How To Unravel
The post intended for midweek went out early. The day after a bombshell like yesterday’s hearing of the January 6th committee investigation, that bombshell should be the main topic on any American’s mind. It certainly has attention around the world. Cassidy Hutchinson’s courage this week has provided essential, gut-wrenching testimony.
The U.S. Constitution is magnificent. It provides the framework for a system of government that is like the political version of extremely well designed software. It has mechanisms for rebalancing itself when it gets out of balance. It has fallbacks and error handling routines. The UK where I live may be regarded as the mother country to the USA, but government in the UK evolved rather than being designed. The UK doesn’t have such extensive mechanisms for handling things that go awry.
Like software, no governmental system is perfect, not even one that was brilliantly designed.
Americans have blundered into a whopper of a situation that doesn’t have enough built-in correction routines. The J6 committee is laying out the worst of how that gap was exploited by the previous Administration. It is laying out how the gap is still being exploited.
We have an Amendment that says people who swear an oath to defend our Constitution and then strive to wreck it are ineligible to hold elected office. We haven’t applied it yet in this instance, but it’s clear that a number of people have amply earned to have it applied to them.
What we don’t have is any clear way to unravel the harm they have done. There is legislation they shouldn’t have been in a position to block or to ram through, but they did. There are appointments that may have been illegitimate. There are agencies that have been distorted or shut or bloated. So far it looks like we cannot unravel anything like that. We have to step through it, one item at a time, and mend the damage where we can. What to do about any questionable lifetime appointments (I’m not thinking only of Justices, although some of them are on my mind) is especially thorny.
All of this has to be done while dismantling of our system of government is still underway, being done by people who were put in place to do it by a regime that looks more corrupt every time we turn over another rock.
I won’t try to write any more here this week. On Tuesday, every American got a lot to think about, especially those of us who want to reinstate and reinforce the rule of law.
So let’s think.