A Minor Musing About Parliamentary Practices And The 17th Amendment

A few days ago, Dr. Blanchard speculated that netting seats may be "the only thing we care about anymore." Coincidentally, Kevin Drum provides a major reason for that political callousness:

For all practical purposes, we live in a pseudo-parliamentary system of governance, and the only thing that matters in Congress is what party you belong to.

I've long thought Congress began morphing into a de facto parliament with Gingrich's Contract with/on/for America. Northeastern liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats were endangered species before then but now they are extinct.

Conservatives nationally and in South Dakota now want to repeal the 17th Amendment. They claim that repeal will increase the influence of states. These same conservatives seem content with conservative Republicans voting en masse to stop every Obama initiative simply because it's an Obama initiative.

Repealing the 17th Amendment will do little to reduce the Republican embrace of a pseudo-parliamentary system. In fact, it seems a blatantly obvious move to increase Republican numbers in Congress. Currently, Republicans control the legislatures in 27 states; Democrats control only 17. Those numbers would give Republicans 54 seats. Nebraska's unicameral legislature would probably send two more Republicans. Republicans would then need to get 4 of the 10 Senate appointees from the states with divided legislatures to have a 60 vote majority in the Senate.

Meanwhile, electoral college trends show Democrats should have an easier time keeping the Presidency. Nate Silver provides a helpful graphic.

Parliamentary systems work because the head of state and head of dominant party are the same person. Parliamentary practices won't work with a federal system that seems be destined to have divided government more the foreseeable future.

Quotation Of The Day: Constitutional Sanity Edition

From Senator Rand Paul:

"The U.S. Attorney General’s refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening – it is an affront the Constitutional due process rights of all Americans”

The Threats One Sees Are More Dangerous Than The Conspiracies One Can't

Cory calls out conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Steve Sibson.  As Cory points out Sibby fervently asserts bogeymen lurk behind every rock, tree, curtain, and atom.  The Four Horsemen of Sibby's Apocalypse are  socialists, ”Masons,” [the] “New World Order,” and “New Age Theocracy.” Sibson's trust issues and search for black helicopters would be humorous if they did not dangerously distract from real and imminent assaults on freedom.
Conor Friedersdorf reminds readers that President Obama

has previously been subject to complaints about his war on whistleblowers, the humanitarian and strategic costs of his drone war, theillegality of the war he waged in Libya, his use of the state secrets privilege, his defense of Bush-erawarrantless wiretapping, and his assertion of the power to kill American citizens accused of terrorism.  . . . .[and] Obama plans to sign rather than veto a bill enshrining indefinite detention into U.S. law and failing to exempt American . . . .

All of these decisions frighten me far more than any Masonic Socialist.

One could, of course, hope that candidates hoping to win the nomination of the party of limited government would be more amenable to preserving civil liberties.  Newt Gingrich quickly destroys that hope. Tod Kelly writes,

The war on drugs, I admit, is worrisome. The surveillance of American citizens without a warrant is troubling. Holding people not charged with any crime for an undetermined period of time is deeply disturbing. And yet as chilling as I find those realities, none of them frightens me to the degree that this idea does:

“During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gingrich suggested the president could send federal law enforcement authorities to arrest judges who make controversial rulings in order to compel them to justify their decisions before congressional hearings… When host Bob Schieffer asked how he would force federal judges to comply with congressional subpoenas, Gingrich said he would send the U.S. Capitol Police or U.S. Marshals to arrest the judges and force them to testify.”

Granted, Newt doesn't seem ready to be establish a secular theocracy with New Age requirements that all school children learn to play the flute or "non Western instruments."  (Those New Age Pagans are a conniving bunch.)

Still, that separation of powers thing was important enough for the founders to put it into the Constitution.  A president who decides that he can abolish courts and arrest judges who issue rulings he disagrees with is acting like a dictator not a president.  The real danger to Americans' freedom comes from politicians who refuse to take seriously their oath to uphold the Constitution not some secret cabal.

Conservatives And Evangelicals May Not Go Together Like A Horse And Carriage

At The Front Porch Republic, Darryl Hart has written a provocative post about evangelicalism and conservative politics.  I am going to hit a few highlights, but the whole article is worth reading.

Hart writes,

The shame here is that we are over three decades into the shot-gun marriage of conservatives and evangelicals and the latter have apparently not learned a thing from the Right. . . . Conservatives were often Christian and shared evangelical convictions about the importance of religion as the basis for culture. But Conservatives were never so biblicist about it.

The alliance between conservatives and evangelicals has always confused me.  Conservatives have seemingly used evangelicals as political cannon fodder but have never awarded their foot soldiers the spoils of battle.  The fact that evangelicals keep returning to help conservatives win elections indicates that they have learned little from their political allies.

Hart also points out that relying on the Bible as the source of one's political conservatism is problematic.  First, the Constitution is not in the Bible and the Bible is not in the Constitution.

For most Protestants, the Bible and the Constitution were in fundamental harmony, or at least Protestants were free to interpret the Bible according to the liberties protected by the Constitution. But anyone who has read the Pentateuch, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Constitution knows that the ideals of checks and balances, small government, and freedom of religion, are not readily found in Scripture.

Second, many conservatives don't accept the Bible as a source of authority; instead they appeal to natural law.

Instead, natural law was a way of appealing to a common set of truths derived from the creator of the universe upon which people could try to establish a peaceful, free, and orderly society. It was also the grounds for trusting neighbors who didn’t have Jesus in their hearts; the law written on their hearts would keep these God-deniers from most criminal activity and maybe even lead to genuinely neighborly acts.

Having differing sources of authority may cause evangelicals to see allies where none exist.  Further, being unwilling to accept natural law as authority may lead them to underestimate the many varieties of conservative.  More importantly, evangelicals seem to have no coherent idea of what to do if given the chance to govern.

[Evangelicals] sincerely believe they are conservative. But they have almost no understanding of the various shades of American conservatism and its different thinkers. They think they are conservative simply because they are Christian, never realizing that at least since the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, a lively debate has been going on about the Right and its borders. They think they are conservative because their Bible tells them they are conservative. Yet, they don’t know the world of American conservatism beyond restoring the Decalogue in public life.

Evangelicals allied with conservatives not because conservatives had the same priorities but because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."  This rationale is ironic.   Evangelicals insist that thought and action must be biblical. but they have based their political alliances on a maxim not found in the Bible.

A Messy Conspiracy Theory Thriller

I hate conspiracy theories.  See this reply on a Madville Times comment thread.  My distaste for theories like about Freemasons or the Illuminati notwithstanding,  I think we may be living in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy.

Earlier today, David Frum tweeted.

Why doesn't new Boehner bill just require Obama to resign in favor of a Republican before 2nd debt ceiling increase? Tidier.

Frum is both sardonic and correct.  Too much of this seems to be an effort to defeat Obama by manufacturing a constitutional crisis.  In fact, House Republicans be lining up a second crisis if the debt ceiling debacle fails to produce their desired result because the 14th Amendment will allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval.

In the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris reports

There is more and more talk, especially among House Democrats, that if no compromise can be reached on the debt ceiling by August 2nd, Obama should assert his power under the 14th Amendment to raise the ceiling himself by executive order. Bill Clinton helped pave the way for this resurgent interest in the “constitutional option” by saying, in an interview with Joe Conason last week, that if he were in Obama’s shoes he’d do so “without hesitation.

Philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes in the New York Review of Books

Some Republicans have declared that if the president does accept the constitutional argument, and acts without their consent, they will try to impeach him. That would take only a majority of the House, which the Republicans control. Impeachment would be a tragedy because, even though the Democratic Senate would certainly refuse to convict, the process would waste a huge amount of the president’s time at a crucial and difficult moment of our history. But surely even the Tea Party representatives can understand that they would make fools of themselves by declaring that a president is guilty of “a high crime or misdemeanor” whenever he interprets the Constitution in a way they believe wrong, particularly when a substantial number of the nation’s lawyers agree with him.

I'm less sanguine than Dworkin about what the Tea Party will "understand."  In short, I expect either default or impeachment.  The biggest conspiracy may be that Tea Partiers are secretly enjoying the chaos they are creating. 

Are Private Soldiers A Good Idea?

Wired Magazine reports that the United States State Department is hiring over 5,000 private military contractors, less charitably known as mercenaries, to work in Iraq.  Further, it seems as if the State Department is less than forthcoming about the details.

By January 2012, the State Department will do something it’s never done before: command a mercenary army the size of a heavy combat brigade. That’s the plan to provide security for its diplomats in Iraq once the U.S. military withdraws. And no one outside State knows anything more, as the department has gone to war with its independent government watchdog to keep its plan a secret.

I may be a bit paranoid, but the idea that a department of a government can set up its own military is disconcerting.  The fact that bureaucrats are keeping details secret is even worse.  Wired reports that such fears may have merit, especially given the history that private contractors have in Iraq.

This isn’t an idle concern or a typical bureaucratic tussle. The State Department has hired private security for its diplomats in war zones for the better part of a decade. Poor control of them caused one of the biggest debacles of the Iraq war: the September 2007 shooting incident in Nisour Square, where Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Now roughly double those guards from the forces on duty now, and you’ll understand the scope of what State is planning once the U.S. military withdraws from Iraq at the end of this year.

“They have no experience running a private army,” says Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who just returned from a weeks-long trip to Iraq. “I don’t think the State Department even has a good sense of what it’s taking on. The U.S. military is concerned about it as well.”

 Finally, I realize Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia illustrate that few political leaders believe that the Constitution's restrictions should be followed, but is this "brigade" pass Constitutional muster?