Independence (new rollout for 2020)

The Fourth of July celebration -- in origin quite earnest, and a time for historico-political speechmaking and some semi-military display -- has gradually softened and loosened, like an old sweater, into a fairly agenda-free holiday for kids:  Family, fireworks, fun, and french fries -- the four Fs of sweet July.  Well I recall, how we as kids  lined up along Ridgewood Avenue, excitedly half-comprehendingly, to watch the parade flow by.

As you grow older, some of it does get old.  Brief bursts of bright blotches against the night sky  no longer move me -- not, at any rate, so much as the least glimpse of God’s own handiwork, like the more permanent pattern-and-colorburst on the leaves of a coleus, or a lady cardinal in the bush.

But in another way, the meaning of this day grows ever deeper, even sombre.  For the success and permanency of the American Revolution was by no means a foregone conclusion -- we were truly in uncharted territory back then.   The more you learn about history, and the more history itself keeps happening, you are forced to conclude:  Most revolutions  go awry.

To begin with our own.   Contrary to the impression we got in school (back in the fifties, when we all sat dutifully at our desks), at the time of the Declaration of Independence, a bare one third of the American population was in favor of rebelling against Britain; a third against; a third undecided.   The perfect setting for an immediate post-revolution civil war.  Yet it did not happen (the Civil War a century later fell along quite different lines).  The only threat came again externally, in 1812 (“the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air”), when the wrath of the British Empire was again turned against us, and the nation’s capital was set in flames.   The pinwheels and cherry bombs of latter days  commemorate an actual peril.

Nor were the political logistics of the Revolution so simple as that of one entity rebelling against one other:  at the time, we were not yet quite even America, let alone the United … States;  but an assemblage of upwards of a dozen colonies, founded at different times by various creeds and ethnicities (Catholics in Rhode Island, Puritans in Massachusetts, Quakers and various German sects in Pennsylvania, and so forth) many of which had been at odds with one another back in the mother country, which is why some of them came here in the first place.  Yet they fought side by side;  and when victory was won, did not then fall to quarreling over the spoils, nor into strife as to which should be cock of the walk;  but together founded  a unified nation.
By contrast, India was one country at time of independence from Britain -- yet immediately fractured, savagely, along sectional lines.  What had been contemned as the British “yoke”  turns out to have been a garde-fou (et les fous se sont emparés de l’asile).

Remarkably as well, we managed, over the years and (by now) centuries, to maintain (most of us) extremely cordial, even intimate relations with the Mother Country -- an unusual trans-hemispheric affinity, unmatched by the relations of the Latin American countries to Spain and Portugal (let alone Haiti or Algeria to France).

Consider next the French revolution -- “next”, because in fact it was subsequent to our own, having broken out in 1789;  though the way Europeans run on about it, you’d think it was the first revolution in the history of the world.  Anyhow, it remains a proud occasion;  the French version of Independence Day is Bastille Day, celebrated on July 14, with great fanfare.  (For our friendly nod to our old ally, click here:  Merci la France.)
Yet their revolution was -- franchise oblige -- a gorawful bloody cock-up.  Not content with overturning centuries of monarchy, the revolutionaries proceeded to la Terreur, and to a sort of overreaching ideological Gleichschaltung that foreshadowed the Bolshevik excess, and of successive waves of revolutionaries being eaten by their children, in a way that prefigured the Stalin-era trials. And to crown it all, it didn’t even stick:  within a couple of decades, the kings were back.
France did not ultimately found a Republic that stuck, after the imperial and revived-monarchical interludes, until 1871, with the Third Republic (which segued into the Fourth and Fifth, not without strife, but without a relapse into pre-Republican polity).   Nor did this event stem in any direct way from the events of 1789.  As William Shirer tells it, in The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969, chapter “A Freakish Birth): 

It came into being by a fluke.  The National Assembly, elected in 1871 … had not wanted a Republic.  Nearly two thirds of its members were Monarchists.  But they could not agree on a king …

So the lawmakers … sort of backed into the harness of a republic … by a majority of one vote … 353 to 352 -- though there would have been a tie  had one deputy, who was against it, not been late in arriving for the balloting.  Even then it was not clear to many members that they were actually choosing a republic.  The day before, they had rejected it, or thought they had.
By contrast, the Constitution that came out of our revolutionary days  has lasted and guided us down to the present, with comparatively modest and incremental additions.

~

Since the end of the Second World War, world history has been spotted by rebellions and revolts, mostly anti-colonial, in quest of independence.   And for the most part, the results have not been pretty.
Myanmar.  Zimbabwe.   Algeria. Somalia.  Cambodia.  South Africa.  Congo.  The fragment that is Pakistan, and the mini-fragment of Bangladesh.  And now more recently, South Sudan and Azawad.  Names like tombstones along the  the corpse-strewn path of History’s forced-march.
And thus the American declaration of independence, which shone at the time, shines yet more brightly now, against the contrasting dark.  It is as though the metal of which men then were made, deemed sturdy bronze at the time, were revealed, in the fullness of time, with the reckonings in and the dust dispersed, to have been, in actual and astonishing fact, of purest gold.

~

[Update, 4 July 2020]  The above reflections were written some years ago, re-posted annually by way of commemoration.   But at present, the nation seems more riven than at any juncture of my lifetime  since 1968.  In particular, the valedictory-nostalgic dismissal of fireworks along with french-fries as one of the simple childhood pleasures that one outgrows, has come up against a startling volte-face, as, in the now-lowering national mood, these have taken on implications  no longer celebratory, but menacing.]

The Three Powers

The impeachment struggle  has been a three-cornered contest, among the three branches of government.   Such a delicate triangular balance  is what keeps things interesting; a contest between but two  comes down to arm-wrestling, and is quickly settled, though maybe settled amiss.

Elizabethan times witnessed a similar struggle among a triad, with monarch corresponding to the Chief Executive, Parliament to the Congress, and the third, robed branch, the clergy, replaced now with the judiciary.

In Elizabeth’s time, the puritans had endeavoured to bring ecclesiastical grievances before the House of Commons;  this, the queen resented, as it seemed that the commons were endeavouring to go outside their province  and legislate on matters which could only be constitutionally dealt with by the clergy in convocation, and by the crown.  In this way, the religious question assumed a constitutional form.

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV: North to Drayton (1909), p. 305

The parallels here are more than we would have expected, right down to the detail about the “puritans”, neatly re-incarnated in our own day  by the Woke brigade.  And that of the monarch being a Queen -- like our POTUS, though he is  of the drama kind, and not of Tudor blood.

~

The motif of the “Trivet of Conflict” finds its supreme cinematic embodiment in the final scene-sequence of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” -- not a circular firing-squad, but an equiangular shoot-out.   The act plays out, as ideally in the  Seventh Art, without words or sudden motion  till the fatal climax, silent but for the tinkling melody of an antique music-watch  winding down.  Here too, for our own amusement (or that of the blog-observing gods) we may match personages across the spheres:  here,  Good (a.k.a. Blondie) is the Supreme Court (granted, partisans carp at decisions that do not go their favorite way, but that branch is surely the most dignified and even relatively impartial);  Bad  is our naughty POTUS;  and Ugly -- who could that be, but our quarrelsome Congress.

To spare our readers further metaphor, we shall not be drawing comparisons between the branches as enumerated in the Constitution, and the Persons of the Trinity (as explicitly enumerated  nowhere in Scripture, but now held dear).

~

[Update 8 Feb 2020]  For any who deem the Elizabethan analogy  too ennobling for our present sticky pickle, look ye rather to that trio of Stooges, who, in simpler days, brought delight to tots and idlers.  Our pushful POTUS is perfectly cast  as Moe.

[Update 9 Feb]  What sketch of the American polity, with any pretentions to, well, pretentiousness, could be considered complete, without the obligatory obeissance to Tocqueville?  We must check the Tocqueville box.

The basic dynamic of the first two branches of government, whether monarch and parliament, or President and Congress, is a matter of politics and power.   It is the third, robed element, whether the Church or the Judiciary, that is less obvious: with goals and methods less tangible, more nearly timeless.

Historically, as the sway of the Church retreated from the secular sphere, in general  it was not replaced by another body.  America, it seems, was an exception:

Aucun peuple n’a constitué  un aussi grand pouvoir judiciaire  que les Américains.

Chez toutes les nations policées de l’Europe, le gouvernement a toujours montré une grande répugnance à laisser la justice ordinaire  trancher des questions qui l’intéresent lui-même. … A mesure, au contraire, que la liberté augmente, le cercle des attribtions des tribunaux  va toujours en s’élargissant.  …Chez les nations de l’Europe, les tribunaux n’ont que des pariculiers pour usticible;  mais on peut dire que la cour suprême des Etats-Unis  fait comparaître des souverains à sa barre.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 225-6

[Update]  To have three pre-eminent and even quasi-coequal powers within a polis, is inherently metastable and dramatic, and indeed has found its way into drama.  Cf. the Scottish poet David Lindsay’s morality-play A Pleasant Satire of the Three Estates (Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, in contemporary spelling), 1552

[Update / Antedating]  The structural theme appears in a play of the sixteenth-century dramatist John Haywood.  "The climax to the triangular duel  which forms the main episode of The foure P.P.  is an effective piece of dramatic technique." 

(Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. V: The Drama to 1642, Part One (1910), p.95)

Here Come de Judge

Top of the headlines these past two days, has been the announced intention of the Palestinian Authority to “join the International Criminal Court”.   The Israel-friendly layman’s first reaction, one might suppose, would be, “At last!  Those blighters are finally ready to recognize the rule of law.”  But no:  The move is being described, in terms of utmost alarm, as “provocative”;  culminating in the bizarre lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times.

Now, I have not the least intention of saying anything about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict per se.  You don’t care what I might opine on the matter -- and in this case, neither do I.  The point at hand is rather a logical one of journalistic rhetoric.  To make clear that the crux has nothing to do with the fraught particularities of the two entities just named, we shall henceforth refer to them only as “Entity A” and “Entity B”.

So, the facts:  Entity A and Entity B have an often bloody, ongoing dispute -- ongoing for over half a century.   They do not form part of any larger entity that could adjudicate.  So Entity A prepares to “join” -- and thus allow itself to be bound by -- the rules of a sort of court, based in Europe.  Yet this move, we learn from worthy sources like NPR or the NYT, is a “provocation”.  If Entity A had announced its intention to join the Axis of Evil, or the Islamic State, or Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, one could understand the outrage.  But submitting its fate to a court?  Yet these news sources by no means explain the basis of their opposition;  they report the matter blandly, as one might a traffic accident.  On croit rêver.

(1)  The Rule of Law among Nations.

Throughout most of history, and still over most of the globe, there has never been any rule of law among nations.  After the carnage of the Thirty Years War, there followed a peace, the Treaty of Westphalia,  and with it a top-down experiment, the  “Westphalian Arrangement”.  This great moment in European history is made the centerpiece of Henry Kissinger’s trenchent recent book, World Order.

Later, after the disaster of the Great War, the Western world decided (partly upon the urging of the American President Woodrow Wilson) to found a broader and more democratically based entity, the League of Nations (Société des Nations); but when push came to shove, the Senate refused to ratify;  and this would be the pattern for future U.S. behavior.

"Music Minus One"

(2)  The Misrule of Law

Yet -- peek behind the curtain just a bit, and you can spot some justification for the stubborn U.S. stance.  Peer further, and you see why media like the New York Times  refuse to come clean about the reasons for their stance -- though really, the reasons are reasonable enough.

For the fact is:  Entity A is jurisdiction-shopping.  Strike out at the Security Council -- no biggie, try your luck at the next venue.   And the further fact is:  There are some pretty wonky jurisdictions.

Las Vegas was once the capital of the quickie divorce, back when marriage actually meant something.  And now London is gaining a reputation as the go-to place to go, for wives who want to take their husbands to the cleaners; just as it was long the favored venue for exposed scoundrels seeking the protection of draconian libel laws, or for undeportable jihadis like Abu-Hamzah al-Misri.  Political considerations quite peculiar to the U.S. recently resulted in astonishing sanctions against foreign banks (see Bank Robbery). Most relevant to the Entity A matter, however, is a recent case adjudicated by the Cour européenne des droits de l’homme, brought against Switzerland by an ornery immigrant, which we thumbnailed here :  

            Torture Inflation

Thus,  consider the prickly reactions of Americans to decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court  perceived as wayward or overreaching.  (For our (nomo)logical point, it is irrelevant whether such perceptions are justified.)   Whatever the intellectual or moral frailties of its individual members on this day or that, the Supreme Court is a body which, as an institution, has existed for over two hundred years, consisting entirely of American-born Americans, appointed by the President and approved by our elected representatives in the Senate, and bound by a publically available and widely revered body of doctrine, the U.S. Constitution.  By contrast, consider a stateless foreign body, from a hodgepodge of national cultures, bound by no common and recognized body of legal theory, and responsible to no-one in particular, not even an electorate; and whose decisions have, historically, often seemed quite fanciful, even to members of some of the cultures from which the membership is drawn. The question, then, is why Entity B should feel itself in any way bound by the decision of the Cour pénale internationale, sitting off in the far-away Hague.  (Nor should Entity A feel bothered by the blast of criticism from the likes of the New York Times, who are writing, not analytically, but ex parte.)

An observation:   Though there are some Supreme Court decisions that I wish had gone the other way, I still must attest:  the Court -- hearing, by its nature, almost exclusively the most fraught cases -- typically acts judiciously, without grandstanding, and not yielding to the frenzied pressures of the media or the masses, which often beset their deliberations.  Their sobriety and solidity are in stark contrast to the irresponsibility of the Congress, and of the electorate, in recent years.   They say you get the government you deserve;  at present, we have a Court better than we deserve;  though God knows how long that will last.

Republican right-wingers (misnamed “conservatives”) have nonetheless been loud in denouncing “judicial activisism”;  but the stance is, quite apart from its empirical shakiness, purely opportunistic, and swivels when the wind shifts:  Witness the lead article in this morning’s New York Times :

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/politics/gop-turns-to-the-courts-to-aid-agenda.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

(3)  Calling a johnny-mop a johnny-mop

Back to the observation which prompted this post, which was merely that liberal/MSM reporting on this story  has had a through-the-looking-glass quality, that is cognitively quite annoying.   The reason is that they dare not come out and say plainly that the European courts -- and supranational organisations in general -- are nothing that non-Europeans should feel bound by.   Similarly, at the United Nations,  Samantha Powers will wax eloquent over the wonders that the African Union is sure to perform (chronicled here), while privately knowing otherwise.   Publically, we maintain the fiction that there is such a thing as a settled body of “International Law” (a phrase pronounced in hushed tones, with breathy respect);  but in practice, we apply it as the breeze pleases us (one way in South Sudan, another in Crimea).

The New York Daily News, unrestrained by considerations of decorum, used to refer to the United Nations under U Thant as “Mr Clean and the East River Gang”.  By comparison with the contemporary code of silence, that is almost refreshing.

History of the Miranda Warning

Many Americans (particularly in the ornery mood that the country is in now) probably imagine that the right against self-incrimination as currently enshrined in the Miranda Warning was some kind of new-fangled liberalistic criminal-coddling innovation  dreamed up by the Warren Court, sparked by the case of some perp who was probably guilty as hell.   Of course, it is basically a pretty straightforward application of the Fifth Amendment to that Communist tract known as the Constitution of the United States.   But let all that lie.  Our purpose here is more along the lines of the literary.

Wikipedia, that invaluable über-solon, notes English precedent, citing evidence from, of all things, some classic novels (and two of my favorite, in fact):

Warnings regarding the right against self-incrimination may have originated in England and Wales. In 1912, the judges of the King's Bench issued the Judges' Rules. These provided that, when a police member had admissible evidence to suspect a person of an offence and wished to question that suspect about an offence, the officer should first caution the person that he was entitled to remain silent. However, the warning about the possibility of anything the suspect said being potentially used against him predates even that: it appears for example in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four, published in 1890 (Chapter 6: Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration"):

    "Mr. Sholto, it is my duty to inform you that anything which you may say will be used against you. I arrest you in the Queen’s name as being concerned in the death of your brother.”

as well as G. K. Chesterton's novel The Ball and the Cross, published in 1909 (Chapter X: "The Swords Rejoined"):

    "No, sir," said the sergeant; "though most of the people talk French. This is the island called St. Loup, sir, an island in the Channel. We've been sent down specially from London, as you were such specially distinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say so. Which reminds me to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at your trial."

It is rare indeed that I can bring forward anything to correct or complement Wikipedia;  but in the spirit of an etymologist (which for a time was my day-job) bringing forward an Earliest Attestation,  let me present this one, from Bleak House, published in 1853:

“Now, George: duty, as you know very well, is one thing, and conversation is another.  It’s my duty to inform you that any observations you may make  will be liable to be used against you.  Therefore, George, be careful what you say.  You don’t happen to have heard of a murder?”

“Murder!”

“Now, George, bear in mind what I’ve said to you.  I ask you nothing.  I say, you don’t happen to have heard of a murder?”

The highlighted passage sounds as though it might be echoing some formal written text.  But a few chapters later, when the inspector gets his hands upon the actual murderess -- a Frenchwoman -- he addresses her in less formal terms:

“I’ll give you a piece of advice, and it’s this.  Don’t you talk too much.  You’re not expected to say anything here, and you can’t keep too quiet a tongue in your head.  In short, the less you Parlay, the better, you know.”

The limb of the law who utters these sterling words, is none other than Inspector Bucket, whom duty compels  to arrest a friend.  And here in Bleak House, we have another precedent as well, since Inspector Bucket is regularly cited as a forerunner of the fictional detective, thus helping to launch the whole illustrious genre of the whodunit, in which the island of England long outstripped every other race.  Indeed, the success of that stream of fiction, and the subtlety and decency of English criminal code, are not unrelated.  You would never have an Hercule Poirot in a dictatorship.

Mind what you say, now ...

~

Literary post-note:

The accused in this case, the old trooper George, himself takes a stoic, manly stance towards the warning he has been given:

“I must come off clear and full  or not at all.  Therefore, when I hear stated against me  what is true, I say it’s true;  and when they tell me, ‘whatever you say will be used,’ I tell them I don’t mind that;  I mean it to be used.  If they can’t make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not likely to do it out of anything less, or anything else.  And if they are, it’s worth nothing to me.”

-- Bleak House, chapter LII

Moreover, he refuses a lawyer:  “I don’t take kindly to the breed.”

Altogether, the old trooper George is one of Dickens’ most admirable creations (or evocations).  And he is brought stunningly to life in the audiobook reading by David Case (a.k.a. Frederick Davidson), who likewise did a memorable job with the related (but still distinct) character of Major Bagstock in in audiobook of Dombey and Son.

~

 For more on Bleak House:

      A scholium ad "A Lost Fragment of 'Our Mutual Friend'"

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Managing an Orderly Succession

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:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/2-states-plan-2-tier-system-for-balloting.html

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 17^th 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:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[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

.

Is America Ready for Self-rule ? (III)

Apparently not. 

The antics of the Republicans in the House, are simply embarrassing.   They’re not even worth polemicizing against -- it’s like clowns piling out of a Volkswagen.

It would be bad enough, playing Chicken with the nation’s financial credibility, were they protesting something over which they had no control -- some egregious Supreme Court decision (Citizens United comes to mind), or Executive overreach, or even The Human Condition in General -- immolating themselves like Buddhist monks (though taking us with them).  But in this case, they are protesting a law that they themselves passed, not long ago.

Future historians will pore over the nation’s remains, perhaps dubbing this The Decade When White People Went Crazy.   What could have caused it?  In the case of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the presence of lead in the plumbing has been cited as a possible contributing factor.   As for the Teabaggers, here is my theory:  some neurotoxin somehow entered the food chain at strategic points, infecting Twinkies, mayonnaise, and Cheese Whip.

[Update 3 Oct 2013]  Note:  Italy isn't ready for self-rule either:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/world/europe/italy-politics-coalition-government-enrico-letta-silvio-berlusconi.html?ref=global-home

I mean -- I'm not playing favorites here.

[Slapstick update 4 October 2013]  There are, of course (though it is impolite to mention this), many many Third World countries  unready for self-rule, with evidence too abundant to mention.  We simply cite this latest one  because the details are so incredible:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/world/africa/in-kenyan-mall-thievery-comes-after-carnage.html?ref=global-home&_r=0&pagewanted=print

If that were a movie -- say, with Bill Murray -- it would be pretty funny.

[Constitutional update, 4 October 2013]  The Constitution foresees circumstances in which the President, and indeed perhaps his deputy the Vice-President, might be unable to govern:  the line of succession goes down from there.

Thus, it would at least be in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution -- though no clause spells this out -- were the nation (in particular the President) to employ emergency measures in case, say (speaking hypothetically) , one of the Houses of Congress were to become clinically insane.

This possibility is discussed in this morning’s New York Times:

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/us/politics/experts-see-potential-ways-out-for-obama-in-debt-ceiling-maze.html?ref=global-home

Fortunately, the hapless Boehner has already indicated that he will cave on the question of the Debt Ceiling, so all that  may not be necessary.   Still, it would be helpful to world economic serenity, were the President to go on television tonight, and announce, in that clipped, compressive style that is his signature,

“The full faith and credit of the United States is beyond reach of the vicissitudes of politics.  Whatever happens or does not happen in the House, America will not welsh on its obligations.

Brilliant, Mr President

Just listened to the speech.   The President has, at the last minute, pulled a rabbit out of the hat -- calling Congress’s bluff.  With one stone, he has knocked several birds off their perch.

The speech was a coup de théâtre, and possibly planned de longue date.

The President, remember, was trained as a Constitutional scholar, long before he entered the sordid world of Presidential politics.  And quite possibly, late of an evening,

alone in his study, the fire dying in the grate,

over well-aged brandy, and a pipe replenished from the Turkish slipper that he keeps on the mantlepiece,

while the city slumbered, unencumbered with the cares

that line his stoically aging face,

he reasoned thus:

“For decades now, the Republic has been facing some disturbing trends.

(1) The ever-expanding reach of an Imperial Presidency;

together with (partially in consequence)

(2) The marginalization and (consequent) infantilization of Congress.

The latter, secular trend  has been conjuncturally exacerbated by the tantrums of the Republican Freshmen.

(3)  In an age of increasing American interventionism, there is a troubling Constitutional vagueness about who can launch an act of war.  True, the Constitution states that Congress has the power to do so -- but it refrains from stating that nobody else does, independently of Congress;  and in view of recent history, this conundrum has now become key.  

(4) True, there is the well-meaning War Powers Resolution of 1973, but that suffers from two key weaknesses, one internal and one external:

(i) The President can unleash what is an Act of War in fact if not in name without consent of Congress, so long as he gets around to “notifying” them within 48 hours;  further, he can ravage any countryside he pleases for up to sixty days before, in the absence of Congressional consent, he would have to withdraw forces -- but by then the war is a fait accompli;

(ii)  The Constitutionality of this Resolution itself  has never been settled, and is logically dependent upon the clearing-up of (3).

(5)  Even the modest provisions of the War Powers Resolution have often been honored in the breach:  for instance, the deployment of the Stuxnet virus against Iran, something that we would consider an act of war if launched against us, was done without consultation or public acknowledgement.

Now, if I take these considerations before the American people, they will fall into a deep sleep before the legal problems have even been posed, let alone argued;  and if I go before the Congress, the freshman in their beanies will throw bananas at me.    How, then, to concentrate the public mind upon these dilemmas.  What I need is (as Doctor Justice would probably put it) a coup de théâtre -- a boffo plot-twist; a jump-the-shark.”

(The pipe has now gone out; the brandy-glass stands empty.  An insight blooms, and he relaxes back in the old leather chair, that once belonged to Madison.)

“I have it.  I shall threaten unilateral military intervention into a MidEast slaughterhouse, and shall channel George W. Bush in the lead-up.   In coordination, Secretary Kerry will channel Dick Cheney.  The nation will be riveted to their TV sets; debate will flourish, pro and con.

Some Congressmen will jump up and down, demanding a voice in the decision, but no-one will pay them any attention.  Yet, in a dramatic last-minute development, I shall go live, right after the U.N. inspectors have left the theatre and everyone is expecting an imminent attack;  I shall re-iterate my conviction that the deed should be done;  but then, at the eleventh hour, I shall take Congress at its word, observing that the larger context in which this present mess in Syria is only a ripple, is whether the Congress shall continue the role envisioned for it in the Constitution, or whether it shall devolve further into a mere sideshow for media-hogs.”

~

Gratuit !

Lisez le conte entier

“Le détective et la fillette”

~

This approach masterfully compassed several objectives at once…

(A)  Had the President begun by saying he would launch against Syria only with Congressional approval, the matter would have dragged on, and not gotten Bashar’s attention.  By the time they eventually got around to a vote, the baseball season would be in full swing, some other atrocity would have happened somewhere else, and the Aug 21 incident would have dropped out of the public’s tiny attention-span.

(B)  Had the President approached Congress for approval from the outset, he would have met the usual wall of non-cooperation by those solons whose idea of governance is bashing Obamacare.   But by pretending to go forward unilaterally, he suckered them into a trap:   They demanded a say -- and now he gave it to them.

(C)  By drumming up edge-of-the-seat interest in his proposed intervention, the President managed to “run it up the flagpole” internationally, before committing himself.  Okay, so the British refused to salute.  Interesting …

(D)  He has managed both to sound extremely forceful, and to delay the actual implementation till whenever.  This gives time for the U.N. inspector’s report to come in;  for cooler heads to prevail;  for new intel to surface concerning possible rebel use of these same weapons; etc.

(E)  He is requiring each member of Congress to stand up and be counted -- put their money where their mouth is.

(F)  And if, ultimately, Congress votes nay,  the President can honor this just as Cameron honored the will of his own Parliament, thus avoiding a rash and parlous act, while yet not really climbing down or taking it all back:  rather,  the original interventionist proposal shall have been (to use the term of the dialecticians) ‘sublated’ -- aufgehoben.

(G) And if, after all this, Bashar should nonetheless go ahead and once again deploy chemical weapons, then there will be no more U.S. hand-wringing and uncertainty:  We’ll know the drill.   Obama will once again go before Congress, and if this time they vote Yea, he might even get the Brits to come in with him.  We  shall  see …

*

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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~ ~ ~

The Russian President likewise made a notable speech, remarkable for its apparent tone of moderation.

“I would like to address Obama as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate: Before using force in Syria, it would be good to think about future casualties,” Putin told Russian news agencies in Vladivostok during a tour of the country’s flood-stricken Far East.

Next week’s Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg would be a good forum for discussing the Syrian issue, he said, “so why not take advantage of it?”

Putin said he was sure the attack was the work of rebels trying to provoke international — and especially American — involvement in the Syrian conflict. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, he said, would have had no reason to use chemical weapons at a time when it had gained the upper hand in the fighting.

Putin said he and Obama have not discussed Syria since the incident occurred.

“The U.S. president and I certainly discussed this problem at the G8” summit in June in Northern Ireland, he said. “And, by the way, we agreed then that we would jointly facilitate peace negotiations in Geneva, and the Americans committed themselves to bringing the armed opposition to these negotiations. I understand this is a difficult process, and it looks like they haven't succeeded in this.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-sharply-steps-up-criticism-of-us-over-syria/2013/08/31/532c48ea-1238-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_story.html

Vl. Putin, announcing his new career as a male model for Hathaway shirts

But have a care.   Stalin too was a master of bluff avuncular public moderation, while murdering opponents behind the scenes.  And indeed the reporter goes on to comment:

The Russian president is fond of needling his opponents, often adopting a tone of apparent reasonableness tinged with a considerable amount of condescension. A U.S. assault on Assad’s regime would do nothing to hurt his standing, at home or in many countries abroad, where his contempt for Washington tends to play very well.

~ ~ Посмертный Одобрение

"Если бы я был жив сегодня, и в настроении для тайны,

это то, что я хотел бы читать: "

Я не делаю случае развода

Мерфи на горе.

(Я Иосиф Сталин, и я одобрил это сообщение.)

~ ~

[Update 4 September 2013]   Contrast French autocracy:

Édouard Balladur :  «Il faut agir en Syrie»

L'ex-premier ministre défend le principe d'une intervention en Syrie et refuse un vote préalable du Parlement.

[Update]  More here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/brilliant-mr-president-update-post-10.html

[Update 6 October 2013]  Since we posted this, the succession of military and diplomatic victories for the Obama administration  has been dazzling. Putin came round; Al-Assad has caved; and even Iran is making nice again. 

When the surprise Russian-American-Syrian initial agreement on chemical weapons was announced, we had to listen to professional Obama-bashers bloviate in the media about how, for technical reasons, dismanteling was technically impossible.  Turns out the things mostly hadn’t even been weaponized, and the dismanteling has already begun:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/un-official-says-chemical-weapons-inspectors-begin-destroying-syrian-stockpile-machinery/2013/10/06/c166f608-2e70-11e3-9ddd-bdd3022f66ee_story.html

In normal times, this all would be the Talk of the Town;  only, the Republicans have shut down the town, and a cowed media retreats from objective assessment before the shrillness of partisan mudslinging.   Yesterday saw another triumph of intelligence planning and special-forces implementation, in which one of the few remai ning original al-Qaeda top brass was not only neutralized, but actually captured alive.   Likewise commendable was the simulataneous SEAL retaliation against the Shabaab on their home turf. By any rational measure, everyone would simply salute these carefully planned and flawlessly executed triumphs; but as the NYTimes put it on today’s front page, “the simultaneous attacks are bound to fuel accusations that the administration was eager for a showy victory.”

Again, no point even polemicizing against the Teabaggers on this:  truly we have reached post-consensus politics when they throw tantrums even about matters on which the most consensus exists -- the need to fight al-Qaeda.   You might try, not to polemicize, but to satirize this state of affairs, by imagining an apple-pie-and-motherhood scenario in which the First Lady praised the value of mothers breastfeeding and being denounced for it by, say, Michelle Bachmann -- except that that actually happened.  The satirist shrugs and casts his pen aside.