Constitutional Government At Risk

Today I read an article by Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post. 

She postulated that the government shutdown is just "leverage" and part of the political process; almost legitimizing the blackmail that is going on.  She explains that an easy "fix" of the latest deadlock is to eliminate the "medical hardware" tax, that conservative medical hardware companies want, and then pass another funding mechanism by agreement, and the thing is solved. 

Just "leverage" huh.  Not quite.

Try, just try to go back to your high school Civics class.  Remember the drill:  how a bill becomes a law. 

Remember the separation of powers that runs through the Constitutional Process, which makes it VERY difficult to get a bill into a law.  There are procedural roadblocks along the way.  The whole process demands consensus, compromise, and yes, politics, democratic process is the lawmaking process.

Remember how difficult it was to get the Affordable Care Bill into law?  Remember it really took almost 100 years before a national health care plan was passed.  Remember that the basics of the law are conservative in nature; basically putting the onus on the private insurance system to deliver affordable care.

And then, once the Law was passed and signed by the President, it was rushed to the Supreme Court by its opponents, hoping to have it overturned.  A major part of it was declared unconstitutional, but enough survived to put it into action.

All this, to get a bill into a law. 

This is the genius of our system.  It protects minority views constantly by limiting the power of majorities.  That is a democratic process that has sustained itself through a Civil War, a Great Depression, and through two World Wars.  Never in all that chaos, did the democratic process stop, never was in compromised.

Now it is being compromised.  It is being compromised by a conservative scheme to, even though conservatives only control one third of the government, to stop all governmental services except those they like, finding a last minute way to veto the Affordable Care Act.

And, predictably, what they did yesterday shows their agenda to end our Constitutional system of checks and balances.  The House passed a host of Bills, funding areas of government that they like.  The President even signed one of them: funding pay for the military. 

So, the "new normal" is to deny funding for government, except for what you want.  This can go on forever, if the Senate and President cave in. 

And, the debt ceiling "crisis" looms on the horizon.

Our checks and balances system is there for a reason.   It makes moving a Bill into Law extraordinarily difficult.  Moreover, it makes amending Laws extraordinarily difficult for a reason.

It is called the democratic process.  That process has been set up to purposefully protect the minority view from the tyranny of the majority, and conversely, protecting the majority view from a tyranny of the minority.  Any political scientist can tell you this tyranny cuts both ways.

What we are seeing now is not "leverage" it is the tyranny of a minority being played out. 

A constitutional crisis is what is really going on, with high stakes.

Because you see one tyranny of the minority is a thing called fascism; one party rule, that eventually destroys democracy completely.

And that is where we are today!