State of the Union

I'm sure we're all looking forward to Our President's State of the Union address, wondering how he'll manage to put a positive spin on recent events, and ready to count how many standing ovations he gets from the Republican side of the aisle.  They'll do their best to look enthusiastic, I suppose, despite the damage he's done to their party — not to mention their country.

I confess that the shutdown lasted twice as long as I expected: it turned out that McConnell was more adroit at ducking the blame than anticipated.  Eventually, though, there were enough pointing fingers to poke him into action.  Plutocratic fingers, of course, are especially pointy — and McConnell's first and foremost goal as Leader has been to keep the dark money flowing (and dark.)  It's not unreasonable to suspect that some of those extra-pointy fingers started poking pretty hard.

I won't presume to predict what will happen when the temporary funding bill expires.  Will the Congressional conference committee toss Our President enough crumbs to save a smidgen of face?  Will Tr*mp decide a "state of emergency" will shore up his base and distract attention from the Mueller inquiry?  Will some brand new craziness emerge over the next three weeks?

I don't know about the first two options, but number three seems like a safe bet. The state of the union, as I'm sure you've noticed, is wack.

The Creep

No, not that creep — albeit the creep you're thinking of may be poised to accelerate the creep I'm thinking of: the creeping accretion of presidential power.

Every American child learns about the three branches of government, and the idea of "checks and balances."  Formulated by the Founders as a check on tyranny, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.  What they failed to foresee was the advent of the professional politician, and how that development would throw their plan for checks and balances into disarray.

Politicians hoping to win reelection do their best to avoid any action that might stir controversy: they much prefer to leave such actions to the President.  The last time Congress used its constitutional power to declare war was in 1941, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and all our current conflicts – in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – are unconvincingly based on the Authorization of Military Force against al-Qaeda, enacted in response to the 9/11 attacks.

 Congress also allows the President to act without its approval in cases of national emergency, but national emergency has never been well-defined.  Until now, presidents have used it primarily to impose economic sanctions on specific governments and individuals — actions Congress could have initiated on its own had it been so inclined.  In those instances, Congressional inaction may have been motivated more by laziness than by political peril, but still served to accelerate the creep of authority from the Legislature to the Executive.

Currently, Our President is very likely to use his emergency powers to build his wall, diverting the needed funds from Army Corps of Engineers projects currently budgeted to help victims of recent hurricanes and wildfires.  Most congressional Republicans seem ready to allow it, even though doing so would mean ceding fiscal authority to the executive — thereby compromising the single most important legislative check on executive power and further eroding what remains of our putative democracy.

Congress does have the authority to stop it, under the National Emergency Act of 1976; but that would entail Mitch McConnell, that most professional of professional politicians, letting a challenge reach the floor of the Senate.  He won't.

And the creep goes on.

The Theology of Health Care

Back in the 16th century, when European merchants were energetically inventing capitalism, John Calvin arrived to tell them they could forget all that stuff about camels passing through the eyes of needles. God, he assured them, rewards His favorites in this life as well as the next, so their wealth was a sure sign they were saved. It followed that the poor, being congenital sinners, were not deserving of any consideration at all.

The twenty-first century version of Calvinism is called "Meritocracy." Meritocrats assume that those who prosper have earned their wealth by being better than the rest: their success is the fruit of their personal "genius" and "grit."  They claim to "make their own luck," and discount the importance of institutional barriers faced by others — like inequality of opportunity or discrimination. Hence, to their minds, those who fail to prosper deserve to fail; and certainly don't deserve any share in the wealth of their betters. It follows that taxing the rich in order to provide health care for their inferiors is nothing less than a crime against nature.

There seem to be some Republican Senators who genuinely believe in the New Calvinism (and some who still believe in the older version.) Many more, though, are just the lazy lackeys of their major donors, content in their safe, Red-State seats, mindlessly voting with their leadership.  A few, though, face more complex political situations -- and there even may be one or two who see a moral choice awaiting them after the Fourth of July.  Let's hope they bring their camels along.