This morning's Diane Rehm show on NPR dealt with the following topic:
This Presidents Day we look at what many constitutional scholars and former government officials see as the expanding role of the Executive Branch since 9/11, and whether Congress is fulfilling its constitutional role of legislative oversight.
My first reaction to the question is
Do bears crap in the woods?
The idea that we need to devote a lot of time to the obvious turned me off. I hoped that we would hear some suggestions about what to do. Look below the fold to see more about this issue.
The conversation was interesting only in that any attempt to either justify the Bush coup or to even suggest that congress was coming even close to doing its job was lame at best. So there was a kind of consensus. There were three experts , two on constitutional law,
Lou Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. He's also author of several books on presidential power, including "Presidential War Power" (2004) and "Military Tribunals and Presidential Power" (2006)
Douglas W. Kmiec, professor of constitutional law and Caruso family chair in constitutional law at Pepperdine University
and
Bruce Fein, former associate deputy attorney general, Republican counsel during the Iran-contra hearings, and founding partner with the Lichfield Group
The main aspect of the consensus was that Presidential power has been increasing for some time while the role of congress has been diminishing. They also agreed that the Bush coup has taken things to an all time low, to put words in their mouths.
My reaction to this "discussion", besides being very upset, is to apply my own mindset to the issue. I think and write about complexity science and, especially, the role of the holistic world view we carry mainly in our unconscious mind on the attempts we make at being "rational", whatever that means. Here's what comes to mind. The impotence we are experiencing as a people has its roots in the circularity of what I will call "the broken government syndrome". Broken governments have come up in history again and again. The usual result is some kind of catastrophic rearrangement involving a lot of violence. There have been exceptions, the "velvet revolution" being among the most recent. In our case, many, if not most of us seem to be convinced that we can use the electoral process to fix things. To me this is an interesting (and depressing) can of worms. How do you use a broken tool to fix that broken tool?
In answer to a caller who asked whether the presidential candidates have come forth with their approach to the problem, one of the discussants related that he had confronted each of the candidates early on and received answers fron two, Ron Paul and Dennis Kuchinich. Hmmmmm? So let us involve all our time and energy in selecting among the remaining field? So called "rational" thought abhors circular arguments. In complexity theory we recognize that real world situations are replete with loops of causal entailment. One example is the use of the broken tool to attempt to fix the broken tool. I hesitate to follow this line of thought further because, quite frankly, it scares me. If we are indeed locked in a loop of trying to fix a broken government with a broken government, are we not being at least a little bit foolish?
Another caller was a young person who wanted to see if the group had any solutions to recommend. To boil the answers down to a sound bite, he was told that it is necessary to go beyond elections and become "involved" all the time. Wow! Why didn't we think of that before? Involved in what?
Being ready to turn 72 next month, I have to keep reminding younger folk that most of this, if not all, is reallly not new to me. We had long, agonizing bull sessions during the sixties and seventies about what to do. As faculty advisor to SDS at SUNY at Buffalo in the late sixties, I was up many a night embroiled in discussions about the issues. If my memory serves me right, it was a dark time like this one, but our hopes at finding an answer seemed to create a lot more willingness to look outside of electoral politics for ways to break out of the "broken tool fixing the broken tool" quagmire. In fact, my own piece of dogma relating to those times is to blame the use of electoral politics to capture and squelch the creativity that was so vibrant for a while. To sound even more paranoid to some, it was politicians very much like our presidential candidates today who used the energy and creativity sink of electoral politics to save the day for the establishment.
So as I prepare to work to get Obama elected, if he indeed is our candidate, I recall comparisons between him and JFK, who was the president who got us into a lot of the junk we were trying to straighten out back then. I do this with a deep unrest inside myself, because if I had to bet, I'd bet that if successful beyond our dreams, the 2008 elections will bring us no closer to a way out of our mess than we are under the emperor with no clothes. Norman Mailer wrote The Presidential Papers back then and he opted strongly for electing Goldwater over Johnson because then the evil would have a face and we would be less apt to be seduced by it. This is an interesting thought. Since the 2006 election, maybe ol' Norman was as much a prophet in that book as he was in The Naked and the Dead (If you have never read that book you need to do so as soon as possible).
I think I have made my case as well as I can. Please, if we are to hope to fix the government problem, do not put all your eggs in one basket. If, as I strongly suspect, the election leaves us no closer to a solution, then we need to be devoting at least as much of our creative energy to alternative ways of fixing it as we are to perpetuating the broken system