Tuesday, January 30, 2018

America's Constitution is Terrible.

That the partial title to an article at The Week.  The first four blurbs are interesting.
he American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk — and it's only getting worse.
When written, the Constitution made a morally hideous compromise with slavery that took a war and 750,000 lives to make right. And while its basic structure sort of worked for awhile in the 20th century, the Constitution is now falling prey to the same defects that has toppled every other similar governing document the world over.
The truth seems clear: America is going to have to overhaul its basic structure of government, or eventually it will fall to pieces.
The major problem with America's Constitution is that it creates a system in which elections generally do not produce functioning governments, and there is no mechanism to break the deadlock (like calling snap elections). Most of the time, control of the House, Senate, and presidency is split between the two parties in some way. Bipartisan compromises to keep government functioning used to be common, but are near-impossible anymore due to extreme party polarization. So as Michael Kinnucan points out, during divided government "there is de facto no legislative body."
Ever since the election and inauguration of Hillary Clinton (oh, yeah, that didn't happen), the liberals have been liberals have been in a deep dark depression.  It's bad enough that they want to looks for scandals everywhere, while ignoring clear felonies on their side, but now they openly state that they want to re-do the Constitution.

Kevin Hayward, at Poerline thanks them for simply coming out and saying it.
We should be grateful to Ryan Cooper for acknowledging so forthrightly in The Week what has been obvious to conservatives for a long, long time—liberals really really hate the Constitution, because limited government is an impediment to their endless dreams of ruling over us more completely and fixing every human problem:
Mr. Cooper's odious piece is interesting reading, if only to see the mind of liberalism unhinged.  Mr. Cooper's biggest problem is not the Constitution itself, but the hundreds of thousands of people like me, who have sworn an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign add domestic".

I don't know that I have ever been relieved of the responsibilities of that oath.

5 comments:

Old NFO said...

Nor have I, or any other veteran.

Owen Family at Far Better Farmstead said...

Restoring earmarks and just plain old pork barrel spending would help break the logjam. Ever since they got rid of earmarks the only thing left to pull votes (in congress) together is is ideology. And we are too closely split to work together by ideology alone. Throw some money for "back home" in there and politicians line up like piglets on a sow!

Retired Spook said...

How the bloody hell would they know if the Constitution is outdated or not? None of them have ever read it!

kamas716@yahoo.com said...

Government gridlock is a feature, not a bug. We're generally much safer when the politicians can't agree on how to rape us. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats have stepped in for the politicians lately and created their own ways of raping us since they weren't getting direction from above.

pigpen51 said...

I am a strict constitutitonalist. I find it quite refreshing that the government is in gridlock so often. That means that it is not doing anything, which is pretty much what the founding fathers had in mind when they set about to start this fledgling country. A bunch of states loosely grouped around a small central government whose main function was to ensure the safety of the union of states, which we know as The United States of America, and also to facilitate trade between said states, and act as a sort of judge when disputes came up between two states. The executive branch was charged with not only ensuring the safety of the country, through our military, but also with the enforcement of laws, and finally, with international relations. That is pretty much it. It says nowhere in the constitution that the president is allowed to take a law, in the following example, Obamacare, and just by saying so, stop and start provisions of it at his own will. He cannot change the provisions of the law in order to make it more palatable to the masses, without going back to congress and starting the entire process over again, but it seems like our previous president felt like he was above the constitution, and could do pretty much anything that a pen and a cell phone would allow. Fortunately, now he is finding out that when you make laws as the president, by passing the legislature, the next president can simply, with that same pen and cell phone, x them into oblivion. And this, my friends, is exactly why the Democrats hate Trump so viciously. Not because he is a bad man, or a pervert, or even not of the club. Oh, no, it is only because Donald Trump has the brass balls to get rid of much of Obama's hoped for legacy.

What we are finding out, as time goes on, is that America is much better off by having him do this. Anyone who saw the SOTU address, or heard about it, knows just how well Trump has done in his first year, the Democrats kicking and screaming notwithstanding. Every economic indicator is sailing high, unemployment is so low that I wonder how much longer they will even bother to measure it. And that is for everyone, not just educated white men. Companies are returning, taxes are going down, not just for that pesky 1%, but for everyday people, to whom Nancy Pelosi and her comment about a grand being crumbs is insulting.

Will this continue? Who the hell knows. But one thing is for certain, and that is that if the Democrats don't quit stepping on their own genitals, they can forget about the mid term elections. Nothing says vote for me more than a good job, a strong military, and a sense of pride restored to a nation that for too long has been brow beaten by the Democratic leaders about how bigoted and homophobic and just plain rotten the every day American is. I saw a picture of a Democrat daring to start to stand and clap for Trump at one point in his address. Nancy Pelosi turned on her and pointed her finger at the woman and scolded her in public for daring to support anything that Trump said. When somewhere around 75% of the American people thought that the president did a good job, this could be a bad poster for the Democrats to have to explain. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. It is a damn good thing that Pelosi can raise funds, because she hasn't got much else to recommend her for anything other than retirement.