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| Kant |
If you are a member of the legislature, state or federal, you will have discovered by now that there are inestimable benefits of introducing bills that cannot pass, the most important of which is that dead bills leave in their wake no appreciable consequences.
But dead-on-arrival bills have a useful after-life as
campaign fodder. They can be used for boosting a candidate’s bona fides among narrow intersectional
groups of possible voters from whom intersectional politicians hope to raise campaign
cash.
In a bipartisan legislature – Connecticut has not had one
for 30 years or more – dead-on-arrival bills usually originate in the House and
are killed in the Senate. Of the two bodies, the Senate is often regarded as
the more responsible body, brimming with realpolitikers whose eyes are sharply
focused on the consequences, intended and unintended, cultural or economic, of
proposed legislation.
Kant, we are told, “… is a
deontologist; from the Greek, [which refers to] the science of duties. For
Kant, morality is not defined by the consequences of our actions, our emotions,
or an external factor. Morality is defined by duties and one’s action is moral
if it is an act motivated by duty.”
Of course all politicians are motivated by what they
consider to be a “duty” to hang onto their offices, and this sometimes leads
them down dark byways. Generally, politicians have no moral duty to cheat their
way into office or, having achieved office, to maintain their positions by
proposing dead-on-arrival legislation they strongly suspect will have no
consequences other than as fodder for political campaigns.
But politicians who have sworn off moral considerations rely
on dead-end measures because, among other reasons, money and political prestige
are rewarded in the political afterlife. U.S. Senator Chris Dodd did not become
a millionaire until, having left office, he happily shouldered his duties as
Chairman of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
“Most ways of earning money,” Henry David Thoreau reminds
us, “lead downward.”
In any case, real political morality is related entirely to
the LIVE political consequences of
political action. All dead-on-arrival political legislation is therefore
immoral by Kantian standards, because non action is unrelated to any political
duty. Then too, the political duties of politicians in a democratic-republican
system of government are to the whole polis, not to his own professional
advancement, and the interests of the polis cannot be furthered by
dead-on-arrival legislation.
In a legislature that is not bipartisan – think Connecticut
– partisan legislation generally leads to unopposed LIVE consequences, often buried beneath mounds of honeyed rhetoric.
Good legislation leads to good consequences, we were taught
by our Civics teachers, a long vanished species, and bad legislation leads, way
down the road, to bad consequences. However, in politics, what is good for the
political geese is not always immediately bad for the ganders they supposedly
represent. Many legislative bills have long fuses, the unintended consequences
appearing long after the legislation has been launched.
By way of example, we know that legislation leading to
higher taxes and spending – the two are casually related – cannot reduce
inflation, because inflation itself is a hidden tax, and the solution to high
taxes (i.e. inflation) cannot be higher taxes.
Kant would have had
no difficulty faulting as “immoral” political actions that violate what he
called the “categorical imperative.” We all have a moral DUTY to behave in such a way that each and every one of our actions
may be considered a universal law, applicable to all mankind, including ourselves.
This is why cheating and lying are inherently immoral acts. If cheating were a
universal duty, everyone who cheated would in due course be cheated. If lies
were tolerated in a Constitutional Republic, the representative principle would
be constantly violated.
To return to dead-on-arrival legislation -- i.e. proposed
legislation that cannot pass into law -- Kant might say all such legislation is
immoral because a legislator has a moral duty in a Constitutional Republic to create
legislation that positively benefits his or her constituents. And while
dead-on-arrival legislation targeted to a narrow audience may help a legislator
in his re-election campaign, dead-end legislation can never benefit the broader
needs of the legislator’s constituents.
In fact, Kant might argue, it would be better for the
legislator’s constituents if the legislator shirking his principzl political
responsibility were to be discharged from office by a morally awake
constituency that is, unlike the legislator, able to distinguish properly lies
from hard truths. No sir, you may not have your cake and eat it too, however enticing
the thought may be.
All politics must be moral realpolitik and not some variant
of magical thinking, according to which words are totems that change reality.
You can say, until the sun goes down, that the proper
definition of inflation is NOT too many dollars chasing too few goods, but
saying it, as our moral philosophizing moms and dads insisted – doesn’t make it
so. After all the political rhetoric is put to bed, up is still up, down is
still down, twice two makes four, and moral action is inescapably related to
moral duties.
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