The other night, in a conversation with my mother, I expressed my fondness of 'austerity' politicians, such as Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have gained a reputation - usually very negative in the view of the media - for vetoing and barricading popular, majority-passed measures that raise taxes or give government more power as a means of resolving the finanical ruin said government has driven itself to. When bombarded with criticism for denying majority rule, said politicians claim they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and said measure blatantly violates it, so if people want it passed, the legislature must amend the Constitution, which requires far more than a simple majority. I pointed out most people are not educated on politics and economics, and amid the hysteria induced by the modern crisis, the majority would likely comply with the government continuing and expanding the counter-productive measures that created it, but austerity allows an educated minority to obstruct this. After processing, my mother's response was "Well, I see your point, but do you realize that is no longer Democracy?"
EXCUSE ME? NO LONGER Democracy?
My mother immigrated to this country in her 40s, so in her case such a statement is somewhat excusable, but any natural born citizen that went to high school in this country and says something so stupid ought to have their right to vote suspended until they get a passing grade in high school civics. Hyperbole, of course, but we owe it to ourselves as citizens to at least understand that this political system was NEVER intended to be a democracy. The United States and every state within it are organized as Constitutional republics. The difference between a democracy and a republic (the proximity to the modern party names is obsolete at best, BTW) is very simple, and you can skip the next section if you know it:
A democracy is governed entirely by majority rule; it can be representative in that decisions are made by an elected legislature rather than referendum, but said legislature has virtually unlimited authority to do whatever it wants as long as the measure gains a majority. Parliamentary systems such as the UK and other British Commonwealth countries follow this model - the heads of the executive departments are members of parliament appointed by a legislative vote, and this includes the Prime Minister or other head of State that does not have anything close to the checking power of the US President.
A republic typically has mutliple bodies of government such as a legislature and a separately elected executive branch, but the key difference is a set of rules, or Constitution, that clearly outlines the powers of each body of government and explicitly prohibits them from operating outside these parameters, even if the majority favors such operation. Both fans and critics of the US and its State Constitutions would do well to actually READ them; they are operating manuals for the governments with restrictions clear as day. The Constitutions ARE living documents in that the legislature can change - or amend - any provision, but this requires far more than a simple majority. It follows that a Constitution that could be changed by simple majority would defeat the entire point of having one.
In recent years, Americans have taken a liking to a sickening fashion of conveniently forgetting that the United States is a republic and not a democracy each time a measure they like is obstructed by its inherent austerity and rigidity, but cheering like banshees on LSD each time the same system swallows up a measure they disagree with. In the midst of the modern economic crisis and the continuing fractionating of both political parties which make majorities difficult to attain, it has become trendy for people ignorant of politics to attack the political process on the grounds that a minority can 'hold it hostage' or 'deny the will of the people', and this assinine rhetoric poses a credible threat to the integrity of the system. This trend has nothing to do with party lines - looking back as little as the last 2 years will demonstrate this. The last two years have been marked by insipid accusations against Republicans, calling them the "party of 'no'" and the like, for attempting to barricade Obamacare and their austere minority behavior during the Lame Duck session. Laughably, however, the same people making these accusations cheered themselves hoarse when Bernie Sanders attempted to use the exact same procedural hurdle - a filibuster - to stop the compromise package. Now the Democrats are a minority, and these same cheerleaders of the lynching mob are as fond as ever of their promises to barricade the repeal of Obamacare using the same hurdles that defy the will of the majority. Supporters of the GOP, not to be outdone, are already screaming in their "mandate" fervor for the liberals to get out of the way while the majority "restores American values", forgetting that only a month ago their party of choice relied on the same barricades to block measures they disliked. My views on the measures in question, although I've posted here about many of them, aren't very relevant to this post. The problem I'm adressing is this short-sighted desire to do away with republican constraints on majority rule that doesn't take into account the undeniable reality that no party will be a majority forever, and in the modern case - for very long.
A simple example of what happens when these constraints are shirked is the first 6 years of the Presidency of Bush Jr. The Democrats of 2001-06, with the possible exception of the few months preceding 9/11, were one of the most complacent minorities in the history of this country. The Republicans' majority in those years never reached anything close in either house to what the Democrats had in 2009-10, or to what the Republicans have in the House of Reps now, and yet the Democrats refused to use the readily available political mechanisms to obstruct the passage of the blatantly authoritarian and unconstitutional Patriot Act and even its RENEWAL in 2006, the pointless and counter-productive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and their continued funding at the expense of social welfare and other entitlement programs they claim to support, the 'tax cuts' of 2001 which were then openly presented as corporate stimulus - proven to fail to stimulate the economy dozens of times by history, and a variety of other imbecillic measures that some corporate tycoon likely whispered into Bush Jr's ear during a golf game. In fact, large factions of establishment Democrats voted in FAVOR of many of these measures, including modern Democrat "heroes" Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, under the pretense that they were a necessity in dangerous times. Having to vote for these measures in light of a constituency grasped by hysteria that would otherwise not re-elect them may explain this complacency, but it does not EXCUSE it.
Desite this, however, the inherent difficulty of making permanent changes certainly prevented Bush Jr. from doing far more long-lasting damage to both civil liberties and the economy; and I leave it up to everyone to make their own hypotheses regarding how far he may have gone without them. The majority of the Patriot Act blatantly ignored half of the Bill of Rights, but ignoring the Constitution does not negate it. Some of its provisions were struck down by judicial review, and others have already expired or are set to expire shortly. Without Constitutional restrictions, Bush Jr. and his complacent Congress could have easily made these into permanent laws that would have to be repealed rather than expire or be ruled unconstitutional - a significant problem the modern UK now faces with police state measures passed under Tony Blair. Arguably, this lack of resistance could have allowed Bush Jr. to use these laws to remove further obstructions to unilateralism and proceed to Hitler or Stalin-like tyranny; but the claim that he would have gone through with this is not verifiable.
Similar situations occurred under a variety of past presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all ignored the Constitution during the Viet Nam era, but not being able to downright revoke it limited them in doing so, and the document outlived each of their laughable political downfalls (Kennedy was NOWHERE popular until after his assassination). Similar abuses were perpetrated by Truman during the Korean War era, Wilson during WWI, a variety of presidents most Americans haven't heard of during the Gilded Age, Abraham Lincoln (another President made to appear popular by post-mortem historical revisionism) during the Civil War, and even before that. Despite all its shortfalls and difficulties, our political system is one of the oldest in the world at this point, and this is attributable first and foremost to the fact that it makes it nearly impossible for any politician to acquire the power to degenerate it into a totalitarian dictatorship that would require a violent revolution for reform.
There are two common counter-arguments that have been made throughout our 223 years of existence and continue to be made to this day. The first is that 'certain exceptions' or 'fluid interpretations' are acceptable because the provisions in the original Constitution were written so long ago and are obsolete in guaranteeing equality, and examples of "good exceptions" are often cited as evidence. Unfortunately, both the "obsolete" claim and "good exceptions" are simply factually inaccurate. The Constitution's ONLY intended fluidity is the capacity of the legislature to amend it, and this WORKS. Slavery may have been written into the original US Constitution, but it was done away with by the 13th Constitutional Amendment - NOT the hollow propaganda of the Emancipation Proclamation as many Americans mistakenly believe. Similarly, the unapologetic biggotry of 'Separate but Equal' practiced for the following 100 years was found unconstitutional by the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education. Jim Crow laws also invariably violated the Constitutions of every State in which they were enacted, and even the biggotry of those cultures at the time allowed the governments to shirk the Constitutions but NOT revoke these provisions. As for the Federal government, Brown vs Board of Education demonstrates that it ALWAYS had the Constitutional authority to end Jim Crow laws; physical authority may have been another story in the 1870s, but ignoring the Constitution hardly addresses that. Hence, integration absolutely did NOT require the Constitution-trampling provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Feel free to use this information educate any emotional idiot that tries to justify anti-Constitutionalism using the race card by erroneously lumping these political developments together.
The second counter-argument has slightly more legitimacy, but the costs it points out are unfortunately the price of liberty. It was popularized by the 1960s Johnson administration and remains fashionable to this day to lament about how one measure or another could have passed and helped starving children, poor seniors without health benefits, neglected veterans, the apprehension of some international terrorist and so forth; if only the system was easier to change and allowed for simple majority rule. The advent of television campaigns around the same time added a powerful emotional component to this argument, pointing out people left out in the cold economically. However, these campaigns that film malnourished children and dead soldiers in Iraq ought to make Americans disgusted with whoever made the commercial, not their political system. We need to remember that a system based on simple majority rule would likely have degenerated from one even concerned with such humane undertakings in the first place, and decades ago. I have pointed out at least a dozen administrations, complete with legislative support, that blatantly over-stepped their authority and undoubtedly wanted more power - it is naive to think at least ONE of them would not have turned the system into a fascist dictatorship. Reality has yet to provide a political system that is completely fair and leaves no one in a compromised position, but historical attempts to create one by removing barricades to government power breed Stalins and Hitlers - systems I doubt many of you feel would help the same people left out in the cold.
Erich Maria Remark's timeless wisdom - "the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic" - could not apply more accurately to this situation. While limited government types like myself want equality and a better economic quality of life for all people no less than any concerned bleeding-heart liberal, we hold the distinction of understanding that we must accomplish this within the bounds of Constitutional contraints, rather than naively believing that removing them will bring propserity. If you enjoy the mere freedom to point out that you disagree with a measure being passed or failed by the government, I strongly advise you not to lament about the romance of an easier-to-manipulate system in which the outcome may have been different, and to remind others of the inherent trade-off I have pointed out here. The outcome in that fairy-tale system may indeed be very different, different in ways you wouldn't romanticize about.
