Pam Bondi and Republican Ideology

I confess that, until a few months ago, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi didn’t register on my radar screen. What does the state Attorney General actually do?

Then I started to run into press accounts of Bondi’s seemingly obsessive and definitively misguided efforts to maintain the state’s ban on gay marriage in spite of various court rulings here and all over the country declaring such bans unconstitutional.

Talk about running against the tide of history. Why? What’s it all about? One thing you can’t do is read it as Quixotic. Like Quixote, Bondi’s quest is futile and deluded. But unlike Cervantes’s character’s quest, Bondi’s is ignoble.

A story in last Sunday’s Miami Herald piqued my interest and began to put Bondi’s anti-gay marriage thing in context. Connecting the dots, Bondi’s behavior is not about tilting at windmills. It’s another manifestation of what then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, speaking only slightly hyperbolically, once called a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” As a sociologist I would use different language and call it a movement, a well-organized and, especially, a very well-funded right-wing movement. This movement, however, is not really vast in its popular appeal but it is definitively so in the reach of its power. Call it what you will, it is real.

Let me give one quick example to illustrate the distinction I made in the last paragraph. There is nothing that those who identify with the right-wing movement hate more than increases in the minimum wage. For a generation, corporate clout in Congress has managed to foil almost all efforts to raise the minimum wage. The result is that the purchasing power of the minimum wage has eroded dramatically along with the income of the lowest-paid workers.

In contrast, when a few years ago the issue of raising the minimum wage was put before voters in Florida–a relatively conservative, Southern and anti-union state–a whopping 71 percent approved it. Referendums in other states have yielded similar results.

The huge disparity in the actions of Republican legislators in Washington and Tallahassee and the views of the people as expressed through the ballot shows that the core of the right-wing agenda, which is economic, is not popular. Yet that agenda has been implemented in the state and the nation for decades. So just who are our supposed representatives representing? The answer is obvious.

That’s not really surprising. I have long known that that there is a legislative component of this rightist quasi-conspiracy, led by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization lavishly funded by corporations, which regularly turns out cadres of perfectly programmed rightist robots ready to pass pro-business laws in their respective state capitols. What I did not know until I began digging into Bondi’s agenda is that there is a more recently-founded counterpart to ALEC made up of Republican state attorneys’ general (Republican Attorneys General Association–RAGA). 

Now the mystery of Pam Bondi’s fierce resistance to gay marriage in Florida becomes clear. Bondi is a full-fledged, high profile member of RAGA. RAGA supports virtually every right-wing cause in the nation, mainly through “friend of the court” briefs in various lawsuits. Opposition to gay marriage is one of the main so-called cultural issues in the right’s agenda. Ironically, Bondi announced her engagement in 2012, and now she is eager to deny the right to marry to gays and lesbians.

But it turns out that Bondi, whose job is to ensure justice prevails in this state, systematically intervenes in favor of right wing causes far beyond gay marriage or issues that directly concern Florida. For instance, a July article in the Broward county edition of the New Times titled “Eight Reasons Pam Bondi Is the Worst Attorney General in Florida History,” pointed out Bondi ed efforts to torpedo Obamacare in Florida. Also in Florida, and more outrageous if less significant, Bondi persuaded the governor to postpone an execution for a day because the date coincided with the kick-off of her reelection campaign!

Outside Florida, find a pet right-wing issue and Bondi is likely to have weighed in on the side of lunacy, injustice, or both. It’s an ugly, ugly record. Against controls on the sale of assault weapons in Connecticut (enacted in the wake of the worst slaughter in a school in U.S. history–Sandy Hook Elementary, Connecticut). Against the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay, one of the most sublime places in the United States, which has suffered from decades of environmental damage. The list is long and doesn’t contain any stance that is either ethically justifiable or specifically relevant to Florida. The Broward New Times is dead-on in their rating of Bondi.

I will conclude by trying to explain what all this stuff about gay marriage and guns have to do with the economic core of the right-wing agenda. Space compels me to give a somewhat crude and schematic explanation. The fact is you can’t win too many elections if you just concentrate on making the rich richer and screwing the poor and the middle class. To assemble a winning coalition on behalf of the economic agenda, the Republican party has championed the causes of many not necessarily well-heeled constituencies: unreconstructed racists; homophobes and xenophobes; religious fanatics; gun huggers; foreign policy paranoids; and reactionaries of every stripe. God, the devil, or American society created them. The Republican party brought them together.

As for Bondi, an attractive woman and one of the rare powerful females in the state’s Republican party, she presents a more pleasant facade than the detestable Scott, who looks exactly the part of what he is. But don’t be fooled by the package when reelection time for both Scott and Bondi comes around in November. If anything, since taking office Bondi has been more intensely hard-line than Scott. They both should be booted from office.

It may not happen. Bondi has conducted her far-flung ideological sorties under the radar, and her opponent has been under the radar period. Scott has an opponent who is virtually the archetype of the flip-flopper. And the saddest part of all is that in spite of that, Charlie Christ would be much preferable to Rick Scott.