stone savage

zeitgeist: Fall, 2005
ortgeist : U.S. political atmosphere post Hurricane Katrina

“I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.” - Benjamin Desrali

When the checks and balances in our Constitution are negated by the sway of a majority political party, we find ourselves in very dangerous territory. In such circumstances the only hope we have to be free of oppression is to rely upon the good ethics, high morals, and humble care-taking of our governmental leaders. We put our faith in them to “do the right thing” for all who will be effected. But, what happens when the “right” thing is not a matter of enlightened decision, but is born instead out of political loyalty?

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At what point do we sit back and begin to ponder how exactly it is that we’ve come to this cross-roads? The very possibility we’re facing in our federal government right now is something our form of government was specifically designed to prevent.

Our Senate is held by a majority of a single party. Our House is held by a majority of a single party. The Office of the President is held by the same party as holds majority in both the House and the Senate. The only portion of our federal system of checks and balances that is left is our federal judiciary - the U.S. Supreme Court.

The politics of a judge should be irrespective of how that judge rules on matters of law. The work of splitting hairs in order to find justification for an argument is the work of lawyers. The work of a judge is to impartially interpret the law.

Our current Court is made of 4 liberals (Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer), two conservative-centrists (O’Connor and Kennedy), and three conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts). With the retirement of Justice O’Connor and with the possible confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito - the makeup of the Court becomes one of 4 liberals and 5 conservatives.

So, with this makeup we have total federal devotion to a political party. We already know that O’connor and Kennedy are the two Justices who have voted irrespective of their political leanings - with Kennedy doing so only rarely. This means the system of checks and balances, with the appointment of such a strongly conservative judge as Atilo, is null and void.

Is that a problem? No, it is not a de facto problem. It only becomes one when the political party in question puts forth policies that are in the interest of the party rather than in the interest of the people to whom they are supposed to answer.

A stage is being set, somewhat carelessly, to place the principles that founded this country into a territory of negation. How did it come to this?

It is my belief that we began setting this stage with the Seventeenth Amendment. Huh? What’s that? Does anyone even really know?

Article 1, Section 3 of the United States Constitution states:

“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”

Well that doesn’t seem all that out of keeping with what we know about Senators unless we focus in on the short little apposative “chosen by the Legislature thereof". We popularly elect our Senators, they’re not appointed by individual State Legislatures. One has to wonder why our founders chose to have our Senators appointed by State Legislatures - the answer is in what they hoped would be achieved by that process. They hoped to give States a direct say in the affairs of federal government, which ties in with the hope of getting each State to commit to the Constitution, as well as keeping them free of regional pressures of the populace. So why change it? When did it change?

It changed in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment:

“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time. More than one State had left open Senate seats, for years on end, due to political division in the Legislatures. Bribery as well as questionable regulations surrounding appointments obscured the proper appointment of Senators as well. While a movement had long been in the making to modify the way our Senators came to office, the major public proponents of the measure were none other than the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, and the infamous prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial, William Jennings Bryan (who was the Secretary of State at the time). Where Hearst dogged the Senate in publication after publication of a series of articles later to be termed “The Treason of the Senate", Bryant publically campaigned for the amendment. The pro-change people believed it “would end the dominance of party ‘bosses’ and the state ‘machines,’ stamp out the undue influence of special interests in the Senate, make it more responsive to the will of the people, and of course, eliminate, or greatly reduce, the execrable practice of spending large sums of money to get elected.”

That argument seems rather weak by today’s standards, doesn’t it? Can anyone honestly say that our current method of electing Senators has solved those problems? But, what is worse, is what we lost by the change. What we lost is the ability to keep the Senate free of the pressures of the populace. Why is that so important? It’s important because our Founders were serious about the idea of checks and balances.

State Legislators are seated by popular election. It is their responsibility to appoint federal Senators, or else they end up having no say in the Senate on matters affecting their State or their populace. Whilst there is certainly room for all manner of difficulty in that method - the one danger it avoids is having State Rights trumped by a populace with no direct interest in a given State’s interests.

With that one simple change we set the stage for the possibility that our government would one day be at a place where nationalized politics mattered more than the interest of the State or the interest of the individual. This was the very thing our Founders attempted to avoid.

What happens when there is only a single-minded force behind the federal government? It can allow the Supreme Court to avoid appropriately declaring unconstitutional a federal law passed by our Congress and signed into law by our President. What happens is that we set the stage for an absolute power - and we all knows that absolute power corrupts absolutely. America, the land of freedom, falls into the potential hands of tyrranical rule where the rights of the individual are trumped by the interests of politics.

When the only way for individual rights to be protected against “the bonds of tyranny” falls into the hands of the people because our entire system of government failed to do it for them - there is only one course of action that can be taken. I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to The Second American Revolution… although I’d be interested in seeing how the new Declaration of Independence might read.

I’m not opposed to the appointment of Judge Atilo because of his politics. He seems very qualified for his position. I am concerned about his appointment because the political reach of the few has become the noose for the many.

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