George and the Declaration

Irony amuses me. There was an article in our local paper recently that amused me no end. 

It seems that a guy named George E. Norcross III has just spent over $4 million dollars for one of the last remaining copies of the Declaration of Independence. He is going to place it in the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia so that the public can see it. This seems like a very good and decent thing.  But, that brings us to the irony.

You see, George E. Norcross III is well known here in the Philadelphia area. He is described, even in the very article that reported this story, as a “South Jersey political power broker.” This description doesn’t really do him justice. It is not an exaggeration to say that nothing of any real consequence happens in the politics of this part of the world without George E. Norcross III having a hand in it. I’ll give you an example. I once spoke to a woman who was thinking of changing jobs from a good government position to one in a lobbying firm. This woman is very talented and the government position she held was influential but not exactly powerful. Yet, when this woman was telling me about how she was leaving the government, she said that she had to first check with “George,” and he had said that it was OK. You can only imagine how much he has to say about others who wield even more power. 

How is that George E. Norcross III has achieved this regal position?  Is he a high-level government official? No. Is he even a former such official? No again. Has the public ever been asked whether he should be given this encompassing authority? No fucking way. George E. Norcross III it turns out, is, as again described in the newspaper story, the chair of an insurance company and of a large local hospital.

Mr. Norcross is powerful because he is rich and because he is willing to spread his wealth around in the form of political contributions. It comes from the money he makes from his insurance and health businesses. How about that for irony – political power derived from businesses that make their profits from human conditions that a more decent social apparatus would otherwise provide.

Nothing here is intended to imply that Mr. Norcross does anything illegal. Certainly, nothing has ever been proven. Nor is anything here intended to imply that Mr. Norcross is alone in his status. There are similar such “power brokers” all over the country. And that’s the point. How ironic is it that a “power broker” with no governmental or political position now acts to exalt the single most famous and important piece of paper that itself exalts the power of the common man.

You might say that the Founding Fathers weren’t exactly paupers. You might also say that the system they created – with its continued slavery and its Electoral College and its limitation on the popular election of Senators – wasn’t exactly a model of Bernie Sanders populism. And you would be right. But these observations need to be tempered by the recognition of the times that the Founders lived in.  Even with all of those qualifications, those wigged aristocrats in Independence Hall were revolutionaries. They created a governmental process that gave the people more power than they had ever had before.

But these are different times. We hopefully have moved on from when the idea of rule by the people was new and different. When those people who should have the power line up to take a gander at the Declaration of Independence that the insurance and health executive has charitably provided for them, how will they read the words, “Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That’s what it says: “consent of the governed,” not “consent of the wealthy.”

Surely, George E. Norcross III could have spent his $4 million dollars on something a lot worse (taking into consideration how much his charitable contribution will reduce his net expenditure). I am not condemning Mr. Norcross as much as I am observing that if we continue in the Citizens United direction we are going, then the words of the Declaration of Independence won’t be worth anything close to $4 million. They won’t be worth the parchment they are printed on.