“It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.” James Madison, often referred to as “The Father of the Constitution”
It’s not often we get to witness a major historic event live, but the Kavanaugh hearings certainly qualify. I don’t recall being so emotionally moved and feeling I viewed something that will be long remembered since I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV when I was a little kid. I will always view both events as assassinations, but the Kavanaugh hearings slowed the bullet down to a crawl so that we could all witness in stop action vividness and instant replay the blood and bone hit the cameras. I never thought I’d ever agree with Lindsey Graham, but I’d have to call the whole scene a dehumanizing display. The thing Graham conveniently forgot was that Republicans were every bit as guilty as the Democrats, but a good case can be made the Democrats constructed the original bomb.
What we just witnessed in the Kavanaugh confirmation was a knockdown, drag-out bloody fight on the level of a brutal heavyweight championship. Drawing that comparison further, I recall a line by Jackie Gleason in “Requiem for a Heavyweight” when someone called boxing a sport.
“Sport?” Gleason railed. “If the ceilings were high enough, they’d hold these things in sewers.” This is where the Kavanaugh process went, and it will take many flushes to remove the stench. Undigested remnants could very well clog democracy’s pipes for decades. Both sides started raging fires. The damage is mutual and continuing.
It’s critical to understanding our peril if we study the great difficulty we’ve had exporting democratic principles to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The tribalism in these countries just presents far too many formidable barriers to cooperative coexistence that democracy requires. Like a fire needs oxygen, functional democracy requires a sense of common respect and genuine compassion for others we seem to be losing like air from a punctured tire tube.
To be clearer, we’re here in Kavanaugh’s wake because of “the nuclear option.” I don’t want to delve deeply into terms like “cloture” but think a mini political science lesson might be in order.
Our founding fathers had many faults, but no one should doubt that these leaders possessed an acute sense of the human condition and all the problems it brings. A most important Constitutional principle is a balance of power, often called “checks and balances” that made it all but impossible for any one person or group to control the government when significant opposition existed. Perhaps the most commonly held belief by our founding fathers was one of instinctive distrust for any government, including our own.
While not an original or formal part of our Constitution, until recent times the Senate had used a rule that required 3/5ths of duly sworn senators to override the threat of filibuster, a parliamentary procedure to block passing a given item in the Senate, what is essentially a protection of minority rights. While not universally required for all Senate business, approval of presidential nominations once fell under this rule as did passing many new Senate bills. What this meant was that it took more than a simple majority to conduct much business. The requirement of more than a majority was intended to assure broad acceptance of new policy or an appointment to office.
Unfortunately, when Democrat Harry Reid employed the “nuclear option” that changed cloture rules to push through Obama era appointments blocked by Senate Republicans in 2013, Pandora’s Box opened and the practice flashed right back to haunt the people who first pulled the trigger. This time the stakes were even higher, two Supreme Court nominations that were, essentially, shoved down the opposition’s throat.
If one views this as fine and well, just a “we win and you lose” proposition then all’s well in America. The problems with this thinking and high stakes confrontation is what’s created: toxic emotional turmoil and rabid dissension just as dangerous to the body politic as nuclear waste is to human life, a poison that unravels the fabric of our democracy and acceptance for it. To me the vicious battle we all just endured makes no sense regardless of viewpoint. Sure, it was great theatre, but at what price?
One of the invisible elephants in the room with Kavanaugh was a win at all costs desire to overturn Roe v. Wade with the hope of ending abortion in the United States. While the ruling could be overturned, the actual reality is that abortion will continue as it always has because we simply can’t force people to comply with moral mandates to control just about any issue that takes place behind closed doors. To gain reasonable compliance, people have to believe rules and laws are fair and just, and we now have about 50 percent of our country who won’t buy what the Supreme Court says one way or another, a very serious problem. Look this up under “Prohibition” that some historians say actually increased drinking and certainly didn’t eliminate it. As a country, we’re very slow learners.
And then we have the feminist counterpunch, just as ineffective at changing aberrant male behavior as is the appointment of a man who lied so many times Chicken Little should have been called as a character witness. Will sacrificing Dr. Ford on the altar of public opinion prevent sexual assault or even encourage more victims to step forward? It would seem the lesson here is that even the most credible witness will be attacked, condemned and mocked, not by just the average person, but also the President of the United States.
Let’s be clear here. The Supreme Court is a very powerful entity able to create massive change in our society, but it is also very limited in many areas, and so is our government by design. Almost overnight the court could end affirmative action, eliminate or restrict the use of capital punishment, invalidate of affirm many state and federal laws, but there is no way it will ever be able to control individual behavior on a lot of very personal matters.
What makes sense? For my two cents, I think we need to focus more on the document we keep fighting around, the Constitution, and consider amendments that would create more harmony and less acrimony. Perhaps we need an amendment that would lock in the 60-vote Senate requirement and elevate it beyond a simple rule that can be discarded for political convenience and the desire to be reelected. Such an action would empower people in the center of issues and not at its fringes and promote both sides to seek laws and appointments that the other side won’t attack as if the Hounds of Hell clawed at our doorstep.