John Nichols | The Nation

San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. (Shutterstock)

“How many more bridges must collapse, how many people must be hurt or die and how many billions of dollars must be drained from our economy before Congress makes investing in the basic infrastructure of our country a priority?”

That was the question from Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, after last week’s collapse of the Interstate 5 Bridge over the Skagit River in Washington State.

O’Sullivan has asked it before.

In fact, he and his union have been focused on infrastructure issues for so long that they don’t just have questions. They’ve got answers.

Which prompts another question: Is Washington ready to listen to the people who have been saying for years that we can’t afford to keep neglecting and shortchanging our nation’s infrastructure?

It is no secret that Congress turns to business leaders for advice and counsel on national priorities. In fact, there are days when it seems that Washington does nothing else.

But as attention again turns to the question of how to respond to crumbling infrastructure, it would be foolish and irresponsible to neglect the work of groups like the American Society of Civil Engineers—which now gives an overall grade of “D+” when weighing the condition of the country’s infrastructure—and the unions that have embraced, highlighted and expanded upon the ASCE’s report cards.

Congress does not have to reinvent the wheel. But it does need to start listening to the people who got serious about these issues a long time ago.

And it needs a sense of perspective that seems to be missing from official Washington.

To his credit, President Obama has been pushing for the development of a national infrastructure bank, asking: “What are we waiting for? There’s work to be done. There are workers who are ready to do it. Let’s prove to the world that there’s no better place to do business than right here in the United States of America, and let’s get started rebuilding America.”

But Obama’s proposals represent only a modest pushback against the austerity agenda that says Washington cannot respond even to immediate challenges. The infrastructure bank plan, as currently imagined, would use $10 billion in public money to leverage private investment. The president also wants to add $4 billion to grant programs that were part of stimulus program. And even that gets him derision from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, for trying to “be Santa Claus.”

This is a measure of just how dysfunctional the discourse has become in Washington.

While Washington wrangles over even minimal investments in infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers reminds us that $3.6 trillion in investment will be needed by 2020 to get US infrastructure up to grade—not just for safety sake but to compete in a global economy that’s built around ports, bridges, roads, rail and public facilities. At this point, according to the ASCE, the funding shortfall is $1.6 trillion.

That’s a daunting number. Unless you understand the dynamics of the infrastructure debate. That’s where unions that have been focused on these issues for years come into play. For years now, building trades unions such as LIUNA have been in thick of research and advocacy with regard to infrastructure issues. Unions such as the United Steelworkers have focused on how best to produce the steel and other materials needed to rebuild bridges.

These unions do not have to cobble together “quick-fix” proposals. They recognized long ago that, as LIUNA leaders have been saying through their “Build America So America Works” campaign, “Our nation’s approach to transportation infrastructure is functionally obsolete.” And they have worked with engineers and planners to identify and developing plans for smart, efficient and forward-looking investments in the repair and replacement of crumbling bridges, roads, tarmacs and harbors.

They’ve won a few allies in Congress. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair Barbara Boxer, D-California, is serious about these issues, as are House Committee on Transporation and Infrastructure members such as Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon. And there are Republicans who have shown a willingness to work on these issues; members such as Congressman Richard Hanna, a former Operating Engineers union member from New York who has worked with his old union and others on plans to speed up the approval of infrastructure projects.

Democratic and Republican representatives whose states have been hit with bridge collapses and other crises, such as Congressman Jim McDermott, D-Washington, have become essential advocates. “In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration found that one in nine bridges in America are structurally deficient. That is a shocking statistic for structures that are a cornerstone of our domestic and foreign commerce. Our economy has no chance of recovering, let alone thriving, without supporting the most basic of our infrastructure needs. Even more alarming is the fact that this bridge was not considered structurally deficient. The most basic role of our government is ensuring the safety of the public,” says McDermott. “Without the resources to do so, I worry that avoidable disasters like this will become commonplace. It is time to reinvest in our state and in our country. We can’t afford not to.”

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That’s a proper sense of urgency—and common sense concern. But both those commodities are still in short supply in Washington.

It really is time to turn up the volume.

Congress is out of session for the next few days. But when it returns, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee should bring some of the urgency that Americans feel to Washington. They don’t have to listen to any one group of experts or advocates. They can entertain proposals for grants and loans and infrastructure banks. But what they can’t do is deny the necessity of action. And what they shouldn’t do is neglect the insights that can be garnered from the unions that have been saying for years that the United States must get serious about investing in infrastructure.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert w. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how big-money politics warps our national priorities away from vital issues such as infrastructure renewal.

(Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

America is experiencing a rare and dramatic moment of grassroots advocacy for fundamental reform of our elections.

Unfortunately, the political and media elites that define our discourse are doing their best to ignore it.

So it remains in America as it has ever been; Thomas Jefferson was indeed right when he told George Mason, “More attention should be paid to the general opinion.”

And the general opinion is that the money power, which has come to dominate our politics, must be checked and balanced.

With little in the way of financial resources and frequently dismissed even by pundits and politicians who claim to respect its goals, this movement to amend the Constitution to address the crisis of money in politics has secured official endorsements from thirteen states and close to 500 counties, cities, villages and towns nationwide. And when the boldest proposals of the movement to overturn the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC are placed on the ballot, they win by overwhelming margins.

That was confirmed again Tuesday by the voters of the nation’s second-largest city. Los Angeles electors were asked: “Shall the voters adopt a resolution that there should be limits on political campaign spending and that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of human beings and instruct Los Angeles elected officials and area legislative representatives to promote that policy through amendments to the United States Constitution?”

The Los Angeles Times, arguably the dominant media outlet in the community, actively opposed the measure, “Proposition C,” with editorials and signed opinion pieces ripping it as “a primal scream about the role of money in politics.”

The voters decided to scream. As loudly as they could.

Seventy-seven percent of them voted “yes”; just 23 percent voted “no.”

That’s a reasonably typical result—similar to the levels of support seen in Colorado and Montana when the those states weighed in on the issue last fall.

The LA resolution is not binding. But it is influential. Organizers for the city’s “Yes on C/Overturn Citizens United” campaign—including the Committee for Common Cause, the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) and the Money Out/Voters In Coalition—secured plenty of support from local and national reformers. They also got backing from national groups such as Free Speech for People, which is working with Common Cause to expand the recent discussion of scandals in Washington to include “the other scandal”—the obliteration of rules and regulations governing money in politics that has resulted from the Supreme Court’s interventions.

The LA campaigners may not have gotten the local paper’s support. But they got the backing of LA’s newly elected mayor, Eric Garcetti, and the newly elected city attorney, Michael Feuer. And they worked especially hard to get endorsements from the members of Congress who have the power to advance a constitutional amendment—securing significant support from US Representatives Karen Bass, Tony Cardenas, Janice Hahn, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Adam Schiff, Brad Sherman and Henry Waxman.

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They also got another California representative to sign on: Nancy Pelosi.

The House Democratic leader has voiced her objections to the Citizens United ruling before. But getting her to sign on as a backer of the “Yes on C” campaign offers a reminder of why these grassroots initiatives matter. They ask something of members of Congress in a way that is hard to ignore.

As Derek Cressman, who directs the Common Cause “Only People Are People” campaign to reverse Citizens United, notes: “Congress members may respect the opinions of the city councils, but councilors are not their ‘boss.’ Having voters directly instruct members of Congress, their ‘employees,’ carries a certain obligation to respect.”

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how the collapse of journalism and the rise of big-money politics threatens to turn our democracy into a dollarocracy.

Take Action: Help Overturn 'Citizens United'

Karl Rove addresses the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. (Steve Helber)

Karl Rove is offering America a super-sized serving of political cynicism.

Since the controversy over the targeting of grassroots tea party groups for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service arose, Rove has engaged in the sort of political sleight of hand that could only be practiced in a country where elite media have no skepticism—and no memory.

Just a few months ago, after the 2012 election, Rove was widely portrayed as having declared war on grassroots conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The former White House political czar was frustrated: During the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Republicans had been positioned to win control of the US Senate. Yet, in each cycle, they fell short after the party’s grassroots activists upended the candidacies of relatively more moderate candidates in Republican primaries. The Tea Party favorites frequently proved to be weaker contenders and—in the cases of candidates such as Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell in 2010 and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock in 2012—were seen as having snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

Rove had enough of that. So in February of this year he declared his intent to use his gold-plated political operations to police the party. Specifically, the veteran operative who says his hero is “Gilded Age” political boss Mark Hanna, declared his intention to “avoid having stupid candidates who can’t win general elections. Who are undisciplined, can’t raise money, aren’t putting together the support necessary to win the general election campaign—because this money is too difficult to raise to be spending it on the behalf of candidates who have little chance winning in the general election.”

That stirred an outcry from Tea Party activists and their allies:

• Fox News’ Sean Hannity described “a battle between conservatives and the GOP establishment.”

• Conservative talk-radio host Mark Levin asked: “Who made Karl Rove queen for a day.”

• Conservative commentator Erick Erickson said that Rove’s “American Crossroads is creating a new Super PAC to crush conservatives, destroy the tea party, and put a bunch of squishes in Republican leadership positions.”

• Newt Gingrich wrote of Rove’s plan: “No one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country. That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine. It should be repugnant to every conservative and every Republican.”

• The Tea Party Patriots announced that “Karl Rove believes he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars, crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo in Washington from millions of freedom loving Americans.”

What a difference three months makes.

Now Rove is racing from studio to studio to cry crocodile tears about the abuse of, well, the people he was determined to abuse. He decried “the IRS’s thuggish behavior” in a Wall Street Journal column. He told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, “This smacks of a greater, you know, sort of effort inside the IRS to punish conservative groups.”

You would have thought Karl Rove was a Tea Party Patriot himself.

But, of course, he’s the guy the patriots said was “out to crush the Tea Party movement.”

So what gives?

Rove is playing a particularly cynical game. He recognizes that there is going to be a Tea Party movement—and that it may actually be stronger as a result of the current controversy. And he knows that the grassroots groups that are seeking tax-exempt status are unlikely to be able to counter the financial and strategic might of his American Crossroads combine.

So Rove is joining the outcry on behalf of the little folks, recognizing that he can only benefit by being seen as an ally of conservative activists who, before they were enraged with the IRS, were enraged with Karl Rove.

But there is more going on than mere “The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend” positioning.

Rove understands something else. If the IRS is under attack for scrutinizing grassroots groups unfairly—and, make no mistake, it is unfair to target any group based on its ideology—that could create a climate of official caution where it becomes less likely that there will be scrutiny of what the Center for Responsible Politics describes as “the heavy hitters of the multicandidate outside spending groups”: Rove-tied groups such as Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)4 nonprofit “social welfare” corporation, and American Crossroads, a so-called “super PAC.”

This is where Rove’s shows his smarts.

He understands that the current wrangling over the IRS is going to result in changes, some of them structural, some of them relating to the focus and intensity of inquiries into alleged abuses by tax-exempt groups.

Everyone who has steered a 501(c)4 into the political fray— conservativesand liberals; Republicans like Rove and Democrats with close ties to President Obama—knows that the best possible circumstance for them is one where the rules governing political activity by supposedly “charitable” groups are weak and unclear. And it gets even better for Rove and his ilk if battered-and-bruised IRS agents are disinclined to challenge any individual or group that might accuse the agency of targeting them.

Rove recognizes that the real debate is not about whether discrimination based on political ideology will be aggressively addressed and appropriately constrained. That’s going to happen, as it should. The Congress and the White House will see to it; indeed, President Obama sounds every bit as ardent on the issue as Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

The question that remains is a bigger one.

Will Congress and the Federal Election Commission establish clear and unequivocal standards that IRS auditors can follow? Will we finally, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, and a host of other rulings, have some definition of the new political playing field? That definition would, necessarily, be fair to conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans. But it could still place limits on the ambitious activities of Mr. Rove and his compatriots on both sides of the political aisle.

Only the most naïve observer would imagine that Karl Rove is concerned with protecting the grassroots activists with whom he was so recently sparring. Every evidence suggests that it is Rove’s plan to thwart their activism in 2014 and beyond. What concerns Rove is taking advantage of a political moment. A master of gaming whatever opening occurs, Rove is busily attacking Democrats in the Senate and President Obama for having suggested that clear standards ought to be established.

“Hey, look, the president in some degree is responsible for some of these acts. Remember in September and October of 2010, he went out and denounced…conservative 501(c)(4) groups as enemies of democracy,” says Rove. “You can’t tell me some IRS bureaucrat in Cincinnati, Washington, California—all of which were conducting investigations of conservative groups—were not hardened by the president going out declaring the groups they were looking at quote, ‘enemies of democracy.’”

That’s not exactly an accurate characterization of what the president said. Obama’s remarks on money in politics, made in Philadelphia several months after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision knocked down barriers to corporate campaign giving, made no mention of grassroots conservative groups. Rather, what Obama said was:

[Thanks] to a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United, they are being helped along this year by special interest groups that are spending unlimited amounts of money on attack ads… just attacking people without ever disclosing who’s behind all these attack ads. You don’t know. It could be the oil industry. It could be the insurance industry. It could even be foreign-owned corporations. You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose.

Now, that’s not just a threat to Democrats—that’s a threat to our democracy. Every American business and industry deserves a seat at the table, but they don’t get to a chance to buy every chair. We’ve seen what happens when they do. They put the entire economy at risk and every American might end up suffering.

So you can’t let it happen. Don’t let them hijack your agenda. The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections. And you can’t stand by and let special interests drown out the voices of the American people.

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Obama wasn’t telling the IRS to go after grassroots activists there. He was talking about the need for Congress to enact the mild reforms of the Disclose Act, which proposed to “amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit foreign influence in Federal elections, to prohibit government contractors from making expenditures with respect to such elections, and to establish additional disclosure requirements with respect to spending in such elections, and for other purposes.”

Just days before Obama spoke, in October, 2010, an effort to advance the legislation had failed by one vote in the Senate.

It is hard to imagine a better circumstance for Karl Rove than one in which any effort to control the flow of corporate money into the political process, and to assure at least a measure of transparency, is decried as somehow inappropriate.

Then, Rove would be a man without limits.

He could use his vast resources to beat the candidates favored by grassroots conservatives in Republican primaries and to secure November victories for his favored contenders.

Then the threat to democracy that the president described would be complete—as sincere activists on the right and the left would be shunted to the sidelines of a new political landscape where corporate cash decides the day and the boss is not a CEO but a cynical political operative named Karl Rove.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert w. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how the collapse of journalism and the rise of big-money politics threatens to turn our democracy into a dollarocracy.

How long will Arizona deny driver’s licenses to immigrant youth? Read Aura Bogado’s take.

Voters stand in line in North Miami, October 30, 2012. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a point of emphasizing during the Bush v. Gore arguments in December 2000 that there is no federal constitutional guarantee of a right to vote for president. Scalia was right. Indeed, as the reform group FairVote reminds us, “Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal.”

Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison want to do something about that.

The two congressmen, both former state legislators with long histories of engagement with voting-rights issues, on Monday unveiled a proposal to explicitly guarantee the right to vote in the Constitution.

“The right to vote is too important to be left unprotected,” explained Pocan, who announced the initiative at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, where the Republican state assembly speaker recently announced plans to enact restrictive “voter ID” legislation before the 2014 election. “At a time when there are far too many efforts to disenfranchise Americans, a voting rights amendment would positively affirm our founding principle that our country is at its strongest when everyone participates. As the world’s leading democracy, we must demand of ourselves what we demand of others—a guaranteed right to vote for all.”

Without that clear guarantee, argues Ellison, politicians continue to propose and enact legislation that impedes voting rights. Noting recent wrangling over voter identification laws, burdensome registration requirements and reduced early voting opportunities in various states, as well as a challenge to the Voting Rights Act that is now under consideration by the US Supreme Court, the Minnesota Democrat, who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says, “Even though the right to vote is the most-mentioned right in the Constitution, legislatures across the country have been trying to deny that right to millions of Americans, including in my home state of Minnesota. It’s time we made it clear once and for all: every citizen in the United States has a fundamental right to vote.”

If approved by the Congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states, it would add to the founding document this declaration:

SECTION 1: Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.

SECTION 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.

There is nothing radical about that language. It outlines a basic premise of the American experiment, and a concept that the United States has proudly exported. Indeed, when the US has had a hand in shaping the destinies of other lands, as well as international agreements, the primacy of the right to vote has been well understood and explicitly stated.

The constitution of Iraq guarantees that “Iraqi citizens, men and women, shall have the right to participate in public affairs and to enjoy political rights including the right to vote, elect, and run for office.”

In Afghanistan, the constitution provides every citizen with “the right to elect and be elected.”

The German constitution crafted in the aftermath of World War II declared that every adult “shall be entitled to vote.”

In Japan, the constitution announced, “Universal adult suffrage is guaranteed.”

And, of course, when former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission that outlined a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document declared:

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

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Americans have considered right-to-vote amendments in the past. But the frequency with which contentious debates are erupting nationwide—just this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than eighty bills to restrict voting have been introduced in more than thirty states—has already inspired significant activism on behalf of constitutional reform.

“The right to vote is the foundation of any democracy,” says FairVote executive director Rob Richie. “Adding an affirmative right to vote to the US Constitution is the best way to guarantee that the government, whether at the federal, state, or local level, cannot infringe upon our individual right to vote. Building support for this amendment offers an opportunity to inspire a twenty-first-century suffrage movement where Americans come together to protect voting rights, promote voter participation and debate suffrage expansion.”

John Nichols is the author (with Robert w. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it examines a host of voting rights and democracy issues—including the case for a right-to-vote amendment to the Constitution.