It only took 234 years…
But, yeah, I told you so.
Back in July, I posted three articles about what I see as a terrible flaw in our Constitution — the non-existance of an enforcement mechanism to enforce itself. Just in case you're interested, here’s the links:
I’ve been watching, as has the rest of America, the shenanigans of the GOP in Congress, and waiting for what I knew would be coming.
Proof.
It is as clear as the nose on my face (have you seen my face?) that somehow, someone within the GOP was using some kind of mechanism to keep their caucus together and voting as a block. Just like, for the last 234 years, the entire Congress was still using the same mechanism to keep one another in line and behaving “gentlemanly” towards one another. Or, at least, mostly, and except for a few notable examples, inside the halls of Congress itself. At least it’s been a hundred years or more since the last armed duel, anyway.
(Ok, ok, I’ll admit that twice in the last month someone had to be physically prevented from assaulting McCarthy, but I’ll take the stance that physically preventing those assaults counts as enforcing the “gentlemanly” standard, though admittedly, just barely…)
But back to my main point for today.
Now we have that proof. Within the last few days, more and more of the moderate Republicans have brought out that proof — that often anonymous sources have threatened them and their families, either with social, economic or physical threats, if the members of Congress failed to vote for Jordan. Now, I’m not going to directly accuse him of being complicit, but yesterday, when he announced unexpectedly that he’d go for a third vote, he sounded damn confident he'd win, didn’t he?
So there you have it. Direct evidence that yes, there IS a mechanism for enforcing some kind of “social” standard for actions in Congress and Government, separate and apart from the Constitution. A mechanism that is remarkably effective — or was until certain people got sick and tired of the actual illegal part — threats of physical violence.
Now there was, a bit ago, a report that the wife of one such Republican got a threat via text that threatened her husband with never holding another public office again. Arguably, that’s not more than a political threat, and as such, probably isn't illegal, since it doesn’t involve, necessarily, something illegal.
But threats of physical violence are illegal, and it appears that Jordan’s supporters (whether he knew or not) crossed that line sufficiently that the victims decided (together?) that they were going to reveal the existence of the threats.
But this entire situation not only reveals the current use of that 234 year old mechanism, but the limits of its effectiveness. It also reveals another flaw. One that links to the first one I wrote about.
The Next Flaw.
The system of checks and balances worked into the Constitution have worked pretty well over the last 234 years, but then, we’ve never faced the kind of situation we do now — a Party with the goal of overthrowing that document’s legal status in this country. Sure, in the 1850’s, we did face a situation where some States wanted to leave the Union, but that wasn't the same thing, nor did they face the same kind of paralysis we do today.
A very small group of people, largely led by Gym Jordan, have managed to paralyze one House of Congress, to the point that the government is unable to deal with at least two crises facing us today — Ukraine and Israel — with a bill placed before Congress and working quite nicely through the Senate in a bipartisan manner, that will not only deal with those two issues, but adds in Taiwan and the Southern Border as well.
Fewer than around a dozen House members are not only refusing to cooperate, but are using the rules of the House to completely prevent that body from accomplishing anything, up to and including funding the government, by mangling the process of choosing a speaker, in part by refusing to cooperate in any way — and by forcing their fellow Republicans to not seek assistance from the Democrats. Now we have proof of how they’re doing that.
Today, under the current Constitution, neither the Senate, nor the President, nor the Supreme Court, can force the House of Representatives to do anything. There is no mechanism to either force the House to act, nor bypass that paralysis in order to do anything — even if that “anything” was needed to literally save the country’s ass. Those other parts of the government can’t even together force that half of Congress to act.
So much for “checks” or “balances”, huh? To me, the ability of a very small number of members of a single House of Congress (and the “lower” House at that) to be able to paralyze the entire US Government is an unconscionable failure of process. Bad enough that the Constitution has no enforcement mechanism to force a President to obey the rules, but now we see that failure extends to not just Congress, but to individual members of Congress as well! And the inability of the rest of the government to override that failure is another failure in and of itself.
Now, I Am Not A Lawyer, so I’m not going to try and suggest anything as a fix. I’ve got no idea at all how that might be remedied. I can think of several ways to do it, but any of those could be used by a nefarious opposition to force the other Party to act in ways that might enable that nefarious Party to do something they strongly oppose. So, none of that is any kind of solution!
But clearly, something eventually needs to be done to prevent this from happening again. Hopefully someone smarter than I about how these things might work could have an idea.
If ya do, there’s the comment section. So, clap and let us know what your solution would be. Thanks for reading!
