Archive of stories pre April 2007 | As Benjamin Franklin left the final day of deliberation by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a citizen supposedly asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
If all goes as planned, in a week or so that Republic will finally escape our grip. When the Senate votes to affirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the central tenet of our government - the separation of powers - will take a blow from which it will likely never recover. In its place a de facto monarchy will solidify and expand, and our Constitution will join the Geneva Convention as a quaint anachronism. And the Republic we have kept for two hundred years will join its Athenian and Roman predecessors as good ideas whose time has passed.
Melodramatic? I think not. While the Bush administration has shown itself incapable of prosecuting even one war at a time abroad, it has been far more successful in its unprecedented two-front war at home. They have invaded territory Constitutionally granted to the judiciary in a way not seen at least since the Nixon administration. They have mounted the most direct challenge to Congressional power in the history of our republic. And on each of these fronts, effective resistance has been largely non-existent.
Congress cheers its own subjugation as Austria welcomed the Anschluss. The doomsday scenario many of us foresaw both before and just after the 2004 election now looks as inevitable as Manifest Destiny.
One aspect of the evisceration of the power of Congress was evident in the farcical Roberts and Alito hearings themselves. The Senate has an explicit Constitutional role in choosing those who sit on the Supreme Court. Once upon a time, both Congress and the Executive branch took that role seriously -- senators asked meaningful questions, nominees actually answered them, and if the answers were unsatisfactory, nominees were rejected. When a radical conservative tried to walk in the front door almost twenty years ago, he was decisively rebuffed. As a result, the honesty of Robert Bork's extremism is but a distant memory. Now Borks in sheep's clothing sneak in the back. The executive demonstrates its disdain for the advice and consent power by turning the hearings into an addendum to The Brothers Karamazov* in which it is those who loudly proclaim their religiosity act as if God is dead, so that all is permitted.
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