this to be anything other than a nice bit of kabuki and something to thump come primary time. Amendments require two-thirds majorities from both houses of Congress – could you imagine two thirds of our politicians passing a rule that would mean they’re to be treated the way they treat us?
Now that you’re done laughing, ponder a moment the pervasiveness of “rules for thee but not for me” in our society beyond the halls of Congress. It’s easy to bash the 535 elected “representatives” on the Hill for exempting themselves from the rules they force us to live by, but the true corrosion of our society derives from our fellow citizens enjoying their own version of disparate privilege and immunity to the laws that apply to the rest of us.
A libertarian writer named Radley Balko has been writing about the militarization of law enforcement for years, and recently wrote a book called “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” Daryl Gates, the chief of the LA police department, is credited with popularizing the use of “Special Weapons and Tactics,” or SWAT, teams in response to the increasingly powerful, organized and dangerous gangs that police were facing off against. A popular TV show helped establish the acceptance of militarized squads in black tactical garb and with more powerful firearms on our streets and among us, and with the help of the federal government and the “cool” factor, there are SWAT-style teams all over the country, and not just in big cities. Small towns with virtually nonexistent crime problems are forming their own SWAT teams and loading up on military weapons. Keene, NH, a town of 23,000 that has had two homicides in the last 14 years, got a federal grant of nearly $300K to buy a tank (actually a Lenco Bearcat armored vehicle, but lets not prevaricate – it’s a tank. Cool toy? Sure. Appropriate tool for our friends and neighbors to use to patrol our streets? If you’re comfortable with tanks driving around small town America, take a moment and ask yourself why.
Once you have a tool, you’ll want to use it – and likely will justify its use as a way to keep your skills with it fresh. So, of course there are lots and lots of SWAT raids, 40,000 a year by some estimates. Are we to believe that there are over a hundred instances a day where the risk to law enforcement is so great that SWAT teams are needed? In one notorious instance, SWAT teams raided Gibson guitar factories in Tennessee because of allegations that Gibson was using certain hardwoods that were improperly or illegally imported. What possible justification could there be for using a SWAT team here?
A counterargument is that any situation that involves police interdiction puts the police officers at risk. The problem with this thinking is that it embodies disparate levels of risk tolerance between police and civilians. And, if you follow certain sorts of news outlets, you have no doubt seen story after story about SWAT raids gone wrong – wrong houses, people and dogs shot, children terrorized – and may have noted that there are very rarely real consequences for the raiders or their bosses. This map offers some sense of how often this happens.
Law enforcement circling the wagons and protecting their own is nothing new, of course, but as those charged to protect us get more and more into an “army” mindset and less and less in a “to protect and serve” mindset, they lose an all-important sense of connection and belonging to the communities they serve. It becomes “us vs them,” where the “them” is the average citizen, not just the skels and perps.
Look into the criminal justice system and you can find the same sort of thing happening. District attorneys’ offices throughout the nation love to tout their high conviction rates. Prosecutors rise through the ranks and achieve positions of authority and status by maintaining those high conviction rate. See a problem here? If an innocent person is arrested, prosecuted and acquitted, the statistics take a hit. Prioritizing actual guilt is at cross purposes to such an incentive system, and we’ve all read stories of innocent people being railroaded in court or being bullied into taking plea deals. And, prosecutorial immunity means that even the worst violators of the public trust in this regard tend to skate. Proving prosecutorial malice or misconduct is a tall order, and just as in law enforcement, these people will circle the wagons rather than culling the bad apples from their midst. “Us vs Them” again.
Those are easy examples, and we shouldn’t be surprised by them. Tribalism is encoded in our genes. We stand with our own, with those who are like us and stand opposed to those who are not-like us. But when that tribalism is backed by the force of government, we stray away from the basic concept of an egalitarian society, of government of, by and for the people. The institutions that are there to serve us and that should be filled by “us” start to “do unto” us and get filled by “not-us.” And, as the power of these institutions grows, our peers look to “get on the inside” and thus become “not-us.”
We are supposed to be a classless society, one where those who run things are our friends and neighbors. It’s easy to see how we’ve gotten away from that at the highest levels of government, but the real danger lies in the departure from classlessness at the lowest levels of governance, when our friends and neighbors who are on the “inside” lose sight of the fact that they’re our peers.
And worse, the message that it’s OK to tribalize filters throughout society. Public union bosses get laws written that grant special privileges and special exemptions for their members. Wall Street bigwigs get rules written that favor their firms over others and rescue them from bad bets at taxpayer expense. Auto dealers get rules written that exempt them from paying sales tax on used cars while the rest of us have to, in order to protect themselves from the free market. Florists in Louisiana get rules written that mandate licensing of new florists in order to protect themselves from competition. Corn farmers in Iowa use their clout to ensure that the government continue to force us to put ethanol in our cars.
It is natural and instinctual for people to seek advantage any way they can. We have a government that’s supposed to protect individual rights and apply laws in an egalitarian fashion specifically to protect us from those who would seek that advantage through the use of force. But, when “equal treatment under the law” is subverted so ubiquitously, it undermines the very nature of our society and the respect for its principles. Even people who would normally “play fair” are encouraged to “play the game,” to rent-seek, to try and become insiders at the expense of the outsiders. Rot and corruption metastasize, killing the host.
What’s the solution? Senator Paul’s amendment is a good idea, but do we really think that Congress will vote away its power? Worse, do we think that the press and the various powerful lobbies will agree to a rule whose reach would harm their ability to peddle influence and garner exceptions for themselves? Who will advocate for such an amendment? While there is the alternate path to passing an amendment through Congress – a constitutional convention, none of the 27 amendments to the Constitution were enacted via this mechanism, and we are arguably at a point in history where the recognition of the power and autonomy of the states is at an all time low. And, lets not forget that state level politicians are very likely to have the same sorts of motivations as their federal counterparts.
So, what to do? Express indignation and maintain a noise level on this issue. Politicians are motivated by public opinion, especially emotional outrage. Angry voters do scare them. So, be angry rather than resigned, and challenge those who embrace this sort of separatism whenever and wherever you see it.
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