John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARY DEJEVSKY IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Unlike the mess Brexit has left the UK in, Americans should be glad that their constitution actually works – especially in the age of Trump
“The level of uncertainty facing the UK would be unlikely in most constitutional democracies. And much of this stems from the introduction of a referendum into a system that can only tolerate such a mechanism if it reaffirms the status quo”
"And much of this stems from the introduction of a referendum into a system that can only tolerate such a mechanism if it reaffirms the status quo"
Quite an astute observation I think.
However, when Ms Dejevsky says, "In fact, it seems to me, the US constitution has stood up pretty well to the challenges of this aberrant president," I think she reveals that she has missed the fundamental truths of contemporary America.
Yes, Trump is aberrant.
But he is not the great and overwhelming threat in America. Not by any measure.
And with the truly great threats, America's Constitution has not done well at all. Indeed, it has so utterly failed that in some ways it is now a dusty piece of parchment sitting on a shelf, a museum display.
There is no place in the Constitution for assassinations by an agency of government such as the CIA.
There is no place in the Constitution for an industrial-scale system of extrajudicial killing, but that is exactly what operates around the clock today.
There’s no place in the Constitution for “kill lists” with Presidents signing off on them, as Obama did.
Equally, there’s no place giving a President authority to tell an agency like CIA that it should just decide whom to kill, that it knows best who should be killed, which is exactly what Trump has done.
And there’s no place in the Constitution for undeclared wars, the only kind of wars the Pentagon has now waged for many decades. The Constitution is very explicit about how war is declared, but it is simply ignored.
Indeed, there’s no place in the Constitution for a massive agency, the size of some nations, such as the Pentagon.
There’s also no place in the Constitution for the overwhelming role of private money funding national elections that we see today.
There are other matters which aren’t in the Constitution but which nevertheless are established American practices today, a big one being the massively important role of private lobbies in shaping national policy and legislation. This, of course, is closely related to the matter of private money in elections.
There are yet still other realities in conflict with both the letter and spirit of the American Constitution today - not just small matters, but huge and pervasive ones, such as the NSA literally recording everyone’s private communications – so that I think a discussion around a phenomenon like Trump and the Constitution is a bit like Jesus’s words about the noting the mote in someone’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own.
