E J. Dionne is not unintelligent, and occasionally in the past he has displayed the most important moral asset of a political commentator: the ability to concede a point to your opponent in order to strengthen the rest of your argument. But since the reelection of George W. Bush, Dionne has been a bit off his rocker. Consider his piece in this morning's WaPo (tip to RealClearPolitics):
Should a temporary majority of 50.7 percent have control over the entire United States government? Should 49.3 percent of Americans have no influence over the nation's trajectory for the next generation?
There are so many howlers in those two sentences, one would suppose he is intentionally competing with Jimmy Carter for some kind of goofiness per word award. All majorities are temporary, in the sense that they last until the next election. Every electorate and elected body is making choices future generations will be stuck with. And if he means that the Republican majority is temporary, well he is almost certainly right. Though how temporary is anyone guess. I say this working on the general rule of thumb that no party wins forever. But that means that any legislation undertaken in any democracy would invalid, if being temporary made it so.
And what about this 50.7 vs. 49.3? How much of a popular vote margin does Dionne suppose is necessary, in order for a President to nominate Supreme Court Justices, especially since the popular vote does not determine the outcome of Presidential elections? But I wonder if Mr. Dionne objected when President Clinton nominated two Supreme Court Justices, Bryer and Ginsburg, in 1994, even though Clinton was elected in 1992 with a mere 43% of the vote. About 56% of the electorate voted against Clinton that year, though they split their vote between Bush 41 and Ross Perot.
And what exactly does "control over the entire United States government" mean? The 50.7% that Dionne mentioned gave the Republicans the Presidency alone. Congress was won by state elections, and the Court will never be under Republican control for the simple reason that its members never need stand for reelection.
And that's just Dionne's first sentence. It would be charitable to assume that he is in some kind of snit, but that won't do. He opens with the narrowness of Bush's popular majority in order to give the impression that its the popular will that matters, and that such a small majority doesn't really amount to a democratic mandate. But what he is desperate to protect are all those things that an unelected court enacted on behalf of liberals, things like an absolute right to an abortion that they could never have won in a popularly elected Congress. This is deliberately dishonest.
Should seven human beings really be allowed to modify the Constitution at will? Well, maybe not. But they are. What we found out in the last century is that the Constitution itself, the arrangement of offices and powers that the people ratified, in fact allows the Court to do this. But the rules for placing people on the Court have an influence (if a rather unpredictable one) on what kind of Court wields such powers. Those are the rules. If you don't like 'em, try and change 'em. But don't pretend that they are suddenly unfair because now they don't favor you.
The truth is that Dionne doesn't really like democracy very much right now because he doesn't like the majority that is (however temporarily) in charge of it. That is a sign of moral decay.
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