Let’s face facts. Democracy is a messy business, and competing
stakeholders do not always get everything they want. Ours is a system of
government designed to accommodate change – gradual or radical - through an orderly and prescribed process.
We have elections; we have a balance of power shared between three branches of
government; and we have a Constitutional amendment process.
Although these structures are ensconced in Law, there are also
unwritten courtesies, customs, and traditions that smooth the legislative
process and keep governance a relatively civilized matter. Thomas Jefferson
prescribed these rules of order in his Manual of Parliamentary
Practice.
Pending bills originate in the House, move to Senate, are signed
into law by the President, and - if highly controversial - are affirmed or overturned
by the Supreme Court. ObamaCare
has passed all these benchmarks. Those who wish to modify, replace, or repeal ObamaCare must follow this path in accordance with democratic rules and procedures.
Frankly, the current impasse and government shutdown is NOT
ABOUT OBAMACARE, or the Keystone Pipeline, or abortion, or contraception, or
ANY OTHER PARTISAN CAUSE. The government
shutdown represents a despoliation of democracy by an unruly rabble.
Do we practice governance as prescribed by Law - according to time-honored traditions of parliamentary
procedure - or do we conduct our affairs by ultimatum, blackmail, deception and demagoguery, defamation and vilification, fear mongering, extortion and hostage taking? Do we honor democracy, or do
we conduct the nation’s business by insurrection?
Here is what the Constitution states:
The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned [Amendment 14, Section 4].
"Shall not be questioned" ... how do these words confer a right to surrender the validity of public debt to negotiation? To blackmail? Extortion? Hostage taking?
All presidents have a statutory obligation to preserve and
protect the constitution, as do all office holders in Congress. If this or any
president capitulates, our traditions of governance will be dealt a mortal
blow; and the nation will suffer a slow and painful decline. All citizens of all persuasions share this responsibility - and an obligation to pass down these traditions of representative democracy intact to future generations.
As far as I am concerned, the GOP is no longer a partner in
participatory democracy. As Hannah Arendt states:
“A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.”By this definition, I consider the government shutdown an act of sedition and treason.
-------------------------------------
Monday morning update:
On September 30, 2013, in the stealth of night, behind closed doors and hidden from public scrutiny, House Republicans changed the rules of the house and stacked the deck:
"The Rules Committee, under the rules of the House, changed the standing rules of the House to take away the right of any member to move to vote to open the government, and gave that right exclusively to the Republican Leader," said Van Hollen. "Is that right?"
"The House adopted that resolution," replied Chaffetz.
"I make my motion, Mr. Speaker," said Van Hollen. "I renew my motion that under the regular standing rules of the House... that the house take up the Senate amendments and open the government now."
"Under section 2 of H.R. 368, that motion may be offered only by the majority leader or his designee," Chaffetz said.
"Mr. Speaker, why were the rules rigged to keep the government shut down?" Van Hollen asked.
"The gentleman will suspend," Chaffetz interjected.
"Democracy has been suspended, Mr. Speaker."
Video here:
Absolutely right. Too bad we have virtually no chance of getting Obama, Reid et. al. to actually preserve and protect the Constitution by opposing all enemies, foreign and domestic.
ReplyDeleteI agree and have been saying this from the beginning of this shenanigan. The fact is, we have terrorists in our midst...they just aren't of the foreign type.
ReplyDeleteMe too. In the true sense of the word, they're trying to terrorize the voters with fantasies about economic collapse, foreign takeover, Communism and everything short of a Zombie apocalypse and they've been doing it for a long time, getting more frantic and more extreme. Double-dip, death panels, concentration camps for Republicans a cabinet packed with people like Sharpton and Jackson like something out of Birth of a Nation all in the name of selling anarchy.
ReplyDeleteAnd who is making the public aware of what's happening, of the illegalities?
Not Reid, not anyone from the Democratic party. Not the media. We let them put us on the defensive and look like losers.
Please note the update added to the end of the original post. I did not know of this rule change until I read about this morning.
ReplyDeleteIf the government defaults on Thursday, I consider it the opening shot of CIVIL WAR.
More than half the right wing e-mails and nearly all those trying to sell bogus products cite information the [fill in the blank] doesn't want you to know. Sales pitches and video clips and articles "they" will soon take down.
ReplyDeleteWhaddaya know? Here's something they didn't want you to know - the suspension of democracy!
Suddenly stockpiling guns and ammo doesn't seem so crazy.
I do not own a gun, I do not like guns, and I never thought I would see the day when I would consider purchasing a gun. As of today, I am having second thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI'm being hyperbolic, of course. You can't kill them with guns, only with a wooden stake. Between the filibuster and shady tactics like this, we have only a sham government. They've already taken over and majority rule is dead.
ReplyDeleteThe horror
I'm not giving up without a fight. If civil war is what they want, then civil war is what they'll get!
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteTotal elapsed time to delete troll comment: 5 seconds. A new record.
DeleteProtecting the rights of the minority, which our Constitution does, does decidedly NOT give any said minority the right to deny the proper workings of the government. While the House majority may be republican at present this rule change is most assuredly to accomadate the wackiest of the wacky and smacks of tyranny.
ReplyDeleteThese goons will destroy whatever is left of the republican party.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThe notion that a troll is someone who disagrees with me/us seems to be the last refuge of the disappointed troll. Show them over and again, up and down, in and out that they are wrong; challenge them to substantiate their claims and that's where the conversation ends. The idiot locked out, the idiot who can't accept that he is wrong, insisting that he's locked out because he disagrees. The idiot to whom it never occurs to argue the facts, who never has the facts nor the ability to frame a decent sentence -- the idiot. Is it a coincidence that nearly all self identify as Republicans - or is it that the Republican party makes it's fortune by telling idiots they're not? Worked damned well with the Nazis, although they later turned on many of them on the infamous night of the long knives. A lesson? a word to the wise is sufficient, the operative term here being wise.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I disagree with almost everybody from time to time, some more often than others. They are not trolls.
Captain,
ReplyDeleteI don't know the identity of this troll (cowardice is always standard operating procedure for a troll) but whoever or whatever it is, I am sure everyone agrees with me.
They are usually anonymous...which is exactly why I do not allow anonymous comments on my blog.
ReplyDeleteCaptain, for whatver it is worth coming from an Eisenhower, Goldwater, Buckley conservative, keep doing what you do. Rational people enjoy the challenge as well as the opportunity to rethink their often long held beliefs and paradigm(s) in light of new information.
ReplyDeleteAs contentious as Congress appears to us today, there was a time in our history when...
ReplyDelete"Preston Smith Brooks (August 5, 1819 – January 27, 1857) was a Democratic Representative from South Carolina... is primarily remembered for severely beating Senator Charles Sumner (Free Soil-Massachusetts), an abolitionist, with a cane on the floor of the United States Senate, on May 22, 1856...
... an attempt to oust him from the House of Representatives was made, and he immediately resigned his seat, he received only token punishment and was re-elected by the people of South Carolina (but died before his next term began).
Sumner was seriously injured, and unable to serve in the Senate for three years, though eventually he largely recovered."
Source: Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks
Found this on the intertubes, written by a commenter who calls himself "Pap Finn:"
ReplyDelete"The dirty little secret that is rapidly becoming an open secret is that conservatives ("conservatives") fucking hate, hate, hate democracy. Apologies for repeating myself, but from Clinton onward, Republicans have not and will never again accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president. This is one of many excellent reasons to start calling them what they transparently are: neo-Confederates. "
That very colorfully explains the reality of what this mess in Washington is really about.
I'm beginning to regret that Lincoln kept the Union together.
Oh how I tire of the bullshit. Reading the above makes me realize there can be no resolution. By the standards above because I am not a progressive I am a consevative and therefore automatically considered part of the problem.
ReplyDeleteExplain to the hundred of thousand, if not millions of just right of center individuals exactly how that works. Perhaps alienating all those individuals is the way to proceed.
However, there is likely many who think not and my guess is once alienated many just shutdown and flow the other direction.
But what do I know.
Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to vent.
Good comment. Aren't we all part of the problem? We can be conservative and liberal, smart and foolish, stubborn and flexible at the same time. That's the problem with people.
DeleteAnd your right. All these problems have been around since Moses lost his shoe and always will be. Fortunately there are boats and cars and other things to distract us.
RN,
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly entitled to vent, and why should we or anyone else hold it against you (as long as you don't wake the sleeping cephalopods). Tomorrow is a perfect day for another diatribe. Hang in there.
Redefine conservative. I, myself, am extremely conservative. For God's sake, I'm basically a 1970s hippie.
ReplyDeleteThe republican party must die. They have become a fascist organization that seeks to dupe the middle class, while concentrating all power in the hands of capitalists. Nobody in their right mind with an education would seek to screw all ordinary Americans to promote the vain excesses of the overlords. People that vote republican are stupid, delusional and self-destructive, except for about one thousand families and maybe the families of republican politicians.
It's all going to end.
"It's all going to end."
DeleteThat's actually the ultimate truth. For all we know, "existence" is infinite but our world is infinitesimal. Some day it will be a billion years from now and that's just a moment.
Screwing the public, making everything about short term power and money works fine fro people who don't give a shirt about our country, about being part of a country that means something, about the people who are the country -- and isn't it funny that they are always waving flags and talking about principles?
Democracy needs a bit of altruism to be Democracy. Exactly how much is always in dispute, but me first, fork you, and I don't care isn't "conservative," patriotic, Christian or decent.
If you have supported Republicans for the last 30 years, you are part of the problem.
DeleteNixon won in a landslide, but few today will even admit they voted for him. The TEA party was started by Republicans. They chose to caucus with Republicans, even though it's Republicans who violate what they claim they stand for, less spending in Washington and a balanced budget. It takes a lot of dishonest gall to have spent 8 years building a 6-1/2 trillion dollar debt, then claim it's Democrats responsible for overspending. But then they blame Democrats on the government shutdown, when we all know who has the power to fund the government. Outright liars, is the only way to describe Republicans.
Is someone an outright liar if he believes his own story? Just an academic question and a lie is a lie and a lie is different from something one says out of ignorance. Many of these folks are quite capable of basic arithmetic, capable of looking up facts and understanding that a policy that has failed for generations is a failed policy, yet they will keep pushing it, keep screaming it as you stuff the facts up their noses.
DeleteOne reason I got so worked up last night was that I put a face on the government shutdown. Saturday I visited a very sacred hill that has been inhabited for ten thousand years by the Kumeyaay people, the Pau Wai Interpretive Center on the Ipai Waipuk Trail. This is a joint venture of the city of Poway which has been acquiring the land for twenty-five years, the San Pascual Band of the Kumeyaay people and private investment and participation.
DeletePeople have been living in this valley for something in the order of ten thousand years. It is, of course, impossible to document such an amazing thing. But there is compelling and extraordinary evidence. If any of you have ever seen the stone metates, portable or otherwise where the ancient California natives ground their acorns, you know that they are generally about the depth of a bowl. Thousands of metates exist all over the state in boulders that are very easy to find.
These metates were perhaps between two and two and one half feet deep. Perhaps more. The early inhabitants probably used a log to grind the acorns in these deep metates. I could not measure the exact depth because they were still mostly full of water although it has not rained for a week. The only way a metate could become this deep is through thousands of years of use.
I met a young man who was a federal policeman and his wife. They were just the nicest, freshest and friendliest people you might ever wish to meet. This young man is probably looking at 3k/month to pay his mortgage, maybe another $500/mo for property taxes and would probably love to start his own family.
He's also on furlough,
FJ,
DeleteA fascinating account about the Kumeyaay people, and probably worth a post some day (with pictures). Where I live, there were native peoples once upon a time known as the Ais. They are known in these parts for building "kitchen middens" - piles of oyster shells from 60 to 100 feet high - their staple diet. The Ais are extinct, and the oysters are gone (from human impacts such as pollution).
My sympathies to your acquaintances who are furloughed. My son-in-law is too.