The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Friday, January 25, 2013

The Democrats aren’t democrats, either

What Killed Filibuster Reform?

Yes, this is an explanation that doesn’t explain, since it leaves us all wondering why the house doesn’t have a filibuster.

It isn’t really about the power-lust of individual senators.

It’s about every Tom and Dick in Party A who can’t stand the thought that when Harry of Party B has a majority he would almost certainly do something Tom and Dick don’t like.

Why, that would be just utterly unendurable.

And vice versa.

And for the same reason neither party will free even the federal government, let alone the states, from the arbitrary and fraudulent constitutional absolutism of the Supreme Court.

Though it scares the shit out of both parties I personally would be willing to see America try the experiment of democracy.

I think we would find out that the world would not end and both parties would behave a lot more responsibly and carefully than the nervous Nellies now say they fear.

Just as they do in every European country where functional if not formal unicameralism dominates and no court obstructs, and yet the competing major parties are not constantly plunging back and forth, all the time, doing and undoing the same things again and again just as rapidly as they rotate in office.

And I particularly resent that the Supremes are such chronic liars and both parties lie, also, about what they want the court to do.

The conservatives claim to want them to enforce the constitution as written and as meant by those who adopted it and its various amendments, but they actually want the court to pretend the constitution was written by Herbert Spencer, as Holmes said.

The liberals frankly claim they want the court to ignore original intent and enforce instead what’s required by contemporary society and its values, but what they really want is for the court to enforce the constitution they, the liberals, wish we had rather than the one we actually have.

And the courts since the beginning of the 20th Century have indulged both of these illegitimacies, clothing themselves with the totally arbitrary and unconstitutional power to re-write the constitution however they like.

They and what they do are every bit as much a disgrace to America as not just the filibuster but the very existence of the senate.

And no one will change that.

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