Of Government and Getting What We Deserve

There is a theory that I believe but I am not sure how to prove (this side of the final judgment) that over time people tend to get the government that they deserve.  This idea comes to mind when I hear complaints in the public media about the Congress.  You have certainly heard them.  They come in various flavors, but they are the same soda:

• Why can the Congress get nothing done?

• Congress is unable to rise above partisan politics.

• The people in Congress seem so out of touch with the rest of America.

• Congress avoids making tough decisions.

You could surely add to this list.  The underlying theme is that the Congress is not doing its job.

These comments are a frustrating alloy of truth and silliness.  There is a lot that is right and wrong with the current Congress.  Who put these men and women on Capitol Hill?  With the exception of a handful of Senators appointed by their governors to fill temporary vacancies, and the few dozen congressmen who by order of the Supreme Court must be elected in districts where there really is no democracy (I refer to those from districts mandated by the courts to provide only minority representation), all of these congressmen and Senators were elected—by the people whom they represent.

I mention that to refer to both sides of the coin.  We, the people, put those people there.  The other side is, we the people can send them home.  That is a weighty responsibility, one that we cannot discharge faithfully by just complaining.  We cannot do our legislators’ jobs for them and be involved in all of the minor details of all that they do, but we can and must hold them accountable for the sum of what they do and for the general tone and direction of their actions.  To be successful we need to have a clear idea of what we want our representatives to do and be well educated about what they are doing—not just what they are saying.

One of the sillier comments I hear is the suggestion that we should “throw them all out.”  Is that true?  Is every single congressman and Senator doing a bad job?  Even a basic review of congressional action should tell us that is not the case.  On nearly all of the most important issues there is in fact quite a divergence of views and actions.  Again, our inescapable job is to figure out what is the right policy and look carefully at how our elected representatives are conducting themselves with regard to it.  We should weed the garden, not plow it under.

There are many policies and many issues from which to choose.  Let me suggest two.  The first would be the Constitution.  What have been the actions of our own particular representatives with regard to supporting and defending the Constitution and the rule of law?  Our current President has been active in undermining the Constitution and disregarding the rule of law, so this is not a theoretical issue.  What have our representatives been doing to combat voter fraud, to make sure that the executive branch does not spend money that has not been appropriated by Congress, or to prevent bureaucrats from telling law abiding people how to spend their money, run their businesses, freely express their opinions, or observe their religion?  There have been many other assaults on the Constitution by people in Washington.  As voters, we should be mighty touchy about any of those efforts and reluctant to vote for people who do not share our sensitivity about the importance of the Constitution and our rights as citizens.

The second issue I would suggest is economic growth.  We will never really get out of this recession (that feels depressingly like the 1930s) unless we place a top priority on getting the economy growing.  We cannot solve our budget deficit and federal debt problems without economic growth.  People forget that the few years that we had a balanced budget in the 1990s did not come by government action.  Congress and President were in fact surprised by the surpluses.  They came about because the economy grew more strongly than expected.  We should support those legislators who act like they understand that economic growth creates jobs and that economic growth is created by private initiative.  We should support those legislators who consistently vote to remove barriers to business creation and innovation and defeat those who do not.  Those barriers include higher taxes and increasing government involvement in business decisions and operations.

All of this will take work on our part.  We cannot expect to have legislators who work for what is right and wise unless we do our work to find and support those who do.  There are many of them in the House of Representatives and in the Senate today.  We need more of them.

I believe that people eventually get the government that they deserve, and I yet believe that we deserve better than we have and that the time has come to get better.

Of Time for Dying and Living

We are all in the process of dying.  That is why this existence is called “mortality.”  Until we reach the end of that process, though, we are also in the process of living.

The first fact gives rise to the notion of time.  The latter empowers us to do something with time.

The temporary nature of mortality—brought to an end when we receive the immortality that Christ won for us all on the cross and through His resurrection from the tomb—means that time, too, is swallowed up by Christ’s victory over death and will have an end.  What will we do with forever?  How is our forever affected by what we do with time?

While we are in mortality and governed by time an existence without these temporary limitations may seem as hard to grasp as sight must be to one who has never known it.  Yet the promise of eternal existence is as sure as God’s promise of permanent vision to the blind.  As the blind keep a place in their hearts and minds open for the reality of vision, let us keep our hearts and minds open to the concept of forever to be filled one day by its realization, the comparatively brief limitations to be replaced by the boundless.

The ancient American prophet Alma explained how ultimately insignificant time-bound events are, including death itself:

Now whether there is more than one time appointed for men to rise it mattereth not; for all do not die at once, and this mattereth not; all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men. (Alma 40:8)

The psalmist Ethan the Ezrahite lamented how short and vain life becomes if we consider only mortality:

Remember how short my time is: wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?  What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? (Psalm 89:47, 48)

If forever, however, is the normal nature of man’s meaningful existence, then why go through this whole temporary mortal experience?  The answer to that is found in the understanding of just how big eternal life is, requiring some intense preparation.  For eternal society to be the great blessing that never grows old, never becomes stale, an eternal source of joy—rather than a never ending hell of bad conduct, conflict, and ultimate pointlessness—people need to prepare to live there in peace, harmony, union, and the kindness that is the pure love of Christ.  That is the point of this life, a training and testing period, where time is a gift from God to be used to learn how to abide in the presence of God forever, guided by commandments He has given us to teach us how to live “after the manner of happiness” (2 Nephi 5:27).

And the days of the children of men were prolonged, according to the will of God, that they might repent while in the flesh; wherefore, their state became a state of probation, and their time was lengthened, according to the commandments which the Lord God gave unto the children of men.  (2 Nephi 2:21)

While time may often feel short, God made sure that it would be long enough—but no need to drag it out.

Seemingly short or long, it is the task of this mortal life to make the most of our time, for when it is over the pattern is set for how we choose to live the eternities on the other side of death.  That is to say, in this life we shape and reveal the character of persons we would like to be forever, with sufficient opportunities to change and adjust while we may, but in time the rehearsals end, the play is performed to its conclusion, the curtain closes, and the stage lights go out.  A missionary in ancient America explained it this way to a group of people who had discovered that evil was not as happy as they had thought:

And now, as I said unto you before, as ye have had so many witnesses, therefore, I beseech of you that ye do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life, which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed.  (Alma 34:33)

Today awash in time and place, this life and this world can seem like so much, even though we all acknowledge that we came here with nothing and take just as much with us when we depart.  The tools of learning, building, testing, and trying are all lent and mean very little in the end.  What we make of ourselves during our time with them, whether we relied upon the help of God our Father to become more or less like Him, are what will matter when the angel sounds his trump, announcing “that there shall be time no longer” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:110).

Of Lawlessness and the Constitution of the United States

Trivia question for the day:  What is the smallest national legislature in the world?  If you answered, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, give yourself 25 points and a chance at the bonus question:  What is the highest law of the land?  If you answered, the Constitution of the United States of America, subtract 50 points from your score and shake hands with the moderator as you leave the contest in polite and condescending disgrace.

If you are a student of the history of the United States, particularly of its founding, and if you are in addition a constitutional scholar, including some experience reading the writings of the writers of the Constitution, you can take some solace in knowing that your second answer used to be right.  It was right for most of the first 100 years of the history of the United States, and remained right for another 50 years or so after that, although things were already changing in the late 1800s.

In the latter part of the 1800s the Progressive movement, and its fellow travelers the Positivist legal scholars, asserted its voice in America with the notion that law was not at all really connected to natural law as the Founders believed and intended.  In the Progressive/Positivist view, law was whatever lawmakers wanted it to be, and that extended to how the Constitution was to be interpreted.  The Constitution was a collection of written words, words whose meanings were to be interpreted by the new supreme legislature, the Supreme Court, to accommodate the Progressive/Positivist agenda.

The whole idea of a constitution is that there are some fundamental, basic laws that do not change, or that change only by the specific decision and action of super majorities of the population (super majorities to ensure that the rights of minorities are safeguarded).  To preserve their integrity those fundamental laws are written down and taught and embraced from generation to generation.  In the United States, it was on the basis of written constitutions that our nation came together, first the Articles of Confederation, and later the Constitution.

The Constitution of the United States begins with the words, “We the People”.  All of these were new, exceptional ideas.  The approach at the time in the rest of the world was, “You the People”, with a despot, monarch, or some small group of people governing the rest of the population.  In America things were different, and the Founders sought to enshrine and perpetuate that difference within strong bands of a written constitution and the division of governmental power prescribed  and preserved by the Constitution.

It does not seem so different or exceptional anymore.  It seems that today the law, constitutional or otherwise, can be changed or written by five out of nine unelected people in black robes issuing their decrees from a Greek temple in Washington, D.C.  The rest of the 313 million who make up We the People have no more say about it.  That is tolerable, and even desirable if these nine, or the five of the nine, limit themselves to enforcing the laws and Constitution that the people themselves have established through constitutional process.  It becomes intolerable when they just make it up, as they have been increasingly doing since the 1930s.  That is not law.  It is tyrannical lawlessness.

This is very real to the 313 million who are expected to follow the dictates of this tiny legislature.  Under the influence of the lawless behavior of the members of the Supreme Court and their failure to uphold the Constitution, lawlessness and lack of respect for the Constitution are spreading throughout the American system of government.  In very recent years we have witnessed a narrow majority in the Congress, violating its own procedures, pass legislation that obviously violated the Constitution. The executive branch, suspected by the nation’s Founders as ever prone to plans to oppress the people, has exerted an increasingly cavalier attitude toward the Constitution.

These lawless acts themselves are not trivial.  They were explicitly designed to restrict the freedoms of the people, whether with regard to their healthcare choices, how they conduct their financial affairs, or how they find, develop, and use energy—all pretty fundamental to the way that the people live their daily lives.  Under the rule of law we would look to the courts (among other places) to uphold the law and turn back unconstitutional and thus lawless efforts to take away the rights of the people.  Too often lately we look to the courts in vain.  It is far from a sure thing these days that the Court will come to the rescue of the Constitution and the freedoms it was written to protect, witness the suspense that precedes each new decision.

The recent Obamacare decision is the latest and most painful insult to “We the People” yet to come from the Supreme Legislature.  For now, the Five have said that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution cannot be used to force Americans to buy health insurance.  No need.  The Five decided that the taxing authority can be used to force people to do whatever our leaders in Washington want us to do—although they failed to indicate which taxing authority was used. 

The Founders were chary with the taxing authority that they extended to Washington, putting strong walls and tight rules around its exercise.  Remember, it took an amendment to the Constitution to allow an income tax.  Obamacare is not an income tax, or any of the other constitutionally allowed taxes.  Yet a tax it is, now decreed by the five of the nine Justices, that can be applied to anyone—and the anyone is mostly younger adults—who choose in the future not to buy health insurance.  The Five did not say what we might next be forced by taxes to do:  that is just a blank that they have left for people in Washington to fill.

In the days when the Constitution was the highest law of the land one of its great defenders, Daniel Webster, declared in a pleading before the Supreme Court that, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”  The Chief Justice of that Court, John Marshall, quoted and enshrined that thought in his ruling, McCulloch v. Maryland.  Today that power is now available, at the will of the Five, to destroy the freedoms of the people, freedoms that the Constitution and the earliest Courts served to protect.