If Congress approves anything remotely resembling this relief package, we need to pursue means for peaceful revolution that our Constitution gives us that are more radical than biennial elections throwing out the bums. The bums have figured out how to game the system already in place to give themselves better security against being thrown out than the Politburo under Soviet Communism ever attained to. We need to change the system out from under them.
Yes, 2/3 of Congress would have to agree to get the ball rolling. But if they’ll agree to a $700billion blank check, won’t they thereby have already abdicated? Will it really require much public pressure to get them to just take the small further step and abdicate in name as well as in fact? We’ll give them the Baby Doc treatment. They can get on a plane for the Riviera. But they have to get on that plane, all of them (with exceptions only as approved by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with voting for this relief package, or either AUMF, or the USA Patriot Act, or the MCA, or FISA "reform", putting reprieve beyond even the Commission), and never return to this country that they have raped, pillaged, burned, and now, intend to urinate all over.
But, oh my God, shouldn’t we be in mortal terror of a runaway convention? This is what we always hear against the convention method of amending the Constitution, that such a convention could rip up the founding document, and run off in who knows what direction, untrammeled by any checks or balances. Well, guess what! That’s exactly what we’re seeing right now, but without even the acknowledgement that this relief package is the extra-constitutional measure that it clearly is. We could pick a thousand names at random out of the phonebook to make up this convention and have them run the country free of checks and balances, and that would be far preferable to letting the Great God Paulson, or any of this group of proven fools and knaves, have their unchecked way with us any longer.
It’s like that class warfare the Right is always accusing us of wanting to wage, when actually we have disarmed and they’re the ones who have been waging unanswered class war on us for a generation. The revolution began two generations ago, from the Right, and has so far been waged one-sidedly by the enemies of public government. No one likes to acknowledge the changes for what they are, and we have got by until now without being forced to admit that we’re not a republic anymore, by pretending that secret government, emergency government, presidential government, all these bypasses of Congressional supremacy and public governance, only applied to the military, or intelligence gathering, or, well, yes, okay, foreign affairs as a whole. But domestically, domestically, that’s different. For domestic policy and the budget, Congress is in charge. We will have government of, by, and for the people, and conduct the people’s business in public by the collective decision of the people’s representatives — for domestic affairs. Except now we see that you can’t really compartmentalize the two. A financial crisis presents the same temptation to let the president’s men handle it all behind closed doors as the supposed, and equally vaporous, foreign and military crises of the past sixty years. Give in to that temptation, and we’ve reached a point where we’re not even pretending anymore to conduct even domestic policy in public, for the publc, by the people’s representatives. This is just the final step in that revolution that has, bloodlessly (well, yes, plenty of people have died to make the national security state happen — but mostly foreigners!), replaced a highly imperfect, but at least functional, republic, with an elected dictatorship.
We’re not getting our republic back without fighting back against this revolution, without reversing it with a counter-revolution.