Hillary: The Constitution is also a set of Rules
Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 07:44:18 PM PDT
I've had enough of moving goalposts and rewriting Rules. We have had eight years of a president who Decided that the Rules don't matter. What matters is getting what you want. If you have to bend and even break The Rules to get there, so be it. This president has disregarded the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, dictates of Congress in areas where it has authority, judges' rulings, and so on.
We've also seen this president constantly change the definition of 'success' in Iraq to the point where the goals are no longer recognizable. Sure, you can set goals and benchmarks and definitions for success, but if you don't like what you see, just keep changing them so you can eventually declare victory when something 'good' happens.
What troubles me the most about the Clinton campaign is that I see the same pattern emerging.
At the beginning of this laborious primary process, the Clinton camp knew very well what The Rules of the process are. Michigan and Florida would not receive delegates, and their vote totals would not be counted in the overall tally. Why? Because they broke The Rules. The delegate count from the remainder of the states would be used to determine the winner. The pledged delegates from each state would vote as directed by the translated votes-to-delegates count, and if necessary the superdelegates would break any near-tie.
But tonight we saw Terry McAuliffe nonchalantly declaring that now it's the popular vote that REALLY matters, and not only that, but of course Florida counts; there's never been any doubt. Man, you add those Florida votes and things are looking great for Hillary (even though they aren't). Hillary herself has said repeatedly that hey, there's no such thing as a pledged delegate. If delegates want to break ranks with their states and The Rules, as long as it benefits me, that's OK.
One major problem with all of this: The Constitution, for example, is also a set of Rules. If the Clinton camp is ready to play fast and loose with established Rules like those of the primary process in an attempt to get what they want, why wouldn't they do it with the Constitution? If they're so willing to keep changing the definition of victory, why wouldn't they do it with their policy initiatives?
I don't care if Hillary turns into the most liberal president ever - if she starts bending the Constitution to achieve her ends, it would still ruin the very idea of America. We've been through nearly eight years of that (though admittedly with vastly inferior policy choices to what Hillary might go for), and look at where it's gotten us. We're being wiretapped and blacklisted and our wages are going down and prices of gas and education are out of control and we're stuck in an endless war that keeps draining the Treasury and getting US servicepeople killed and we're torturing people and holding them indefinitely without charges, and guess what? We're still paranoid about terrorism. We've trashed the very fundamentals of our country, and we haven't gotten a thing in return. In fact, we're arguably much worse off than we were in 2000.
I don't know about you, but I've had it with disregarding Rules we all agreed to at the beginning. We put them down in 1787, and we put them down at the start of this primary season. The fact that Hillary and her people are willing to cast them aside now does not bode well for a Clinton presidency.
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