Resilience

My ‘thousands’ of followers are used to seeing humor on this blog, along with the occasional book review or maybe some art or music. But I think it’s time to add some posts focusing on the state of our country and government. Note that these will appear in a separate tab on the home page.

Today the Congress is ratifying the election of Donald J. Trump to another term as President. Many people, I know, are alarmed or terrified, given his various bloviations, grievances and threats during the campaign. Now I don’t like the man or his announced policies and it is certainly possible or even probable that he will make a mess of our government and our country.

But our government and our country have proved resilient and we can all help to ensure that any damage is limited. I’m going to explore several reasons why it might be difficult for him and his supporters to accomplish all that they hope.

First, let’s remember that our Federal government is designed to be slow. As our constitution was being framed, the Crown’s abuses of power were fresh in the framers’ memories. So they created checks and balances by establishing three independent government branches. Furthermore, they built inefficiencies into the legislative process. The powers of each branch, “would be the means of keeping each other in their proper places,” wrote James Madison.

There were concerns that a strong Federal government would destroy state legislative power. A ‘compromise committee’ among the framers proposed a a plan that became known as the Great Compromise. he plan provided for a bicameral legislature with proportional representation based on a state’s population for one chamber and equal state representation in the other.

The Framers recognized that the division of legislative power between two distinct chambers of elected members was needed to protect liberty and address the states’ fear of an imbalance of power in Congress. As later explained by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the Great Compromise, under which one House was viewed as representing the people and the other the states, allayed the fears of both the large and small states.

While acknowledging that the bicameral legislative process often produces conflict, inefficiency, and in some instances [can] be injurious as well as beneficial, the Framers believed that the intricate law-making process promotes open discussion and safeguards against against improper acts of legislation.

The result of this arrangement is that it can be very difficult to enact substantive legislation with broad agreement among the members of our legislature. Given the narrow divide between the parties in both the House and the Senate and a number of discrete factions in both houses, it will be very difficult to enact much of the new President’s agenda into law (except for some relatively narrow issues in the budget reconciliation bills).

In my next post on this topic, I’ll discuss some other features of our government that will slow things down.