As the Founding Fathers were busy writing the Constitution of the United States, they realized that in addition to giving the three branches of our Government certain well-defined responsibilities there was also a need to put in place the means for preventing Government overreach. We know these provisions of the Constitution broadly as “checks and balances.” Each of the branches is co-equal with the other branches, but the Founding Fathers knew that human nature being what it is there would be attempts, from time to time, by one of the branches to encroach on the responsibilities of the other branches so the Founding Fathers designed each of the branches with a means of fending off those encroachments.
An important provision of these checks and balances in the Legislative Branch is how the elected members of each body are chosen. The House of Representatives represents the people of the United States and the membership is chosen on the basis of population so large States have greater influence than small States. Over in the Senate, the members are chosen with equal representation from each State so that deliberations in that body are influenced by State considerations rather than by the population.
When I wrote my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, I examined the design of our Federal Government to see if I could find something the Founding Fathers might have overlooked that leads us to all this dysfunction. One of my conclusions was that “When senators and representatives conduct their business in response to the same external influences, the design of the federal government is in jeopardy. When the factions dictate the positions of members in both the House and the Senate, the two bodies effectively become one, and the influences of the people and the state are lost to the influence of the faction” and this is exactly what we are currently witnessing in the behavior of our Senators and Representatives. They are behaving as Republicans and Democrats and not like representatives of their constituency trying to conduct the business of America.
This open letter from 47 Republican Senators to the leaders of Iran is a brazen attempt by the Legislative Branch to encroach on the Executive Branch responsibilities. It amounts to a slap in the face for our President and our Secretary of State as well as ramping up the level of political uncivility to new and even more dysfunctional levels.
Of course, the business of Government was not always civil, so history offers some examples that we might expect if this kind of behavior should continue. I don’t think we should be shocked if we wake up some morning to hear that one of our Republican Senators or Representatives has challenged one of the Democrats to a duel. Maybe it will be Speaker John Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Harry Reid or just maybe Senator Ted Cruz with challenge President Obama. In any event, we shouldn’t be surprised by anything as the bad behavior of our elected officials spirals further downward by the day.
The Sausage Grinder is broken; will you help to fix it?
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