On Wednesday, noon EDT exactly, Donald J. Trump ceased to be our President and Joseph R. Biden became our 46th President of the United States. The events of that day in the Federal Political arena made some people happy and some people sad, but those events were set in motion a long time ago. In fact, those events started to be defined when our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution.
Fifty five of our Founding Fathers cloistered themselves in Independence Hall in Philadelphia for eighty nine days during the spring and summer of 1787 laboring to write a new Constitution for our United States. They had the benefit of previous attempts at governmental organization to guide their work in as much as their knowledge gave them strong indication of what not to do. Their constituents back home also had some ideas of what they wanted and what they did not want so the design specifications were plentiful. Indeed, descriptions of their goal were without any prior template. Original thought was, therefore, the order of the day.
Over the past four years of the Trump Administration we have witnessed Executive Branch activities that did not match up to the practices of earlier Governments. Sometimes it was just a different way of doing something, but sometimes the approach was so different that people wondered what the law said? Then when we looked at the law we learned that there was far more wiggle room than we previously imagined. These discoveries caused many to think that we needed to enact new and stricter laws to prevent such things from happening again in the future. Well, as of last Wednesday we are living in that future so we need to start thinking about what happened and what we need to do to avoid such situations further down the road.
I am in the process currently of publishing a new book titled, Our American Story; Fixing the Sausage Grinder. The leading paragraph of Chapter 5 offers some thoughts relevant to this conversation.
“Unless you believe that our Founding Fathers wanted us to endure perpetual chaos in our political lives, you have to admit that our current political system is not working as intended. On the other hand, we have seen that they made every effort to make sure that future generations could enjoy a Federal Government that would be able to govern the affairs of the time. Our Founding Fathers didn’t know everything and they would be the first to admit to their shortcomings as it related to the many possibilities and complications that might mark the future of these United States of America.”
So we find ourselves faced with situations that seem to require greater detail from our laws and our knowledge that our brilliant Founding Fathers deliberately kept our Constitutional language less precise so that it could be more pertinent in unforeseen situations in the future. When we are faced with new societal problems and no specificity in our applicable laws to match the problem, we are not lost as long as we have competent leadership committed to the principles and goals of our republican-democracy. In other words, leadership can make up for vagueness in our governing documents, but tight specificity in our legal language could encumber our best outcomes.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken, will you help to fix it? If you haven’t read A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, you’re not prepared for the job.
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