It seems likely that Paul Ryan’s election as House Speaker will prove to be a poisoned chalice, and the promised unity of Republican House factions behind him will wither under the pressure of decisions about whether or not to make the compromises with President Obama necessary to keep the government functioning and pay the national debt.
It’s easy to blame the ideology, or the temperament, of the Freedom Caucus, for the melt-down, or even the overall competence of the Republican party, as conservative columnist David Brooks has done. “This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.”
But there are also deep structural sources of the malady. Consider the primary election that gives the Freedom Caucus its leverage over the more mainstream majority of the House Republicans; the defeat of Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Cantor’s successful Tea Party opponent, Eric Brat, received only 36,000 votes, just 8 percent of the registered electorate in Virginia’s 7th district. That’s less than a quarter of the registered Republicans. Indeed, in that fall’s general election, the Democratic candidate for Congress who Brat faced, Jack Trammel, received 91,000 votes, almost three times as many as Brat received in unseating Cantor, even though in the General Election Brat crushed Trammel.
So it’s almost certain that if Virginia, like California and Louisiana, let the two biggest vote getters in the primary contest the general even if they are of the same party, that in Round 2 Cantor would have gotten more than enough votes to keep his seat.
And Cantor’s defeat is no anomaly. Consider South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, in which Trey Gowdy, the Chair of the Banghazi Frenzy Committee, defeated four term conservative Republican Bob Inglis. Gowdy charged that Inglis, by conceding the existence of global warming, had forfeited his conservative credentials in spite of a 93.5 percent American Conservative Union rating. Gowdy stomped Inglis in the primary—but again, look at the numbers. Gowdy got only 54,000 votes, a tiny fraction of the registered voters. Once again in the general election the Democratic congressional candidate, in an overwhelmingly Republican district, received more votes than Gowdy in the primary. There are enough other examples that most House Republicans now live in fear of such a primary defeat—which is why mainstream Republicans couldn’t stand up Boehner against the Tea Party.
Applying this 40,000 votes needed to win a contested Republican primary, and considering that the average Congressional district has 330,000 registered voters, a determined and disciplined “faction” (as Madison would have put it) of far fewer than 5 percent of the American public could dominate the nominating process of the Republican party and capture it. (The same math holds true for the Democrats—it’s just harder to imagine such a disciplined faction of Democrats).
Effectively, an even tinier group now exercises dominating power of intimidation over the Republican caucus in the House.
How did this happen? Low turn-out primaries are nothing new—they are standard fare, and over the decades hundreds of primary victors have been chosen by even smaller segments of the electorate than Brat. It didn’t threaten to shut-down the government. Nor is the presence within one or both parties of small caucuses of members of Congress with view strikingly out of step with the American majority. During the Civil Rights era, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was opposed by 65 House Democrats, a much larger number than the Freedom Caucus.
But three basic changes in American politics, blended with low turn-outs created this toxic brew.
First, American political parties were traditionally ideological grab-bags of regional factions. The Democrats lumped Northern urban liberals with rural Southern conservatives, and rural Protestant Conservatives caucused with up-scale suburban moderates among Republicans. After Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 conservatives decided that they needed a “pure” conservative party, one with a clear and conservative ideology. They chose the Republican party. Aided by the civil rights induced migration of southern whites out of the Democratic party, this project proved fabulously successful. With the 2010 defeat of most of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, and the loss of most of the remaining conservative Democratic Senators in 2014, both parties now stand solidly on either the right or the left.
Second, having created European style ideological parties, Congressional Republicans then embraced European style parliamentary politics, imposing discipline on individual Senators and Congressman with strong sanctions if they voted their districts or their consciences on key legislation. This trend culminated in the 1995 promulgation of the Hastert rule, that the Speaker would schedule only legislation which enjoyed majority support in the Republican caucus, and its corollary, that Republicans would uniformly provide such legislation with enough votes to pass.
The Supreme Court provided the third kicker. One of the main barriers to a broadly unpopular ideology successfully plucking off 30-40 Congressional seats was that fringe factions lack an obvious mass funding base. But by repealing all of the legal limits on how much money the super-rich and corporations could pump into campaigns, the Court allowed a single patron to turbocharge policy objective held by a tiny minority of Americans and enable them to black-mail the entire national political system by shutting down Congress.
And how does the U.S. political system get out of this hostage taking dynamic? A few years ago many main-stream Republicans (David Brooks among them) argued that the nomination of a genuinely extremist Presidential nominee followed by a decisive drubbing in the general election would “break the fever” which had taken hold of the party. But that strategy assumed that business elites and the Republican establishment still held the loyalty of hierarchical Republican voters. Donald Trump and Ben Carson’s domination of the Presidential polls seems to have illustrated that this loyalty can no longer be counted on, and that the Tea Party, until it enacts its widely unpopular agenda, may well refuse to bow to the pragmatic counsels of “we need to win the Presidency.”
There is another pathway—it’s what Madison would have wanted—and if I had to bet, it’s the likely outcome. Mainstream Republicans will realize that if a relatively small number of them form cross-aisle alliances with the Democrats on those issues on which everyone except the Tea Party agrees (highway funding for example), they can govern, even if minimally because President Obama will eagerly sign such legislation. The business community will have to provide those who cross the aisle with protection in their primaries—which means that only bills with strong conservative and business credentials will be viable. But if Speaker Ryan is forced into such a strategy, and his consent would be essential, the fury of the hard core of the extreme right will make Catherine de Medici look like a pussycat.
So I don’t think it ends well for Speaker Ryan. But perhaps I am misreading the Tea Party. I hope so.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Imagine If Exxon Had Told the Truth on Climate Change
Snowball-Throwing, Climate-Denying Senator May Crash Paris Climate Talks
Stephen Colbert Compares 2016 Election to the Hunger Games
Bernie Sanders Demands DOJ Go After Exxon for ‘Covering Up’ Climate Change
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.