03/22/2004: 
Stuff That Doesn't Suck
Bipartisanship with productive ends
aka probably the only protest-proof government initiative
No, you aren't dreaming; the two largest parties in the United States have come together for a noble end: to speed the forging of a coalition of democracies within the UN. Reason's Jonathan Rauch explores the potential:
In 1945, when the U.N. was born, most of the world was non-democratic, and so a "league of democracies" would have been a rump group. Today, however, more than 60 percent of the world's countries are electoral democracies. Today it is absurd for Burma to vote as the moral and legal equivalent of Belgium; more absurd for Cuba and Zimbabwe to be members in good standing of the U.N. Human Rights Commission; and more absurd still for Libya to chair that commission, as it did last year.
...
Late in the second Clinton administration, with a push from the State Department, the democracies began to organize. In 2000, 106 democracies gathered for the first meeting of an informal group they called the Community of Democracies. It had no permanent staff or formal powers, but it did produce an endorsement, in principle, of a democracy caucus at the U.N., a stance that the community reaffirmed in a second meeting in 2002 and, most recently, at a U.N. meeting last fall.
The Bush State Department then began lobbying Community of Democracy nations in a series of diplomatic lunches. "And these lunches with ambassadors from all different geographical regions-but all democracies-talked about all kinds of ideas, including this one," Paula J. Dobriansky, the undersecretary of State for global affairs, said in an interview. "Overall, it was very clear that other democratic countries from various regions embrace this idea and feel it could be of great value at the U.N., that it can bring together and highlight issues relevant to democracy."
