The Means We Have to Take Back Our Constitutional Democracy

There's been some silence here for a while.  And that's been deliberate.  

It's hard to write about politics and about what's going on while watching the constitutional democracy that our founding fathers sacrificed to build, and patiently promoted, waiting until people were able to see the value of a better way of doing something, taking some risks, with bold moves that they didn't know would be accepted or rejected, disintegrate along with the remnants of our free press, liberty of conscience, religious freedom and above all, the high value of human existence that created all of this in the first place.  

Over the Labor Day weekend, and since, there were more protests, as it seems the crowds taking to the street are getting more vocal, louder, and more specific in what they are protesting against.  The media takes note of them, not giving them anywhere near the kind of coverage protests used to get when they were directed against the Vietnam War, but then, that was a cause that our media, most of them, supported.  Few of those who work in the media now could pass an eighth grade constitution test.  And I know, because that's a class I taught for years, to hundreds of students.  

Constitutional Means to Make a Change

The founders left us with just a few possible means to make a change in government between elections which were designed to be the free exercise of the will of the people.  They didn't really account for the fact that the level of trust and integrigy that was required for the electorate to make good decisions when it came to choosing the nation's political leadership would ever be undermined by enough ignorance and corruption to make a bad choice.  

But that's what's happened.  

The place where such change is most difficult to make is the place where, in our present situation, it is needed the most.  The Supreme Court is at the root of the problem.  There's been enough bribe money and influence distrubuted to get enough justices, those who were appointed because they showed some kind of moral or ethical weakness, or a lack of integrity and trustworthiness, to rule in favor of the ability of billionaires and billion-dollar profiteering corporations to corrupt the electoral process by taking all of the restrictions off campaign contribution amounts.  The ruling, called the "Citizens United" case, has made it possible for members of the House and Senate, members of the Supreme Court, and just about anyone else in electoral politics, to be bought by big money without accountability. 

Frankly, I don't have to prove any specific claims here.  It's so visible, the evidence is in what these justices have done, and what the politicians who were elected by big money are doing in exchange for the sale of their integrity and character, that their words and deeds are full of evidence of the way they're poisoning our country.  

We, the people, are left with a very narrow, virtually impossible Constitutional way to make the kind of changes in government that are necessary to preserve constitutional democracy in America now.  What we actually have at our disposal is the pathway to impeachment and removal from office, of six incompetent Supreme Court justices along with a President, Vice-President, House Speaker and President Pro-Tempore of the Senate.  And we're pretty convinced, given the partisan alignment of Congress, and the unwillingness of the majority party to act with integrity and honesty, that this is an impossible pathway.  

It is also not very likely that the 25th Amendment can be used to get Trump out of the White House, though if anyone actually wanted to make a legal case, based on evidence for doing so, they'd have enough to remove him a dozen different times.  

Protests, marches, the voices of literally hundreds of thousands of marching citizens in the streets, is not even making a blip on the radar inside the GOP.  There's a good reason for that.  Nothing ever comes of it.  There are marches, speeches, protests, crowds and turnouts that are impressive in their size and scope, but in and of themselves, aside from the rhetoric, and creating awareness of the problem, they have had zero effect in moving the needle toward a reasonable conviction of the President, six justices, most of the cabinet and the congressional leadership, who are grossly incompetent in their leadership of the United States.  

At the end of the day, heading home, the sun comes up the next morning, and there's no follow up.  It's pretty clear that the kind of public pressure needed to change votes in Congress, wake some Republicans up to reality and get this President out of the White House, leaving enough time left to either stop the progression of the destruction of American democracy or start putting it back together, is not resulting from the protests.  

So what really is the point, if that's not it? 

Figuring Something Out

I've just started to figure out that many of the difficulties Democrats have had during times when we've been the ones in power are of our own doing.  We make things harder for ourselves by not taking the party line like the GOP does, no compromise, this is it.  I realized this when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House following the 2020 election.  We had the chance, during that two year stretch, to get a lot of things done, including getting billionaire money out of elections once for all with the overturning of Citizens United.  

And no, we did not have a supportive majority on the court.  But the amendment of the Judiciary act, bumping up the number of Supreme Court Justices could have been an  "in your face" proposition.  A risky but bold move to break the filibuster, and pack the court, would have changed everything on this side of 2024.  Not only would we have been able to see Citizens United overturned, and strict rules placed on campaign finance, but we could have saved Roe.  And an added benefit would have been the ability of the court to clear out all of the blockades Trump was putting up regarding his own indictments and sent him to prison, disqualified from ever running for office again.  

It wasn't Republican opposition that stopped all of that from happening.  It came from within our own party.  

We can't keep doing business this way.  What we do now must either count toward restoring Democracy, and stopping Trump, or we will never have another opportunity, even as we have squandered so many.  We can't squander this one.  Individual political careers are secondary to the restoration of American Constitutional democracy under a renewed Democratic party.  The midterm election in 2026 is just a start.