Mike Gravel is a former United States Senator from Alaska who is running for President in 2008. Some information about the financial backing of the Mike Gravel for President campaign so far:
There isn’t a whole lot of money, to begin with. The campaign has spent $55,000, but $53,100 of that has come from a loan from Mike Gravel himself. $21,452 of donations have been made to the Mike Gravel campaign since it began, back in April.
So far, the Mike Gravel for President campaign has not accepted any donations from political action committees. All of the contributions are from individuals. The average contribution amount is $932.70.
There are some interesting people among Mike Gravel’s early campaign contributors:
Carl Wiglesworth, a talk show host in Houston.
George Ripley, Director of Americans for Social Justice
Paul Raynault, founder of the Raynault Foundation
The most interesting donor of all to Mike Gravel’s campaign is Gregory Fossedal, who lists himself as a consultant with the Democratic Century Fund. Fossedal contributed $3,000 to Mike Gravel’s campaign for President.
Greg Fossedal is the founder of the infamous right wing college newspaper The Dartmouth Review. He worked for the right wing Hoover Institution, wrote editorials for the right wing editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and has also written many articles for the right wing Washington Times newspaper.
The link: Gregory Fossedal and Mike Gravel work together on the The Democracy Foundation. One of the big projects of the Democracy Foundation is the National Initiative, which is championed by the Mike Gravel for President campaign.
The National Initiative project is what it sounds like – it’s a project to pass an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that would largely replace the work of the Congress with a system of law by national ballot referendum.
Part of this amendment to the Constitution refers to the legal sanctioning of a “national election conducted by the nonprofit corporation Philadelphia II”. What is this Philadelphia II corporation? Well, if this amendment passes, it will have quite a bit of power, including the power to set the “interim” leadership of the proposed Electoral Trust, the body that is proposed to administer the national ballot referendum system. “The first Director shall be appointed by the Board of Directors of Philadelphia II,” the proposed constitutional amendment reads.
The officers of the Philadelphia II organization are: President Mike Gravel, Secretary Donald Kemner, and Treasurer Patrick Summers. There’s a retired “Don Kemmer” listed as a donor of 200 dollars to the Mike Gravel for President campaign, but no one under the name Summers has yet made a financial donation to the campaign.
Looking down at the very end of The National Initiative’s proposed amendment to the Constitution is a sentence that concerns me very much: “No court in the United States may enjoin an initiative election except on grounds of fraud.”
This clause of the amendment seems to suggest that people would not have the right to file suit to challenge a law created through the National Initiative process, even if that law contradicted the Constitution itself. If a law passed by the National Initiative made it a crime to criticize the President, no one arrested under that law would have the right to seek to counter that conviction through an appeal in the courts to the free speech clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution. What if a group managed to pass a law through the National Initiative reinstituting slavery? Could that law be challenged by any other means than through another National Initiative? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how.
The more I consider the National Initiative as promoted by the Mike Gravel for President campaign, the more it looks like an extraordinarily bad idea. It would set in place a mechanism for quick and radical changes in American law, and in the current American mood, those changes would likely lead us in the direction of totalitarian nationalism, not toward an enlightened, stable democracy.
Forget the National Initiative. What we American needs most of all right now is a return to respect for the Constitution as it exists. We need the Bill of Rights to be enforced, not bypassed through national referendum. The popularity of dangerous fascist laws like the Military Commissions Act proves that America is in dire need of the reassertion of the genuine stability and moderation that the Constitution provides.
True stability and moderation come when the courts have the power to say no to Executive and Legislative grabs for extreme power. If the Executive and Legislative assert the right to torture, the Judicial Branch is our last hope for true moderation, citing the protection from cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the Constitution.
The sad fact is that this kind of stability and moderation is now regarded as a crazy, left-wing, radical idea. It is a measure of America’s descent into a culture of paranoid right wing nationalism that the basic American values of liberty, justice, and equality are now considered to be suspect.
Mike Gravel and his team may be well-intentioned with their National Initiative. However, the present would be the worst possible moment to undo the legal foundations of checks and balances in our government.
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Post script:
I just spoke with a representative of the Mike Gravel campaign, and he tells me that Gravel is opposed to the Military Commissions Act, and promises to send me additional information about the campaign’s position on the new law.
The connection of the campaign to Greg Fossedal was acknowledged, and Fossedal’s thorough history as a right wing Republican was also acknowledged. Greg Fossedal had been working for much of this year as the campaign finance chairman of the Mike Gravel campaign, but has left the campaign because of family issues. Fossedal may return to the campaign, and would be welcomed back, I was told.
The campaign representative emphasized to me his belief that Greg Fossedal is no longer the right wing activist that he used to be, but has “evolved” into a position that is much more egalitarian and in agreement with the positions of the mainstream of the Democratic Party. I was assured that Fossedel agrees with the positions of the Mike Gravel campaign, which include:
What’s the Fair Tax? More to come on that…
For now, I think that I can best sum up my impression of the Mike Gravel for President campaign as follows: Mike Gravel is certainly an original thinker who is willing to go transcend the standard ideological positions that have defined the political culture of the United States. In some respects, that originality has resulted in a positive and refreshing vision. In some other respects, Mike Gravel’s vision seems risky and over-reaching. Certainly, Mike Gravel could never be characterized as a tired and trite candidate, and I’d like to see his voice challenging the comfortable ambiguity presented by other politicians expected to be Democratic candidates for President in 2008.
Stay tuned for more on Mike Gravel. It’s sure to be interesting.
