The President must give the Congress information on the State of the Union from time to time.
Article II, Clause 3, United States Constitution
I enjoy someone who can give a good speech. There is something spellbinding about a good orator, especially when they are saying something that needs to be said while looking those that badly need to hear the message directly in the eye in a public venue. A good orator uses rhythm and a well turned phrase to capture our imagination and make us believe – even if only for the merest moment – that hope exits and that change can occur.
But far better than a merely good orator is someone who can voice a goal in ringing tones and then actually back up the words with effort, action and dedication. Such a man was Martin Luther King, Jr. For all the beauty of his rhetoric, his real worth was in the long sweaty marches, the time spent in jail for his beliefs, his indomitable will that change not only should happen but could happen only if he and many others stayed focused and kept on marching. He not only had a dream, he forged a path to its success.
President Obama gave a pretty speech last night, but I increasingly lack faith in his willingness and ability to slog forward to the change he urges. The pied-piperish Senator Obama of the campaign trail has morphed into the politician-as-usual President Obama of Washington DC. There seems to be something about the atmosphere in our nation’s capital that turns dreamers into sour wine, leaders into turnips, and faith and belief into yesterday’s porridge.
The institution of the State of the Union speech has degenerated into farcical theater. As a theatrical piece, it is not worth the price of admission. If an entry fee were to be charged for the privilege of being able to watch it, no one in their right mind would show up in order to watch a bunch of overstuffed, self-important, do-nothings act childishly for over an hour. If Congress were to pass a law making viewing of the speech mandatory, I suspect that so many people would pay good money to be allowed the privilege of not watching it that the proceeds would make a significant dent in our national debt.
Harry Chapin used to perform a song entitled “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” which had alternate sappy endings and his brother Tom would always utter the following iconic (to Harry’s fans, at least) phrase when the various endings were inevitably trotted out: “Harry, it sucks.” Where was Tom Chapin last night when we needed him?
Sadly, Washington DC has become the nation’s largest single high school. Let’s be frank: in this most magnificent of urban settings exists the most sophomoric, egomaniacal, breast beating culture it is possible to imagine. Set the various monologues and the diatribes to music and you get Grease 2, a badly imagined and poorly acted musical with a theme of continuously lost opportunity. I would rather spend my money to see Grease 1 – I know how both turn out, but Grease 1 is actually entertaining at some level.
When I consider the problem, I must begin with our Constitution – a document that in 1787 was a masterpiece of ingenuity and daring and that Americans have come to revere and sanctify. Our founders not only dared to dream the Constitution, but they went through a hard fought political process to make it the law of the land. Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers understands that the process of the Constitution’s birth was far from easy. Nevertheless, it not only got written, it also got adopted.
Can anyone seriously imagine our present leadership achieving such a result? For that matter, can anyone seriously imagine our present leadership tying their own shoes without the assistance of their respective entourages?
Therein lies our problem. I revere the Constitution as much as the next person – as a venerable piece of our history which ought to be carefully preserved as a historical document for as long as there is a United States of America. However, it is long past time to recognize that the basic structure of government embodied in our Constitution no longer works in today’s world.
In case anyone has forgotten, it is no longer 1787. The founders’ dream of a citizen dominated House of Representatives that would have significant turnover due to the hardship of travel over then non-existent roads no longer holds true. Our founders felt that a two year term was probably about all that a civic minded legislator would want to serve given the difficulty of travel and the consequences of lengthy absences from family and friends. The thrust of the Federalist Paper‘s arguments over the proposed term of a House member was whether the two years was too long as opposed to the then-standard one year term. This was an area where the founders simply were unable to anticipate a future such as the one in which we currently live. In an age of interstate highways, on-demand air travel, instantaneous communications and an interminable federal elections process, a two year term means only that House members are constantly in election mode, constantly engaged in raising money for re-election purposes, and, consequently, constantly thumping their respective chests in order to stand out from among the crowd. In short, their first priority is not your job problem or my job problem, but is, instead, their own job problem.
The Senate was seen by our founders as a place for the aristocracy to ensure that the House didn’t engage in mob rule. It was created at a time when few Americans had a college education, much less what one would, today, call a high school education. Our founders were self-acknowledged elitists who created an upper legislative chamber – the Senate -to ameliorate the wilder and brasher ideas of the mob. In a country where societal-wide communication is available at the push of a mouse button, the capacity of the upper chamber to serve as a leavening agent has been transformed into a mere recipe for nauseating delay and constant inaction. How else can one explain a chamber that feels itself unable to act despite the fact that the majority party controls an overwhelming 59% of the seats?
Of our three main branches of government, Congress is the most broken. If the President needs to be replaced, we can do so by means of the electoral process; we cannot toss out the entire Congress at any single moment in time. The Supreme Court cannot be changed quickly, but there is some merit to consistency in the judicial process – even though it pains me greatly to say so when I consider the lack of ability and empathy shown by so many members of the present Court. But the Court, too, can and will be changed as each new President has an opportunity to make new appointments. Congress, however, just sits like a cancer on Washington DC, with each new member as fully dedicated to keeping his or her job as the old member he or she replaced. Congress is too big, too lobbied, too useless, too unproductive.
In short, the dream of a government of checks and balances which the Constitution envisages has become, instead, a reality of unrestrained sophistry, self-serving goals, and decisions motivated by pleasing the ever-present and constantly spending special interests rather than decisions taken for the good of the general public. The particular form of representative government created by the founders in a time of difficult travel and poor communications has outlived its usefulness and has become, instead, an impediment to good governance.
It is long past time for us to call for a new constitutional convention and to create a form of government for the present. To those who revere the present document, I remind you that when our constitution was created it was deemed by all as a boldly new and daring initiative. Our founders dared to dream and to fight for that dream. If they could still speak to us, I strongly suspect that they would tell us that nothing is forever and that when the trappings of government become inimical to the public good, one must change the form of government. Why do I assume so? Because that is exactly what they did in their place and time and, in the fullness of their success and daring, they became known as “founders” instead of being remembered as the ordinary citizens they were when they began the process.
I suspect that mere amendment of portions of the existing Constitution will be insufficient. It is time to re-think our entire governmental structure given the present communications tools we possess. It is time to amend the existing Constitution by means of a wholesale replacement thereof with a new document approved by means of the amending process set forth in the present document. Our founders thought about the need for periodic amendments and provided us with a methodology for doing so. In creating a wholesale replacement, we need only follow the genius of our founders as embodied in the existing document.
We don’t need to be afraid of such a process as it would involve significant debate and state-by-state approval. To those would would argue that no one can presently be identified as someone with the necessary stature to lead this effort, I would say that I have sufficient faith in the American people to know that leadership will rise to the top in the course of the process. It won’t come from Washington DC where leadership is a lost art, but it will come from among the many talented individual Americans who will be willing to step up and be counted. To those who would say that such a process would be far too risky for our democracy, I would ask “when did America decide not to dream?”
It is time for a change. Given the present configuration of our government, things simply do suck. It doesn’t have to be that way. All we have to do is dream the dream, get off our collective duffs and join the march. This time the march should be away from Washington and all of the collective inefficiency, uselessness and depravity that it represents.
