Tag Archives: National Constitution Center

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A Triad of Diminished Institutions

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With the three branches of government impaired, have we ever been further from the goal of establishing “a more perfect union?”

We can get lost in the details of daily politics. But looking at the big picture offers little reassurance.  We are used to accusing the President of crippling American democracy by undermining long-held national norms. Attempts to stigmatize and even criminalize diversity programs at universities and elsewhere are only one category of this retrograde behavior. It is now apparent to the nation and most of the world that current our presidential leadership is in dire ruins. Every day Donald Trump provides new examples to lament. Combine this problem with ample evidence that the other two branches of government are also hobbled, and it seems we have drifted further from the goal of establishing “a more perfect union.”

If it is not enough that the Presidency has been shorn of its effectiveness and dignity, the third branch, the United States Supreme Court, has created in its own constitutional crisis. It now regularly yields to an overreaching President who seeks more power and less accountability. As for the second branch of Congress, it has been occupied by a party that has allowed the dismemberment of its formal constitutional powers, including the vital roles of war-making and spending. Passage of a bill for short-term funding of the federal government now counts as a significant legislative achievement.

It is painful to admit, but we are the unhappy recipients of an inverted trifecta that has undermined all three governmental branches. Taking their own paths to ineptness, these frail branches have left us with few chances to further the nation’s collective aspirations. Instead, the branches now function to concentrate power rather than distribute it, reward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary Americans, and accept curbing birthright freedoms. Never has the Constitution looked less relevant as a statement of defined powers as it does now. Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center should spend less time celebrating this increasingly bludgeoned document and more time urgently mobilizing people and ideas to strengthen it. It’s a sad day when we fail to notice that we are honoring what is actually disappearing before our eyes.

To be sure, we have some courageous members of Congress.  And there are important lower federal courts that have upheld judicial ideals, at least until the Supreme Court weighs in. But the Supreme Court has now been given powers that alarms even traditional political conservatives. The decision of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the door for elections to be bought. The court diasasterously ruled that campaign finance is a form of free speech, releasing tsunamis of private money into sometimes tiny congressional races. We may vote this fall, but corporations and others with deep pockets have far more chances to influence outcomes by throwing money at all the modern tools of marketing. Few decisions have done more to harm the idea of one-person-one-vote.

The court has also granted nearly complete presidential immunity from prosecution and total freedom to replace any figure in the myriad federal agencies such as the FCC. No efficient and honest federal bureaucrat is immune from the dead hand of presidential removal. By the end of Trump’s term our agencies will be filled with people who would mostly prefer that their oversight responsibilities be eliminated.

Whether the GOP dominated Congress will be revived by more activist members and Democrats remains to be seen. In the short term our best hope for the recovery of a functioning national government lies with changes in the leadership and competence of the next Congress.

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Curating our Memories

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If we had the obligations of institutions like museums, all of us would probably have to periodically amend the landmark narratives in our lives that we have incorrectly remembered.

There are no shortage of examples of museums and archives that have been forced to correct their narratives about past events.  Was a painting in a gallery actually the property of a Jewish family who had to forfeit it to the Third Reich? Is that tribal dress portrayed in an exhibit of an indigenous group really accurate, given recent and revised histories?  Do our textbook descriptions of the American Constitution adequately treat the deference to slave-owning that historians and progressives now see in some of its provisions, including the electoral college?

Remember the Lerner and Lowe song in Gigi sung by an older couple?

He: We dined with friends.
She: We ate alone.
He:  A tenor sang.
She: A baritone.
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well. That dazzling April moon.
She: There was none; and the month was June.
He: That’s right. That’s right.
She: It warms my heart to know that you remember still the way you do.

On big and little matters, we tend to curate our own histories with details that still seem clear. One personal example: I was certain I witnessed the mayhem of the 1968 Democratic Convention in front of a television set in a basement playroom on Quebec Street in Denver. I can still picture the black and white images of the horrors unfolding on Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton Hotel, vivid as if they were yesterday. The “clear” mental image stays because it marks the sinking feeling that must come to most young Americans when they first encounter a national trauma that pushes aside a simpler faith in national invincibility. The storms of American political and cultural life are an unintended national birthright, forcing amendments to exceptionalist narratives that finally must give way.

But I digress. The problem with my memory is that I could not have been in my parent’s basement in Denver. In 1968 I was living in Sacramento California, where almost no one has a basement. And I was a senior in college, not the higher schooler I remember.  The dates are irrefutable markers. If we functioned like public institutions, all of us would probably have to rework the landmark events in our lives that we have curated as mental exhibits. This amounts to the same kind of historical refurbishment that now happens regularly, using the tenets of critical race theory, the #Metoo movement, and other redefining perspectives. At institutions like the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the creation of amended narratives must now go on all of the time.

I have not checked, but I wonder if the National Constitution Center In Philadelphia has tempered its assessments of the founding document to reckon with the last President’s trashing of what seemed like well-established norms. The emoluments clause prohibiting the use of the office to make money is a case in point. Similarly, writing history texts for grade-schoolers has become an occupation that now leaves some school boards and publishers figuratively bloodied. The question of who gets to tell the stories of our collective past has turned into its own kind of battlefield.

Psychologically, we are not well-positioned to abandon inaccurate narratives. As has been much discussed through the recent election and its aftermath, Americans are like most people who resist new corrective narratives that bump up next to older inaccurate ones. As noted elsewhere, the tension between the two creates an uncomfortable form of dissonance we would like to avoid. And so we often take the avoidance route: only considering evidence that confirms what we already believe.