The Republic of Conscience - Hardcover

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Gary Hart is an American politician and a former Colorado senator, serving in Congress from 1975 to 1987. Since retiring from the Senate, Hart resumed his private law practice and has written several books on U.S. history and politics. In 2014, President Barack Obama named Hart as the new United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland.

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PREFACE

America’s founders created a republic knowing that it, like all republics from ancient Athens and Rome onward, would be vulnerable to corruption. From 400 BC onward, corruption of the republican ideal took the form of narrow, individual, and special interests taking precedence over the common good and the commonwealth. Our founders knew that if this evil insinuated itself into the new American Republic, our nation would not long survive in the form they had designed and had hoped for it.

By these classic standards, the American Republic in the twenty-first century is massively corrupt. A vast and cancerous network of lobbying, campaign fund-raising, and access to policy makers in administrations and lawmakers in Congress is based purely and simply on special and narrow interests. This tragedy is compounded by two relatively recent trends: More than four hundred former members of Congress, not to mention their spouses and family members, have joined the lobbying ranks; and former administration officials come and go from one administration to another with periods of lobbying activities in between.

Thus, a permanent political class has established itself in our nation’s capital. Whether incestuous is an appropriate description or not, it is most certainly a system that an increasing number of Americans distrust—and with considerable reason. Friends promote friends. Rolodexes are shared. Networks are maintained. The system is increasingly closed to outsiders, or at least to outsiders who have yet to attain membership. National leadership appears to be limited to a few families.

Such a permanent political system rarely produces innovative policies or creative agendas. To contest for a seat in the United States Senate, even in a medium-size state such as Colorado, requires millions, sometimes tens of millions, of dollars. Very little of that sum is produced by small contributions. Most of it comes from the institutional investors and political action committees with specific agendas that have proliferated in both political parties. Senators and members of Congress spend hours each day telephoning large contributors, pleading for money. Television networks routinely decry this trend even though they are the principal beneficiaries of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertising.

To raise these staggering sums requires a candidate to subscribe to established agendas. Those agendas do not represent the national interest. They represent a panoply of special interests. Successful candidates arrive in office heavily beholden to those interests that have contributed. Their flexibility, creativity, and imagination are circumscribed by whatever commitments had to be made to finance a campaign. At the very least, they have traded access, the coin of the political realm, for campaign contributions.

But this is not the kind of government our founders created and envisioned for future generations. Even a casual reading of the Constitutional debates, speeches, and voluminous correspondence reveals the founders’ deep concerns, based on their intimate familiarity with the theorists of the republic from Athens through Machiavelli to the English and Scottish Enlightenment, over the threat of corruption, the danger to all republics.

We can only imagine what Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson, among many others, would say about today’s American Republic. Being pragmatists, they would recognize that a nation that increased a hundredfold in population in two centuries, that adapted itself to world leadership after World War II, and that now struggles to compete in a globalized economy would have to change and adjust. But they also knew the difference between policy that must adapt to new realities and principles that must not.

Indeed, they believed that the first principles of every constitution must be frequently renewed to prevent corruption. And the necessity for a timely renewal of principles is the central purpose of this book.

As a veteran of campaigning, holding public office, and advising various administrations, I find no justification in our Constitution for the political system we have now created or have permitted to be created by others. Instead, this system is the product of the refusal to enact campaign finance reforms, to restrict transition from public office to lobbying, and to provide limited candidate access to free media. This is not a mysterious or complex secret process everyday Americans cannot understand. It is the product of interest groups who prefer to trade cash for access, television networks who prefer paid political advertising to open access to the public airwaves, hugely lucrative lobbying organizations, and the compounding of this corrupt system by recent Supreme Court decisions.

Out of this entire morass, nothing would dumbfound a returning founder more than decisions by the current Supreme Court allowing corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to promote their particular narrow interests. This stands as nothing more nor less than the highest judicial body in the Republic sanctioning the corruption of that Republic.

This book attempts to contrast the Republic our founders created and hoped would be perpetuated with the government we now have. Each area of legislation and policy today is dominated by the interest groups concerned with it. Rather than starting with a view of what is best for the nation long-term, the common good, legislators and policy makers seek to reconcile the demands of each narrow interest concerned with that issue. Being men of experience, our founders anticipated this, but they wanted those governing our nation to consider the demands of particular interests in the broader context of the national interest. They feared the corruption that inevitably results when governance becomes nothing more than a process for satisfying an endless host of particular interests. This accounts for their insistence on “disinterested” representatives.

The disappearance of a sense of the national interest, and the consequent governance by and for special interests, reflects itself in today’s political process through the channeling of hundreds of millions of dollars from interest groups to lobbyists and then to officeholders and office seekers. The result is the rise of a permanent political class increasingly remote from everyday Americans and a system that could lead to the ultimate destruction of the republican ideal. This is the corruption we were warned about from our earliest beginnings that would destroy the American Republic.

The new realities of the twenty-first century do not require the United States to abandon the principles upon which it was founded. Neither our economic foundation, nor our foreign policy, nor our national defense requires a corrupt political system. Indeed, commitment to the commonwealth and the common good, including a growing economy, an enlightened foreign policy, and strong national security, will make us more successful and will attract the favorable opinion of mankind.

Preservation and renewal of those first principles represent the duty we owe our founders to keep the Republic they bequeathed to us and our posterity.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about a republic—the American Republic—what it was meant to be and what it has become. In some crucial respects the twenty-first-century American Republic is not the country our founders thought they had created.

The search for the causes of the increasing gap between word and deed starts with an understanding of what a republic actually is or ought to be.

At their best, republics, including ours, have demonstrated four basic qualities: popular sovereignty; a sense of the common good; demonstration of civic...