Guardrails
They're just words on a piece of paper.
Americans put a lot of faith in their institutions: in particular, in the checks-and-balances we learn about (or should) in middle-school civics classes. Congress holds the pursestrings and creates the laws; the president is the chief magistrate, who will see that the laws are faithfully executed; and the judiciary decides whether the Congress, or the Executive, has overstepped constitutional boundaries. This tripartite system was an incredible innovation, born of a distrust of government and an acknowledgement that governments are both necessary and proper: each branch watches the others, providing guardrails that prevent any one branch from the excesses of, say, the British Crown of the eighteenth century.
Or so we all thought. It turns out, the guardrails are fragile and will hold only as well and as long as the people holding them. In other words: if you can’t trust the people charged with policing the guardrails to provide even minimal oversight, do not expect things to magically stay together. Do not, in fact, expect anything.
We have entered an upside-down world beyond Alice’s looking-glass (and far beyond Lewis Carrol’s imagination, to say nothing of his wit). Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are in charge. There is no need to shut down the government: fiscal crisis was averted, and now an unelected and unaccountable apparatchik has taken a meat axe to government ; an edifice 250 years in the making is disassembled in mere weeks. The carnage will be as long-lasting as it is severe: it will take generations, again, to rebuild the institutions that made the United States the envy of the world.
Those institutions, after all, are not the revered “free market” so praised by those whose idea of an economics textbook is a fourth-rate novel by a third-rate philosopher. Now that the Deep State™ has been slayed, we can settle into our Ayn Rand-inspired dystopia. FDA standards for drug trials and approvals were the gold standard for the world, which marches on without us; science is frowned on at NIH; vaccines are shunned by HHS.
The Department of Education — whose purpose is to provide funding, not impose curriculum — is to be shuttered. The Surgeon-General nominee did not complete her medical training and holds no medical license; her only qualification for the job seems to be an animosity towards vaccines, prescription drugs, and pharmaceutical cures. Big Pharma is allied with the Deep State! (Pharmaceuticals bad, sure; but she hasn't explained how her vitamins get onto store shelves.)
The Department of Justice is in shambles. Homeland Security (whose very name has always given me a shudder) has all but shut down its cybersecurity operations in order to “reinforce” the southern border against an imaginary invading horde. Citizens and legal residents are being swept up off the streets and disappeared to foreign prisons, with no due process in sight.
And that chief magistrate, sworn to uphold the laws? He says he has no idea whether he is obliged to uphold the Constitution. It’s a simple question, with only one correct answer. “I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer,” doesn’t pass the laugh test — but nobody is laughing.
Guardrails are only as good as the people sworn to implement them. Congress can turn off the money; the courts can issue orders. So far the legislature has failed miserably, and the judiciary is hobbled by a self-inflicted wound. And the executive — which knows full well the extent of its overreach — gives no indication that it will stop. The schoolyard mentality is evident: “You and what army?”
The Constitution is just words on paper. It requires people of good faith and good will — of differing ideas and ideologies, but still united in common purpose — to give it breath, and life, and meaning. When one branch of government abandons even a pretense of good faith, the others need to step up their game. And the people — who, in our system, hold the power (words on paper, again) — have to take notice, and stay angry. It’s a long way to the midterm elections: Keep up the pressure, or the guardrails will be nothing but a quaint memory.