In judging the electorate that turned him out of office, state Supreme Court
Justice Russell Nigro said Pennsylvania’s voters were “blinded by
rage.”
In fact, it was the exact opposite. In a welcome change, the
voters took off their blinders and could clearly see an entrenched
political class in Pennsylvania that has become increasingly
pretentious, over-paid, and corrupt.
As a case in point, directly related to Nigro, the voters,
rather than being “blinded by rage,” saw a judiciary that has
turned a blind eye for decades as our politicians took illegal pay
hikes by way of so-called “unvouchered expenses,” a practice that’s
a clear violation of a provision in the state Constitution that
forbids lawmakers from increasing their salaries during their
current terms in office.
In the underhanded world of Pennsylvania politics where one
money-grubbing hand washes the other, “unvouchered expenses” means
the politicians get their salary increases illegally and
prematurely through reimbursements for expenses that don’t exist
while the judges flash a green light to the practice and pocket
their own pay hikes.
A thought by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a
French journalist and economist and an early activist for free
markets, is pertinent to our current situation in Pennsylvania.
“When law and morality contradict each other,” he wrote, “the
citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense
or losing his respect for the law.”
It might be something that Mr. Nigro can’t grasp, but what
happened on Election Day is that more voters in Pennsylvania than
normal decided against losing their moral sense. They said the 16
percent to 54 percent pay raises that the Legislature awarded to
itself in a no-debate, no-public input, middle-of-the-night vote
were wrong, and that it was wrong for politicians to grab the money
more than a year early by means of reimbursements for imaginary
expenses, and wrong for the judiciary to be go-along cronies in the
entire illicit process.
Rather than being “blinded by rage,” voters appropriately
concluded that “losing respect for the law” is exactly the right
response when the law is wrong. Similarly, losing respect for
politicians is exactly the right response when lawmakers turn into
a collective of perpetual lawbreakers.
Before it was a beer, Samuel Adams was a leader in the fight
against British colonial rule and a signer of the Declaration of
Independence. In fighting an entrenched and self-aggrandizing
political power, Adams had this advice: “Be not intimidated, nor
suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any
pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are
often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery,
and cowardice.”
Choosing sides in a battle between political subjugation and
individual sovereignty, said Adams, is to choose sides between
slavery and freedom: “If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the
tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for
freedom, go home from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hand
that feeds you; may your chains set lightly upon you, and may
posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
The danger, always, is for those who are ahead of the crowd,
those who see early an emperor without clothes, and say it.
Historically, it’s those groundbreakers, those willing to speak
with candor, those disposed to be the targets of embedded
authorities and ingrained prejudices, who have been essential in
the advances of liberty and societal evolution.
Again, from Samuel Adams, and directly applicable to those
relatively few in Pennsylvania who started the ball rolling against
the pay hike shenanigans that transpired in Harrisburg in the wee
hours of July 7: “It does not require a majority to prevail, but
rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in
people’s minds.”
John Adams, another early patriot in the American revolution,
and later the first Vice President of the United States and the
second President of the United States, warned of the obsession that
those in control have to eliminate any and all beliefs that they
see as either frightening or erroneous: “The jaws of power are
always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if
possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and
writing.”
Still, the larger danger, as America’s Founders cautioned, was
in doing nothing, doing nothing in the face of growing absolutism,
nothing as restraints on self-determination become more
suffocating, nothing as the acts of malice become more sordid and
the roots of repression grow deeper.
