Government is not a Business

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 

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Other Posts by Kent Pitman on related topics:

• Speed Kills
• Retirement Savings
• Political Terraforming
• Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

A to-do list for repairing US democracy

 

If we're lucky enough  not to spiral down into dictatorship during this fall's Presidential election in the US, we need to have a ready-made to-do list for repairing democracy.

To start off a conversation on that, here's my current thinking…

Draft Proposed “Freedom Amendment” to the US Constitution

(Rationales, in green, are informational, not part of the amendment.)

In order to solidify and preserve democratic rule within these United States, these changes are hereby ordered to all United States policies and procedures:

1. Voting

1. No Electoral College. The Electoral College is hereby dissolved. Presidential elections shall henceforth be determined directly by majority vote of all United States citizens who are eligible to vote.

2. No commercial interference in elections. No for-profit corporation or company, nor any non-profit corporation or company that as their primary business offers products or services for commercial sale, may contribute to campaigns or other activities that could reasonably be seen as trying to affect election. (The ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is vacated.)

3. Restore the Voting Rights Act. The ruling in Shelby County v. Holder that voided section 4 is hereby reversed, restoring this Act to its full form and asserting full Constitutional backing to the Act. Preclearance is hereby required for all 50 states equally.

4. No “gerrymandering.” The practice of gerrymandering while drawing district boundaries at the federal and state levels is hereby disallowed.

5. Ranked-choice voting. All federal elections shall be handled via a ranked-choice voting process.

2. Ethics & Oversight

1. Supreme Court Ethics Code. The Supreme Court shall henceforth be governed by the same ethics code that binds all federal courts.

2. Congress and the Supreme Court shall be subject to term limits.

   1. Senators may be elected to no more than 3 terms.
   2. Representatives may be elected to no more than 5 terms.
   3. Supreme Court Justices may serve no more than 18 years.

3. No one is above the law. Elected members of all three branches of government are subject to all laws, just like any other person, even though prosecution of such a person for crimes must wait until that person leaves office. In cases where immediate prosecution might be important, impeachment is an option.

4. Senate impeachment votes are not optional. If the House impeaches someone, the Senate must immediately perform all business necessary to assure a timely vote on that impeachment; this process is not optional and may not be postponed. Once an actionable concern has been raised that a public official might have committed a crime, the public has an interest in swift resolution.

5. House and Senate impeachment votes are temporarily private. Impeachment votes by both House and Senate will be recorded and tallied privately, preferably electronically, with only the aggregate result reported immediately. Individual votes will be held securely in private for a period of ten years, at which time all such votes will be made a public part of the historical record.

6. Public office is not a refuge to wait out the clock on prosecution. Any clock for the Statute of Limitations does not run while prosecution is not an option. This applies for all elected persons for whom indictment or prosecution is locked out due to participation in public office, but in particular for POTUS. It may be necessary to the doing of orderly public business not to prosecute a President while in office, however public office is not a refuge in which someone may hide out until the clock runs out on otherwise-possible prosecutions, whether that clock began before or during time in office.

7. Pardon power is subject to conflict-of-interest (COI) restrictions. It is necessary to the credibility of all public officials in a free society that there be some reasonable belief that rules of law do not create options for corrupt officials to abuse the system. Presidents and other state and federal officials embued with the pardon power may never apply such power to themselves, their families, or any other individuals with whom there is even an appearance of conflict of interest. No such person may solicit any action by anyone on promise of a pardon. Any single such action, attempted action, or promise of action where there is a conflict of interest that is known or reasonably should have been know to the party exercising pardon power is an impeachable offense and a felony abuse of power subject to a penalty of ten years in prison.

8. Independence of Department of Justice. The head of the Department of Justice shall be henceforth selected by a supermajority (2/3) vote of the House of Representatives, without any special input from or deference to the Executive.

   Rationale: Assure DOJ operates independently of the Executive, its mission being to fairly and impartially uphold Law, not to be a tool of partisan or rogue Presidential power.

9. Independence of the Supreme Court. Justices of the DOJ shall be henceforth selected by a supermajority (2/3) vote of the House of Representatives.

   Rationale:

   1. When SCOTUS must rule on the validity of Presidential action, a conflict of interest is created if those Justices might be appointed by that same President or even a majority party.

   2. Since the Constitution requires a supermajority to change its intent, an equivalent degree of protection is essential for choosing those will will interpret that intent. Recent history has suggested that it was easier to change the Court than to change the Constitution, with catastrophic effect decidedly unfair to the majority of citizens.

   3. A President is more than Appointer of Justices, yet that singular capability is so powerful and lasting that it often dominates election campaigns. Citizens need to be free to hire Presidents for other reasons more unique to the moment, such as good judgment; logistical, management, or negotiating skill; expertise in technical or scientific matters; or even just empathy with public issues.

3. Rights of People

1. Corporations are not people. Corporations are legal constructions, nothing more.

   Rationale: To say that they are independent people, is to give some actual people (those who own or control them) unequal, magnified, elitist, or otherwise distorted power over others. There is no place for this in a democracy that purports to speak of all people being created as equals.

   1. No Implicit Rights of Corporations. Any powers and duties of corporations must be explicitly granted to them, as coporations, whether by the Constitution or by legal statute, and henceforth must never be derived from any implication of imagined personhood.

   2. Explicitly Enumerated Rights of Corporations. Long-standing legal powers and duties of corporations such as the right to sign contracts, the right to own property, the responsibility to pay taxes, and any legal responsibility under tort law are hereby acknowledged by express enumeration in support of demonstrated corporate need and are no longer intended to be inferred as part of any preposterous fiction that corporations are just another kind of person.

   3. Non-Rights of Corporations. Alleged rights such as, but not limited to, rights of free speech and religious rights for corporations are hereby clarified to be nullified and without basis. A corporation has no automatic rights of people extending from any metaphor of being person-like. Politics is the province of individual persons, not corporations. Corporations exist for sales, subject to the rules of laws made by individuals, not vice versa.

2. Bodily autonomy right. All mentally competent people have a right to autonomy over choices of medical procedures affecting their own body.

   1. No Forced Pregnancies. From the time of conception to the time of birth, no government nor any other person may have a superseding say over a pregnant person as to any matter relating to a fetus.

      Rationale: This should already follow from the Religious Freedom Clarification, but it is too important to leave to chance. To say that any other person could make such choices would be to allow their religious freedom to infringe the religious freedoms of the pregnant person.

      Also, the term “pregnant person” is used here intentionally to include that adulthood is not a requirement of bodily autonomy. In general, any person who has not been legally ruled mentally incompetent is entitled to self-determination on matters like this. Not even a parent should have superseding control, since a parent will not have to live a lifetime with the consequences.

   2. Fetal Disposition is a Private Matter. Whether a pregnant person wishes to refer to a fetus as simply a fetus, a potential life, an unborn child, or an actual child is a personal religious choice to be made by that pregnant person. No law shall impose a policy on this.

      Rationale: To say otherwise would be to deny the obvous fact that people simply differ on this matter. To assume there were some single right way that everyone must adhere to would be to give dominance to some religious philosophies over others.

      It's a compromise, but the only one that it allows each person the best guarantee of at least some autonomy in a society where not everyone agrees and we are not likely to change that fact by fiat.

      Also, and importantly, some pregnancies are not successful and even in a society where we permit abortion for those who weren't wanting to be pregnant, it would be callous and undignified not to acknowledge the legitimate loss to others who sincerely wanted to carry a pregnancy to term but were unable. It is possible to be respectful in both situations, by feeling the grief of someone who wanted a child and not manufacturing grief for someone else who did not.

3. Right to Choose a Marital Partner. Among consenting adults, the choice to choose who to marry must not be restricted due to race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

   Rationale: This has been accepted already and it is not appropriate to roll that back. It was a good idea anyway, though, because happy families add an extra level of safety net protection to society. Family members try to take care of one another during sickness and other hard times, and this hopefully reduces some amount of stress on public safety nets.

4. Religious Freedom Clarification. The right to religious self-determination is a basic human right.

   1. Religious Choice. All people have the right to explore religous choice on their own timeline and terms. No one is required to pick any particular philosophy, or any philosophy at all, or even to make a choice.

   2. Religious Equality. Religious protections span all religious choices (and non-choices), and hence are accorded equally to all people. No person may be accorded second-class legal status on the basis of their religious philosophy—or lack thereof.

      Rationale: So atheists, agnostics, etc. are still due religious freedom protection. Answers to “Is there a God?” are still due religious protection if the answer is “no” or “I don't know” or “I haven't decided” or “I don't know what that means” or “This is not a binary question.”

   3. No State Religion. The so-called “establishment clause” of the First Amendment is hereby clarified to mean that the United States takes no position that might give the appearance of preferring one religon over another.

      Rationale: We are not, for example, a Christian nation. Nor a Jewish nation. And so on. And yet the US is a nation that intends to treat each religion and non-religion in the same supportive and respectful way, and expects each of these religions to be respectful of others. This is how balance is maintained in pluralistic society.

   4. Religion is not a Popularity Contest. The fact that one religious philosophy might at any given point be more common than another does afford that philosophy a greater or lesser status.

   5. No Bullying in the name of Religion. The freedom of religious choice is not a right to bully or coerce, nor to violate law. Each person's right of religious choice extends only to the point where it might infringe on the equivalent rights of others.

Yes, this could be done by separate amendments. But it would be a lot of them, and the discussion would be much more complex. I say do it all at once because every one of these things is absolutely needed.

If anything, there might be a few things I left out.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was catalyzed by a single tweet by me on ex-Twitter, but it has been hugely elaborated since, after all, this venue does not have a 280 character limit.

The odd graphic of the scales of justice under repair was created by Abacus.AI's ChatLLM facility, using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Dall-E and the prompt:

Draw a picture of a grayscale statue of a woman holding the scales of justice in one raised hand and a small wrench and a pair of needle-nose pliers in the other hand, lower, at her side. part of the statue should include a toolbox next to her feet that is open and presumably where she's taken the wrench from. the woman should be wearing a flowing gown, as is traditional for this kind of statue, but she should have a pair of goggles on her head, as one would use in a metal shop to protect one's eyes. The woman should have a pair of protective goggles, like one would use for metal working, over her eyes.

And, yes, I'm aware I did not get the needle-nose pliers got left out. And on this iteration I didn't ask for her to be seated, though I had been thinking of requesting she be seated at a work bench to resolve some unwanted aspects of previous attempts, so I went with this as the best of several tries.

American Dictatorship

In a “commentary” piece in Salon titled A candidate, not a president: Jack Smith crafts a simple solution to Supreme Court Jan. 6 roadblock, Norman Eisen and Joyce Vance wrote:

«The Supreme Court’s late-term decision recognizing a dangerously expansive immunity from criminal prosecution for former presidents effectively cut off any chance of the original indictment in the January 6 case against former President Donald J. Trump going forward.»

The article goes on to talk about what Jack Smith has done to salvage the case. Good for him. It shouldn't be necessary to work under the preposterous constraints recently imposed by the Supreme Court, but I'm glad he's up to the challenge. And that's the immediate concern, so it makes sense that Eisen and Vance would focus commentary on something so topical.

But I want to draw back and reshape this same set of observations to highlight a few other things that have been bugging me as the rest of this immediate drama runs its course.

Biden Explains the problem

After the immunity ruling, Biden made a bold statement:

“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each — each of us is equal before the law. No one — no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.

With today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed. For all — for all practical purposes, today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.

This is a fundamentally new principle, and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.”

Wrapping our heads around the problem

Sometimes when there are big statements made (like that a President has “no limits” or is “above the law”), it's hard to see the practical reality that is lost inside. I notice this when trying to excite people about the urgency of Climate Change, as well. Sometimes, instead of saying the world might end, one needs to say that there will be no more Christmas vacations, orchids, poetry, or reruns of Groundhog Day. Something more personal. Because the vast scope of “anything” or “everything” is just too hard for the brain to wrap itself around.

I'll tie this all together in a moment, but first one more quote.

The aforementioned commentary by Norm Eisen and Joyce Vance also mentioned this:

«As a result, Trump’s attempts to weaponize the Department of Justice to his own private ends are no longer part of the case. Gone is the allegation that he pressured the Department to release a letter falsely claiming that the election was marred by outcome-determinative fraud. Gone is the allegation that he sought to use the Department to press state officials to certify his electors, rather than those of President Joe Biden. And gone is the allegation that he attempted to install his now-excised co-conspirator, Jeffery Clark, as the Acting Attorney General to implement his scheme when other officials resisted.»

So, yes, as Biden noted, Presidents will be above the law. But as the reduced indictment implies, included in the President's broad immunity, which SCOTUS has made up out of nowhere, are the following truths:

• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President perpetrates a fraud on citizens of the US, or solicits those who work for him (including DOJ) to do so.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President meddles in state or national elections.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, for the President to solicit state officials to do his bidding in ways that would be illegal for others.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President organizes conspiracies against the United States government, in violation of his oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

Smith is doing what he must do in order to get this past a corrupt Supreme Court. But what they are asking him to accept as a premise is just utterly preposterous. The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Forget the fact that we're talking about crimes that probably happened. Forget that it's Trump. Just ask yourself: If you were designing a nation, would these be intended consequences of your design? Can you even imagine our founders intended this? Keep in mind that these are the people that brought us the Declaration of Independence, which said, among other things:

“… The history of the present King … is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. …
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone …
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation…”

Independent of the prosecution of Donald Trump, independent of the sweeping nature of presidential immunity, these specific truths that we already know from the mere fact that Jack Smith felt it necessary to remove them from the indictment, and which are only the tip of a very ugly iceberg, are not suggesting a positive direction for our nation's future. I would like to live in a country where Jack Smith did not have to fear prosecuting such things would be cruelly laughed out of Court.

We must drive stakes in the ground to keep the Overton window from moving.

Dictatorship vs democracy

Democracies have a lot of problems. The back and forth of democratic decision-making can be messy, processes run slowly, and outcomes are not always pretty. Democracies are said to offer the best of worst case outcomes, not the best of the best. For example, they are supposed to resist capture by a single individual. They are supposed to have checks against becoming dictatorships.

And, let's be honest, a benevolent dictatorship might sound better. Someone who knows good things need to be done and can do them efficiently. But the problem is that there is no such realizable system as a reliably benevolent dictatorship. Even if it started out that way, it would risk in every moment becoming malevolent. And if that happened, and it would, there would be no protection.

So, as Churchill is often quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

But at the same time, Jefferson wasn't wrong in saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

We've been too trusting in the US for too long and have allowed, little by little, for various changes that have weakened our democracy's safeguards. We have seen them burrowing in at democracy's weakest points, and instead of responding aggressively by filling observed gaps, we have let them drive a wedge.

So, at this point we find ourselves preparing for an election that many have described as having placed democracy itself on the ballot, because Donald Trump has promised that if elected, he will be a dictator. Just for a day, he says, but not everyone is Joe Biden. The history of power is that people do not step back from it easily. If Trump achieves any approximation of dictatorship, expect him to decide he likes it and wants to keep it that way. And the Supreme Court seems poised to back that.

After all, he seems to think he can be a dictator on day one if he wants. But the Supreme Court has not said anything that distinguishes any day from any other. If he has the power to be a dictator by his own choice on day 1, he has the power to be dictator by his own choice on any day. The Supreme Court seems to have made that pretty clear. That he's hinting only about a single day has no predictive value. His promises are worth nothing. He changes like the wind. The only consistency he has is his narcissism.

Meta-dictatorship

But, wait a minute, why does the Supreme Court get to decide these things?

Well, that's just their role and always has been. They are charged with making decisions that are true to the Constitution, but who polices that? They do. Or they don't. But, either way, no one else can tell them they're wrong.

Pardon the use of technically precise language here, but they just say shit, and it becomes true, stink and all.

They don't exactly make law, but they tell lawmakers what laws are OK to make. They don't exactly enforce law, but they tell enforcers which laws may be enforced. That's a lot of power. Too much.

They are, effectively, a team of meta-dictators. That's kind of always been there, just waiting to rear its ugly head.

A President is suddenly a king. How? That wasn't previously true. The Supreme Court says so. So we believe it. They claim the power to say that someone is a dictator, above the law and immune to question. How do you do that if you're not already a dictator yourself?

So why are we talking about a future world that only might have a dictator after the election. The problem is real, and here, and now. We have a team of dictators already—a weirdly constituted team that has a minority voice that's like an ignored conscience, unable to have an effect but still able to speak out, alerting us to danger. In spite of that, collectively, they are dictators.

Nothing has recently changed about the power of the Supreme Court other than its composition. It has been a potential dictatorial mob for a while, just awaiting two things to align:

• the right composition, to take advantage of the power that was there.
• the death of shame, so they won't be embarrassed doing it.

Now that those conditions are met, the Supreme Court's danger, a danger that has been there all along, is starkly visible.

In a sense, the story of the US Supreme Court is the story of a dictatorship that started out benevolent and decayed before our eyes, just as I was saying one should expect from any such attempt. As soon as we get the chance, we need to correct its structure so that it has much stronger protections. In the past, our various Congresses and Presidents have seen the Supreme Court's design as something sacred, that works well, not realizing they were simply relying on luck. Democracy must be built upon firmer stuff. It needs solid checks against corruption. Nothing less will suffice.

Leave it to the United States of Capitalism to bring on dictatorship fashioned in its own image, as a board of directors, not quite dictating directly, but freely controlling who is allowed to be the country's CEO and under what parameters they are permitted to operate. It's a bad look. But it's what money has bought.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

For the flag logo, I tried to generate an image at Abacus.ai using various models and Dall-E or Flux.1, but all of them made a complete mess of simple instructions, so finally I asked just "make a simple black and white logo in the style of a clenched fist. make sure the fist has 4 fingers and a thumb" (because many times it gives too few fingers), and I had to edit it onto the flag myself, using a public domain image of a flag downloaded from publicdomainpictures.net.

Edit: The penultimate paragraph in the main article above, beginning “In a sense, the story of the US Supreme Court…” had been intended originally but ended up lost due to editing. It was added back the day after initial publication when its absence was noted.

Process Due

Seth Abramson wrote in a tweet, “Our descendants won't distinguish between pro- and anti-Trump, they'll just say, ‘What were those idiots thinking?’ “

I feel embarrassed knowing how easily future historians will mark Trump as a criminal

He's making generations of Americans look like morons in the eyes of history

Our descendants won't distinguish between pro- and anti-Trump, they'll just say, "What were those idiots thinking?"

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) November 3, 2019

Folks outside the US no doubt ask it now.

It's a fair question, but maybe the wrong one.

Constitutional government needs clear process as safeguard against idiocy. We just can't rely on intelligence to be there, nor idiocy not to be, in every moment of every day. That's too much to ask.

I don't mean to let us off the hook. We must introspect on how we got here. To assure intelligence is reliably present and available, it must be encoded in our processes, not left as an exercise to the individuals trying to interpret those processes.

Size is Relative

Toward that end, we too seldom question the oft-repeated myth that “minimum government is best government,” fed us by those who want government kept malleable.

Too big government isn't good.
But too small isn't either.

I have lately tended toward the belief that government must grow in proportion to propensity for abuse, not even just in reaction to abuse, but even proactively, anticipating the likely and covering reasonably anticipated cases that follow from trends.

Libertarians grump whenever government grows, but public response needs to be “If you exploited the common good less, we wouldn't have to complicate this so.”

The asymmetry is that we're stuck in an arms race where conservatives want to escalate their hold over society, and they use Jedi mind tricks to make progressives feel bad about responding.

If they want government to stay small, they should “play nice.”

Our Constitution needs repair, more process & process detail, if we're not to leave procedural action to the chance of idiocy or partisanship.

We need such additional detail to assure a nervous public in times of stress that processes being applied were not developed in the moment to serve Machiavellian ends, but are our normal way of attending to all problems, no matter who creates them and no matter who administers them.

Who Could Have Known?

“What were we thinking?” you ask, you who look on from afar, from across the ocean or from the far future.

Well, “what are you thinking?” Your are us on other days. Don't assume your greater intelligence will carry the day. Ask instead, “does process protect me?” Because unless your answer is a very certain yes, you should be as panicked as we are now, and you should be readying for your time to face this same event.

We look back at you and feebly shrug, “Who could have known?” It's a lame excuse, but somewhat true. This problem is new to us. Some saw it in advance, but many didn't. And so, collectively, because we act as a collective entity, we did not see this. And now, mired in it, we lack clear and strong process to get us quickly or reliably out.

But for you looking on, you all see it. Do not make the error of thinking this a uniquely US problem, of thinking yourselves immune. Don't expect “Who could have known?” to defend your honor when your time comes. Act now to buttress your respective constitutions for what's surely to come for you as well.

Trump-wannabes the world over are taking notes.

The Death of Shame

What gives Trump his power isn't just utter GOP corruption and Dem lack of spine.

It's that there are "norms of behavior" we have asked but not required by codifying them in Constitution or law.

We must fix that. The Constitution needs to grow.

The question isn't whether additional rules are needed, only whether we'll have the spine to insist on such necessary change, lest we endure a recurrence for having failed to.

We've relied on social mechanisms like decorum and shame in lieu of rules. But Trump is shameless. His political power comes of seeing decorum isn't a compulsion for him to conform. He sees an ignorable nicety, and his goal is never to be nice. He sees nicety as weakness.

If we get out of this, still an open question, we must add more rules.

Conservatives will cry "bloat". But too bad. Blame yourselves, GOP. You've earned every bit of clarifying legal text that comes in response.

Some Examples

We need process that does not reduce us to arguing whether major felonies are reason for impeachment. We might not enumerate a full list of reasons to impeach, but we should enumerate some, just so we don't waste months debating at least those.

The Constitution intends discretion about allowing more than just felonies, but that discretion should extend in the other direction, allowing discretion about ignoring felonies. It should say flat out that if there are felonies afoot, or there is even just strong reason to suspect it, impeachment must begin. It should say that if impeachment succeeds in the House, the Senate must engage it in the Senate under rules that are fair to both parties to offer substantive discussion without it being procedurally buried.

Even the question of burden of proof needs to be better spelled out. If a President is seen to act in a way that is adverse to US interests, but we can't prove intent, that might be sufficient to avoid a criminal conviction, but do we want such a person in office? We have to either have the clear right to try a sitting President or an easy path to removing the President so they can stand trial. We should not be forced to endure a criminal President simply for lack of some technical detail. Presidency isn't a right, it is a privilege and a responsibility.

Benefit of any doubt in the reliability and good will of our President needs to be given to We The People, not a dubious President.

Going Forward

I speak as if we might get out of this. That's overly optimistic. We won't.

Maybe—hopefully—Trump will be impeached. But even so, he's shown where Democracy is weak, opening a Pandora's box unlikely to be closed.

Such attacks will recur, and not just in the US. We won't get out of that. We can only prepare. Please let's do that.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This article began as a tweet thread of my own in response to Abramson's tweet quoted above. I've done some editing, rearranging, and expanding here.

Packaged Terror

After 9/11 we were in a daze, a fog that wouldn’t lift, as if the dust and debris of the towers had spread nationwide. It wasn’t clear at the time whether this was an isolated attack, or the first of many.

As if in answer came the anthrax mailings, about a week or so later. That compounded the daze. It was a strange time, and we were all uneasy.

The terrorists only did a little of the job, you see. They killed a few thousand, traumatized a couple of cities. But to make it a really national event, a global event, that required the media and the government. Each in their own way opportunists, they were—and continue to be—complicit.

We were asked to be vigilant about suspicious packages. At the time, that seemed prudent, almost welcomed. There is such an urge to do something in response to an awful happening. It’s an emotional need. A hunger that must be fed.

It was against this backdrop that I soon found a box hanging from my mailbox. Not in it. Just hanging from it. In a bag.

Never mind that I was no one anyone had ever heard of, living in a small town in the middle of nowhere anyone cared about. One’s own life always seems so much bigger and more important than most lives probably are. We all need to feel important.

The package said it was from my health insurance carrier, which to some less vigilant soul might have seemed fine, but I wasn’t taking “routine” for an answer. I hadn’t asked them for anything. I had no reason to suppose they would send me anything. And we were admonished to be suspicious, so suspicious we were.

After all, only the post office is allowed to put something in my mailbox. And this package wasn’t in the mailbox, just hung from it in a plastic bag, probably by someone willing to dispense anthrax but fearful of prosecution for improper use of a mailbox. That seemed to make sense. The kind of sense that people who live in fear are likely to make. The kind of sense that felt good to me. Never mind the fact that the package probably wouldn’t have fit in the mailbox in the first place, if this manner of delivery wasn’t an outright confession of guilt, it at least had “suspicious package” written all over it.

So I called the health insurance folks to check. “No,” they said. They had not sent it. In fact, the return address was an office that was not even open any more.

Well, that was disturbing.

I wanted to go to the FBI or something. But we had no such office in our tiny town. I wondered if perhaps they had trucks that went town to town, looking for possible anthrax mailings and carting them back to FBI Central. So I went to the post office and asked them. I don’t think they were prepared. The government was prepared to scare us, but not to address our fears.

“Go to the fire department,” they said. I shrugged and did.

They seemed as confused as the post office. They suggested the police department, and off I went.

The policemen puzzled at the box I was carrying and finally one of them said “Come with me.”

So I followed as we walked outside to where some kids were playing basketball in an open area with lots of cement on the ground. The policeman shooed the kids away, taking control of the space for his own clever plan.

“Stand back,” the policeman said, aiming a gun at the box.

“But...”

I tried to explain that it was anthrax I was worried about, and that a gun seemed the wrong idea.

It was too late. He had shot it.

Fortunately, since we were standing much too close and the kids would have probably never gotten to come back to play, there was no explosion. Nor was there any powder.

We opened the box. It was a catalog.

I called the health insurance company back. “Oh that,” they said with a kind of verbal shrug. “Yeah, maybe they still do catalogs out of that office.”

I worry a lot about terrorism these days, but not always about what the terrorists will do to us. Now I have a new worry: What we’ll do in response to the terror. What we’ll let our government do in our name, just so they can feel good having done something. Seeing that event, and that pointless act, an act so stupid you’d think it was fiction if you hadn’t been there to watch it, it was easier to understand how we started a pointless war.

And I don’t know what’s weirder—that he did that or that I stood by and let him. It was weird what they did, but it was also weird that I just went along with it. Looking back, I guess it was more caught up in that societal daze than I had realized.

But it’s who we are, we human beings, all of us. We’re easily afraid, and then more easily corralled. We need to know our propensities, and to recognize when they’re overtaking us, lest the simple option of exercising sanity elude us at the most critical of times.

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Author’s Notes: If you got value from this post, please Share it.

I never got around to telling this story when it first happened, but in light of recent events in Paris, and my worry about the selfish manipulation of politics that will inevitably follow, I decided perhaps it was finally time. After more than a dozen years, one or two details might be off in small ways, but it’s the moral that matters, that we’re vulnerable in times like this—not just to terrorists, but to our own terrors and to those who would exploit them.

For more on the politics of preying on fear, I heartily recommend Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

The image was added in 2024 using an image generated by abacus.ai using Claud Sonnet 3.5 and Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra, and postprocessing using Gimp. I didn't take any photos at the time, so it's just intended to give you the general feel.