Since being taken over b\y its most extreme right wing elements, the Republican party has undertaken to remake the democratic republic the founders gave us into something Dr. Franklin and his peers would not recognize: a people-hating oligarchy of corporate monsters.
They love to cite the Constitution even while smashing it to smithereens. (Remember the smarmy Illinois congressman, during the attempt to impeach President Clinton? “We may be an itch, but we are a constiTOOshunal itch.” A singular addition to the congressional hall of shame.)
Now the Senate Republicans — including most of the 47 who committed treason with their seditious letter to Iran on the nuclear negotiations — have decided that the Constitution really doesn’t say that Presidents nominate federal judges and the Senate votes either to confirm or not to confirm them. It might seem to say that but what it really means, according to the new Republican orthodoxy, is that presidents in the last year or two of their terms aren’t really presidents, cannot legally conduct any of the affairs of the presidency, and are mandated to just twiddle their thumbs until the next president is elected. And if the next president is not a Republican, these idiots will find some new “constiTOOshunal” grounds for obstructing everything the elected leader of the country proposes.
This came to pass in part because the current president chose to be Dr. Kidglove and attempt to negotiate the rules of the asylum with the inmates. And because his partisans in the congress lacked the courage and the wit to fight the obstructionists with all of the real constitutional tools in their shop. The more they got away with, the more depredations the right wingnuts of congress committed in the name of the “constiTOOshun.” The game’s over now. The government doesn’t function.
Things will only get worse, unless what now seems extremely unlikely happens. That is, if Sen. Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, and then wins the general election, and his party regains control of at least the Senate, if not also the House of Representatives.
A more likely outcome is a November contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which is really no choice at all. Ms. Clinton has more blood on her hands than any presidential aspirant in our history. Trump is the most dangerous kind of imbecile, one who thinks he is intelligent. Either would be an unmitigated disaster in the White House, for different reasons, perhaps, but does it really matter which iceberg sinks the ship?
Whomever we elect in November, that person will place a hand on a Holy Bible and solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
As if it still existed.
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