There is a one-line joke about brain farts that applies to carpenters, machinists and do-it-yourselfers. It goes more or less like this, "I keep cutting it, but it is still too short!" This has happened to more than one of us, where our thinking process tells us that the fix for the piece being too short is (our brain gets the idea that it is actually too long? or is it just crossed wires?) to cut it again, and that we need to do the opposite of what is really needed.
At some point in the future the Noble Experiment that is the American Democracy, now 231 years old and counting, will cease to exist. It may be by conquering invaders (hard to figure at this time), by coup, by internal decay, or by some mechanism we cannot now foresee. To paraphrase someone who was on the side of the little guy, but who is certainly persona no grata in the political discourse at this time, there must be permanent revolution.
But revolution may take many forms.
In more than a few countries in the past few decades, people have taken to the streets in peaceful demonstrations that ousted tyrants, in some the oligarchs sent elected leadeers packing, in some the U.S. had a hand on behalf of companies like U.S. Fruit Company, in some the occupiers left, saying, "Enough!". Those are only some of its forms.
...It occurs to me - and I am certain that many, many here agree with this - that the system is broken in so many ways that we often think of throwing up our hands and giving it up for dead, but then we would have a horrible legacy to leave our children and their children, wouldn't we?
There is, of course, the question of, "How did we get here?" and that could be dealt with via Freudian analysis of what our childhoods were like or if we hated our parents, blah, blah, blah. But for those who don't know about it, there is another, more real-worldly powerful psychoanalytical school of thought out there known as "Rational Therapy", one of whose founders, Dr. Albert Ellis, passed away just the other day.
It may be of assistance here.
I ran across his work in a book called, "A Guide to Rational Therapy" three decades ago, and remember it to this day. In it - in my own take on and how I apply it - it is not important what happened to you in the distant or even recent past; what is important is how you frame your life when you get out of bed each day; all that old stuff is only still powerful because you keep repeating it to yourself, so the way to change is to stop repeating it to yourself and repeat something else to yourself, beginning today; that the power to make both immediate and long term changes is to start telling ourselves something different, and that we will find the different thoughts taking hold. By being rational about it, rather than wallowing in our self pity, things can be fixed, and life can go on. We don't have to have the same brain farts all of our lives.
So, it occurs to me to see what we can do by applying some kind of Rational Therapy to our broken American Noble Experiment. Somehow, we are having a continuing brain fart by telling ourselves that we are helpless to change the life of our country, that some events have happened that are beyond our control, that we as merely citizens can't affect the future life of the Republic - and that somehow this approach - declaring impotence - will fix it!
Irrationality is at its heart a form of insanity. We should not continue to do the same things and expect better results; to keep cutting when the results keep coming up shorter and shorter is irrational and insane. We have to stop this massive national brain fart and get rational. Somehow we need to stop repeating the irrational thinking and begin to tell ourselves to begin living the Noble Experiment, and then do it for real.
The Founding Fathers did not make an infallible construct. They knew that events would necessitate adjustments to the Experiment from time to time, and surely they knew that some of them might be real doozies, when the Experiment gets really out of whack.
Let's begin by recognizing that now may be one of those "doozy" times:
The system is broken. It is coming up short, and cutting it shorter, trying to fix it, is not working, because it keeps on coming up short - again and again and again.
Obviously we need to set it aside and start with new raw material and some new parameters. What is the raw material? The humans. All of them. And what are the parameters that need to be adjusted? See below...
But does that mean we have to throw away the tools along with the piece that keeps coming up too short?
In short, NO. (no pun intended)
The tools we have available in the American Noble Experiment are those in the Articles, Sections, Paragraphs and Amendments of the Constitution. Those we can still use. They've been abused, but they are fundamentally sound still.
But the wet-vac maybe has to come out in order to get rid of the village criers who keep repeating the irrational thoughts that are making the system completely unworkable. The system is now so layered with extra-Constitutional and pseudo-Constitutional crap - for want of a better word - that have been added over the decades that allow for self-servers, graft, corruption, power grabs, stalls, earmarks, riders, pork barrel, cronyism, lobbyist influence, bribes under many guises, that to think that by simply replacing Joe Reds with Bobby Blues in certain "crucial districts" we can fix the system is pretty much, well, irrational. And voting in Sarah Liberal into the White House, with all the baggage that comes with her lifetime of favors done and coming due, in place of Fred Neocon only changes what flavor of screwing we want next, not the fact of our being screwed.
Bottom line: The Constitutional is Rational, and the system we have built over it is not.
Term limits for Congress won't work, either, not by itself. It will just be new Davids facing the same Goliaths of corporate influence, lobbyists, entrenched power bases, and an Executive Branch angling even more to accrue more power to itself, and against a Congress essentially made up of newbies. Not a good future scenario...
... The American Noble Experiment has come up short. But does that mean that it has failed? Should the baby be thrown out with the bath water?
NO.
If an experiment in a laboratory doesn't give the exact right results when run exactly the way it was planned, then - after some analysis - it is tried again with certain adjustments made.
Just as Rational Therapy doesn't say to go out and kill yourself or shoot up at the crack house down the street just because you have something in your life that isn't working, we should not go out and dumpster the Constitution and turn into an oligarchy or a duchy or to let another Hitler come in and make us feel good for a moment while our world crumbles around us.
Instead, our American Noble Experiment should be adjusted, rationally but decisively. We need to throw out the elements that are not working and start over with new raw materials, with some tool settings a little bit tweaked, based on what we have learned. To adjust the tools too much is too learn nothing for the next possible adjustment. But once the piece we are working on is too short, we do have to start with new raw material. We can't "stay the course" simply to prevent being accused of being "flip-floppers". The Framers would understand.
So, what am I advocating here?
Revolution? NO.
Basically, I am saying, "THROW THE BUMS OUT".
Now, that is nothing new, is it?
But I am also advocating something beyond that.
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...Part of the problem is the accumulation of laws, Senate and House rules and customs, and Executive Orders that hamstring any chance of making adjustments. When the experiment is already too short, adjusting the saw blade won't help make the results any better, only worse.
Yes, there is much to keep, within our laws, Congressional rules and customs. But there is much to remove, as well.
Based on known abuses and to make an effort to eliminate them, these are initial suggestions for a first draft of a rational therapy to make adjustments to the American Noble Experiment to help it survive (details and rationale not included but are pretty clear):
- Dissolve Congress and retire ALL of them. Forbid them from from future participation at any level. Scrap heap time.
- Fire the entire White House; retire them, too, out to pasture. Forbid them also from future participation at any level.
- Take peacefully to the streets and don't stop until mechanisms are in place to accomplish items 1. and 2.
- Amend (adjust) the Constitution to prevent the known abuses from happening again:
- Define Corporations as legal entities for the purpose of legal, real estate, and corporate activities, but ones that are forbidden from participating in elections, either with personnel, money or efforts.
- Forbid lobbyists from any participation in elections or legislation or executive decision making, in any way whatsoever.
- Require all elections, at all levels, to be funded exclusively by governmental funds raised through taxes.
- Stipulate that the exchange of wealth, favors, capital or money is not Free Speech and is therefore not covered under the First Amendment.
- All spending bills must have sunset provisions, with a set number of years as a maximum, not to exceed 10 years.
- No earmarks, riders, amendments, pork barrel items, or other additions may be made to bills by legislators unless the additions are directly pertinent to the stated main purpose of any proposed law.
- All legislators will have term limits, not to exceed 3 terms for Senators and 5 terms for Congressmen. Term limits are lifetime limits.
- No member of the New Congress after these changes may have been a member of any previous Congress.
- All existing laws must be individually reviewed and passed by the Legislature of the New Congress and signed by the President in order to remain effective. These all must be passed within 10 years of enactment of this amendment, or lapse.
- No Signing Statements by any President, past present or future, will have any force of law.
- No person, whether within the geographical Unites States and its Territories or not, who is under the power of the Government of the United States or its delegated subcontractors, or given over to the power of collaborating foreign governments and their subcontractors, shall be subject to violations of the Geneva Conventions, specifically. Should the Geneva Conventions be declared null and void at some future date, the United States government shall continue to act toward persons consistent with the Geneva Conventions and this Amendment, nevertheless.
- No American military forces shall step foot outside the geographic United States, except by written authorization of the United Nations Security Council, and then only for 90 days, at the end of which time the United States military must revert to bases within the United States. This duration may be extended by written authorization of the United Nations Security for only one extra 90-day period. No military action outside the geographic United States may take place in the same foreign country for more than 6 months in any 10 year period.
- A new Fundamental Amendment is to be added to the beginning of the Bill of Rights that reads, "The Citizenry of these United States is the underlying Authority for this Constitution, and all Articles, Sections, Paragraphs and Amendments herein are fundamentally RESTRICTIONS on the Powers granted to each of the Branches of the government, be they Legislative, Executive or Judicial, and these Powers granted SHALL NOT BE EXCEEDED, except by Amendment to this Constitution. Any such Amendment broadening the Restrictions on the Branches shall be enacted only upon a Two-thirds majority in Three-fourths of the Several States, within 10 years of passage of said Amendment by Three-fourths of the Senate and the Congress, individually. The President's signature shall not be required."
Basically, we need to do these things:
- Re-frame the Constitution a bit, adjust it to prevent known abuses.
- Throw the bums out.
- Start over with the foundation that the framers Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, et al, gave us and run the American Noble Experiment again.
You cannot believe how much all of this will save the American taxpayer, not to mention regaining our country. Even paying for the retirement of all the legislators and White House people, the savings will be many, many billions. Those people have been bleeding us dry. And as they die off, they will be natural budget cuts.
Power to the People, where it always resided in the first place.
. . . . TD