It’s not the five failed prime ministers since 2016 and their incompetent sidekicks.
It’s Us.
We tolerate a sclerotic, antiquated democratic system allowing people you wouldn’t trust with your wallet or to babysit your children to rise through deceit and thrive through failure.
British politicians lied occasionally in the past; now lying was frequent and shameless. Nothing worked.
The “bad eggs” used to resign; now they were promoted.
They created problems but rarely solved them.
I was watching some on-air discussion about the House the other night and the question was asked, doesn’t this bother the men and women in the House?
The answer was, for the most part, the men and women who have brought about the current State of Affairs had no interest in governing.
They wanted exposure.
They wanted media time.
They wanted money.
For THEMSELVES!
Service to their country?
Don’t waste their time.
I was struck when one commentator said the Republican’s don’t like the leadership role where they have to produce, they would rather be the ones who get to just complain.
I don’t know what to say but we are putting up with this.
As Obi-Wan said, “Who’s the more foolish; the fool, or the fool who follows him?”
Congress? You expect baseline dysfunction but this is something special …
The joke used to be that if PRO is the opposite of CON, what is the opposite of progress?
Now Congress is the joke.
I have tried and I have wanted to keep politics out of these essays as it wasn’t what I wanted to do but the words in the Opinion Piece, The People Who Broke the House by Michelle Cottle, a domestic correspondent for Opinion and a host of “Matter of Opinion” were to good to pass up.
Ms. Cottle wrote: When it comes to Congress, Americans have come to expect a certain baseline of dysfunction. But I think most of us can agree that the current House Republican majority is something special.
If alive today, I can hear the authors of the Federalist Papers talking back and forth and Alexander Hamilton saying to John Jay and James Madison saying, “What do you think of the House of Representatives?”
Mr. Madison would answer, “I think it’s a good idea. We should get one!“
On the other hand, if they wanted a Government that was representative of the Country, they did a great job setting the current one up.
take ball and go home? nope! won’t bother to show up and play in the game
A few years ago I met up with a friend of mine who had been a basketball coach of a High School team.
He had left coaching since we had last seen each other and I asked if he missed it.
He thought about it.
Then he said, nope, didn’t miss it one bit.
He said it was all different lately.
He said he could handle the having to talk to kids into coming out for the team.
He said he could handle the not knowing what kind of team he might have at the start of the season.
He said he could handle the kids who thought they were stars.
He said he could handle the kids who argued about practice and playing time.
He said he could handle the kids who argued about having to practice.
He said he could handle the kids who wouldn’t show up for practice.
He said he got to used to the idea that he never really knew who might show up at practice.
But, he said, that he never even knew what kind of team he would have at game time, that he never even knew who might show up for a game, that was the thing he could not get used to.
Forget about getting mad and taking their ball and going home.
These kids wouldn’t bother to show up and play in the game.
I was thinking about that and the changes in High School sports today.
I was thinking about that but what it made me think about was the United States House of Representatives.
There are a lot of things going on in the world today and the House has voluntarily removed themselves from the equation.
In an Opinion Essay in the New York Times, Newt Gingrich Called Them ‘Cannibals.’ Now They Decide Who Gets to Be Speaker of the House, by Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies the rise of right-wing media and the Republican Party, Ms. Hemmer wrote about the 1995 Government shutdown that, “A nonfunctioning government suited them just fine; after all, wasn’t that the end goal of their antigovernment politics?”
A nonfunctioning government seems to be what we gots.
A nonfunctioning government that suits some members of the House of Representatives just fine.
Without a Speaker that house cannot function.
A nonfunctioning house that suits some members of the House of Representatives just fine.
How can you have Government when members of a branch of the Government wants to sit this one out?
They aren’t going to take their ball and go home.
They aren’t even going to show up for the game.
One such Representative said he did not plan to vote for the Republican’s choice for Speaker as the process was going to fast!
According to Walter Lord, author of the famous A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic that passengers stood on the deck of the sinking ship and called out to people in the lifeboats to make sure they got a pass as they would not be allowed back on board without a pass.
Some of the awfulness of the story of the Titanic is how many of the stories that are true.
For example, it is true that within 10 minutes of hitting the iceberg, the feller who oversaw the design and building of the ship figured out what happened and told Captain Smith that if lucky, they had about 2 hours before the ship went down.
Less time than it takes to watch that block buster James Cameron movie.
Two hours to fill what lifeboats they had.
Two hours to get what people they could off the ship.
But people stood on the deck and advised folks in the lifeboats they better get a pass.
They better get a pass because when this was all over, they couldn’t get back on the ship without a pass.
I recently saw a headline that it was time to bring back Shop Class and Home Ec so that kids learned some basic life skills, like making a scrambled egg or changing a light bulb, before they left school.
Chief Justice Marshall has made his decision, now … let him enforce it
This is based on a famous quote of President Andrew Jackson when he reportedly said in response to Supreme Court case, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.“
That statement has been much on my mind of late as I think of another former President who is tangled up in the Courts and there is lots of discussion on whether or not he will comply with any number of Court orders and rulings or openly defy any number of Court orders and force the Court to enforce their orders and rulings.
The case in question was Worcester v. Georgia, which according to Wikipedia, was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the Georgia criminal statute that prohibited non-Native Americans from being present on Native American lands without a license from the state was unconstitutional.
In other words, the Supreme Court recognized the right of Native American’s claim and own their tribal lands and that States had no right to extend their laws over tribal lands.
That’s when President Jackson said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.“
As a student of US History, but without a much focus on the Andrew Jackson era (except to note that I had one Professor who said again and again the the election of Andrew Jackson was the last act of the American Revolution and that General Jackson as President would have horrified most of the founding fathers), I always accepted the statement as fact.
Like many famous things that famous people said, further research comes down on the side that Mr. Jackson never said such a thing.
Mr. Greely writes about the decision in Worcester v. Georgia that , “The attorneys for the missionaries sought to have this judgment enforced, but could not. General Jackson was President, and would do nothing of the sort. Well : John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it, was his commentary on the matter.“
First off, I have always read the quote as kind a declaration of war by Mr. Jackson.
Somewhere along in the course of my Education, I am sure I saw a scene in a movie or something where Mr. Jackson stands behind his desk and slams the desk with fist and says JOHN MARSHALL HAS MADE DECISON … NOW … LET HIM TRY TO ENFORCE IT!.
The last words more or less hissed out, daring Mr. Chief Justice Marshall to try and enforce, over Mr. Jackson’s dead body, the Courts ruling.
I have always thought of it as a statement of defiance.
Asserting the power of the President as head of the armed forces, in a showdown over the Supreme Court.
Reading the account of the scene in the book, The American Conflict, I now see that what happened was the Missionaries who got the Lawyers who represented the Native Americans were frustrated.
They had won their case.
They had defended the cause of the Native American States.
They had the Supreme Court on their side.
And the State of Georgia said, “So What?”
Frustrated and seeking support the Missionaries went to the President and asked for help and tossed this hot potato into the lap of General Jackson.
And what did he say?
Hey, this is not my circus.
This is not my problem.
John Marshall made this decision, let him enforce it, not me.
And General Jackson tossed the potato right back.
Not defying the Court and its ruling but, while accepting the ruling of the Court, but distancing himself from the whole mess as best and as fast as he could.
In my mind, the meaning to US History of this quote is 180 degrees from what I thought yesterday.
Mr. Greely citation for the scene and the quote reads, “I am indebted for this fact to the late Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, who was in Washington as a member of Congress when the decision was rendered.”
So here the goofy part.
The quote was not reported until this book came out.
Their is no record at the time of the case that General Jackson ever said it.
And there is no other record if this quote that does not, in the end, come down to this book as the point of origin of the quote.
Best guess, General Jackson never said it.
According to Wikipedia, General Jackson did say, “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
Jackson had “sportively” suggested calling on the Massachusetts state militia to enforce the order if the Supreme Court requested he intervene but the Court did not ask federal marshals to carry out the decision. Worcester thus imposed no obligations on Jackson; there was nothing for him to enforce.
Now here is the point.
General Jackson had no standing on the matter.
It was a State issue, not a Federal one and the Court DID not ask the President to get involved.
Had he said, “Let him enforce it,” General Jackson would have been correct.
General Jackson did NOT defy the Court and use of this quote to illustrate the notion that a US President set out TO defy the Court is incorrect.
Words down through history.
Reminds me of the line from the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
checks, balances remember don’t write a check your butt cannot cash
Weighing in on the speakership race, Joe Biden expressed concern over the “dysfunction” in the House and emphasized the importance of continuing funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.
Asked for his advice to the next House speaker, Biden laughed and said: “That’s above my pay grade.”
“The ability for one person to vacate the speaker of the House will keep a chokehold on this body through 2024,” the Republican Main Street caucus, representing the centrist House Republicans, said in a statement. “Personal politics should never again be used to trump the will of 96% of House conservatives. Any candidate for speaker must explain to us how what happened on Tuesday will never happen again.”
In the movie, Yank at Oxford, a 1938 comedy-drama film directed by Jack Conway and starring Robert Taylor, the Yank says to his advisor he would like to study American History.
His Advisor replies, “My goodness, we have little to offer in this area to occupy it for 3 years.”
I never really considered that in my lifetime, American History would have an end date to punctuate the listing as a field.
United States of America: 1776 – 2023.
checks, balances remember don’t write a check your butt cannot cash
No Haiku For You 