The Constitution foresees the possibility of a President’s
being unable to fulfil his duties (whether because ill, or dead, or sitting in
Sing-Sing), and specifies his successor; and further deals with the case in
which the Vice President should be similarly indisposed. And a good thing, too, since much this
scenario did in fact eventuate during the unsavory Nixon administration (before
the shaming memory of which, Clio averts her gaze). And although that foresightful document does not explicitly
provide for the case that now confronts us, something analogous is afoot: the Republicans in the House of
Representatives have lost their reason.
As we argued earlier, it is time for that body to be
declared legally incompetent. And,
as of yesterday, moves in this direction are afoot (Senate Leaders Take Reins on Shutdown Talks), with the (mostly) grown-ups in the Senate finally
(belatedly) moving in to clean up the mess of spilled milk and broken crayons
left in the soiled sandbox of the House.
Indignantly, some from the junior, or lower, body, have demanded that their betters and seniors should
condescend to stand alongside the nursery miscreants, and (in their phrase)
“Grow a Backbone”
Now, to anyone who lived through the Nixon shambles, this
phrase immediately calls to mind another, famous at the time:
“Grow a Penis”
which referred anagrammatically to Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s
crude and nescient Veep, who was removed in tandem -- ostensibly for his sordid
misdemeanors (which were real enough) but in actuality for his manifest
unfitness to be President (a fact reportedly not lost on Nixon himself when he
selected that portly nonentity as his back-up -- “Nixon’s insurance plan”
against impeachment).
Ideally, the Congressmen would simply be dismissed, their
offices left untenanted for a time, like the seats on the NLRB kept vacant by
the mulishness of Senate Republicans.
But out of charity (even to the least of God’s creatures) we might
rather remove them to a sunny and brightly-painted Sheltered Workshop somewhere
up in the western mountain meadows, where they can happily potter about and, I
dunno, debate stuff, pass “laws” or
something, and -- all passion spent -- docilely lie down on their blankies at
nap-time.
~
The question of “Two-Tier Voting”
The question then arises, how ever we came to such a
pass. And the first thing to
realize is, these ills are not of recent date.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America for just shy of a
year, 1831-2, and who found much to admire in our republic, noted with surprise
the low quality of the Congressmen:
Lorsque vous entrez dans la salle
des représentants … vous vous sentez frappé de l’aspect vulgaire de cette
grande assemblée. … Ce sont, pour la plupart, des avocats de village, des
commerçants,
ou même des hommes apparentant aux dernières classes.
-- De la Démocratie en Amérique
(1835)
The more surprising to him, then, was the contrast with the vastly
superior quality of the Senators:
A deux pas de là s’ouvre la salle
du sénat, dont l’étroite enceinte renferme une grande partie des célébrités de
l’Amérique. … Toutes les paroles qui s’échappent de cette assemblée feraient honneur aux plus grands débats
parlementaires d’Europe.
What could explain the disparity?
A contemporary American, puzzling, might think of the
six-year term, which insulates the Senatorial incumbent against the swift-shifting winds
of idle fancy; and the statewide
suffrage, so that the peculiarities of District 13, where everyone is everybody’s
spouse and “cousin” (a category including sister and daughter, mayhap),
get washed-out some in the statistical accumulation of the state as a whole. Neither of these, however,
suffice to explain the gap that yawned before Tocqueville, and which he
explained quite otherwise:
Je ne vois qu’un seul fait qui l’explique
: l’élection qui produit la chambre des représentants est directe; celle dont le sénat émane est soumise à deux degrés.
For, when the Republic was born, Senators were not elected
directly by the sons of the soil, but by their legislative representatives in
each state.
Tocqueville emphasized that there was nothing undemocratic
about this: said representatives
were not appointed by the Federal government, or the Supreme Court, or the Pope
or what have you: They were the
freely chosen legislators of the people. Yet somehow, this intermediate layer of filtering --
of refinement -- produced better result than the arithmetic sum of popular
knee-jerks. After all, the
average voter had to go slop the hogs;
he didn’t have time to go working his way through The Wealth of
Nations, whereas it was the job of elected solons to dwell upon such things.
Tocqueville drew the necessary lesson:
Il
est facile d’apercevoir dans l’avenir, un moment où les républiques
américaines seront forcées de
multiplier les deux degrés dans leur système électoral, sous peine de se perdre
misérablement parmi les
écueils de la démocratie.
Famous last words!
So far from generalizing this successful experiment, the nation
abolished it, by the Seventeenth Amendment (1913).
~
It was recently reported that, in response to a cockeyed
Supreme Court ruling that illegal aliens could vote in Federal elections (why not
penguins? why not let the penguins
vote!), certain states have introduced what the journalists called “two-tier”
balloting, with state and local elections requiring proof of voter identity,
whereas Federal elections will remain open to fraud:
This use of the term “two-tier” is perhaps something of a misnomer, however, as it principally refers to
structured and generally sequentially ordered subdivisions of a unity: apprenticeship vs. journeyman
status; primary vs.
general-election balloting. Here,
rather, the reference is simply to independent non-intersecting areas of
elections, which have always existed and whose separateness did not spring into
being with the Supreme Court ruling or the local response thereto. The two-tier or two-stage system
of pre-1913 Senatorial elections is much more substantial.
~
The bicameral
legislature is a highly non-obvious invention. And it pains us to report, that the public schools I
attended -- elementary, junior high, and senior high -- tasked to educate us in the practices and
logic of the democratic republic or republican democracy, here signally failed. Having two different chambers was
apparently just an oddity -- a bit of inexplicable Yankee tradition like
Groundhog Day -- which led to duplication of effort and necessitated
time-consuming Senate/House conferences to resolve the differences in their
respective bills. It seemed as
arbitrary a dichotomy as the “shirts” and the “skins” as which we (just the
lads, s’entend) were divided for
scratch teams in sports.
One can only put forward, in the schools’ excuse, that the
original sharp difference as conceived by the Founding Fathers, was blunted by
the 17th Amendment.
~
In the astonishingly clear-sighted vision of the Founders
(and here I’m not being just traditionalist or pious -- they really did a
darned good job) these ultralocally-elected Congressmen, changed as frequently
as socks, were to serve, not only to represent
the people -- to serve as their representatives -- but to be -- statistically,
sociologically -- representative of the people, in all their
parti-colored and manic variety.
They were to serve as a sort of locally-penned, scientific stool-sample
of what-all was going on in the hearts and minds back in the hills and hollers
of an expanding nation that at first was mostly frontier (and without
fiber-optic Internet service to bring the distant news to the Capital; the Founders had to make do with
dial-up). And the Founders
fully anticipated that that chamber would be a bubbling cauldron of emotions,
fantasies, factions, conspiracy theories, quack nostrums, and wacky (and
sometimes brilliant) proposals.
The Senatorial party, having coolly faced-down the Redcoats, were
prepared to face even this.
In the reigning metaphor of the day the Senate was to serve
as “the saucer in which to cool the hot tea” that the House could be expected
to serve up. That imagery no
longer works in our own latte-sipping era -- I’ve never actually seen anyone
use a saucer in that fashion (though come to think of it, a scalding black veinte really could use one).
~
Having brought us to the brink, and now losing their nerve,
Republicans are now trying to scoff the whole thing aside as a non-issue:
Representative Tim Huelskamp, a
Kansas Republican, played down the importance of this week’s deadline and said
the White House “is trying to scare the markets.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-13/effort-shifts-to-senate-leaders-to-resolve-fiscal-impasse.html
The slightest acquaintance with the foreign press would suffice to
disabuse him of that notion.
To quote simply the broadcast I happen to be listening to in the
background at this very moment -- one very far indeed from White House control
-- consider the (basically
pro-Arab, and Islam-friendly) site Medi1.com, a joint French-Moroccan venture
(and very professionally run), which
(by its writ) by no means focuses on America, but rather the francophone and
arabophone pourtour of the
Mediterranean -- the way they characterized l’enjeu
this morning was: “Eviter un
Armageddon économique pour toute la planète”. Perhaps somewhat dramatically phrased, that, but the
point is: The whole world is
watching, and taking this very seriously indeed.
.
~
For more from this pen, try these:
[Update
24 January 2015] Precedents from
European history, ca. 1900:
Parliamentary
minorities now wielded a new weapon … : obstruction.
… Here, the old idea that the rights of minorities must be protected was extended into the absolute refusal
to allow the expression of unwelcome opinions. … Open discussion was the chief
pillar of parliamentarianism, but as soon as the chamber admitted biter enemies
of the regime as well as polite
dissenters, parliamentary debates
degenerated into farce. It
had all started in the Mother of Parliaments, with Parnell and his Irishmen in
the 1880s; but in the
Hungarian and Austrian parliaments, too, there were many who felt too strongly
about their cause to play the
parliamentary game.
-- Jan
Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:
Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 138
ooooo. Pure poison - and I enjoyed every drop!
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