Because They Can’t Get Their Way, Mainstream Democrats Advocate Abolition of the U.S. Senate. Not Just the Filibuster, the Entire Senate.

posted at 8:10 pm on February 17, 2010 by directorblue
[ Moonbats ]   

You remember that “Constitution” thingy? You know, the anachronism from a bygone era, which Democrat politicians and judges take an oath to uphold and then promptly forget about — or claim that it’s a “living and breathing” document?

To show you how far left the Democrat Party has moved over the last couple of decades, a serious debate appears to be raging within the party over the role of the United States Senate. Not just procedures like the filibuster, mind you, but whether there actually should be a Senate at all.

The anti-American Statists — disguised as mainstream Democrats — are debating this topic over at Laura Flanders’ neck of the woods at FireDogLake in a panel discussion headlined “Should We Do Away With the Senate?”.

With the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat, Democrats in DC seemed to give up on getting any major legislation passed. 59 votes (well, 58 and Joe Lieberman) was just not good enough. The blame has been flying–it’s Obama’s fault, Rahm Emanuel’s, Harry Reid’s–but what if the problem simply is the Senate?

What can we change? Would eliminating the filibuster–the so-called “nuclear option” back when Republicans were suggesting it–be enough, or is the Senate, with its two-Senators-per-state-regardless-of-population mandate, just too fundamentally undemocratic? We ask the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, author of ¡OBÁMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and author of a new Nation cover story on the subject, and Nancy Scola of the Personal Democracy Forum.

The panel discussion involves four prominent Democrats who bandy about falsehoods — like “the filibuster is unconstitutional” — with reckless abandon.

The program ends with the suggestion that the United States Senate and the Electoral College both be eradicated.

This discussion aligns nicely with news that President Obama now plans to legislate by Executive Order and dispense with the niceties of working with Congress.

* * * * * * * * *
Like spoiled children, anti-American Leftists are willing to dispense with the Constitution and literally toss thousands of years of human experience down the memory hole because they can’t get their way.

Consider how the three branches of government came to be.

In Book VI of his Histories, the ancient Greek historian Polybius described three basic forms of government, each categorized by the number of those in power. He listed monarchy (rule by the one); aristocracy (rule by the few); and democracy (rule by the many). Polybius described, over time, how each type of government would gradually decline into their various corrupted forms of tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule, respectively.

Polybius believed that Republican Rome had designed a new form of government that could help check this inevitable decline. Rome combined all three forms of government — monarchy (its elected executives, called consuls); aristocracy (the Senate); and democracy (the popular assemblies). In this mixed form of goverment, each branch would check the corrupting ambitions and power of the others.

Aristotle and Cicero likewise praised the construction of a “mixed constitution” and the requirement of a separation of three powers within government.

The French nobleman and legal expert Charles-Louis de Secondat, the Baron de Montesquieu, studied the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. He believed that a properly designed government, in order to prevent tyranny, would require three branches of government. The British philosopher John Locke followed suit and his powerful works inspired Thomas Jefferson as he authored the Declaration of Independence.

As well, America’s Founding Fathers repeatedly cited Montesquieu’s seminal Spirit of the Laws and its emphasis on checks and balances within government. As James Madison wrote, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu.”

History teaches us that the decline of a society and the demise of a government comes with the institutionalization of corruption and a wanton disregard for the written law. Such is our situation today, wherein the states have become puppets of an all-powerful federal government that confiscates more and more private property while exerting increasing control over every aspect of our lives.

The greatest bulwark against tyranny in America has always been the Constitution, which instantiates our carefully designed system of private property, God-given individual liberties and free enterprise.

Yet today the Speaker of the House can’t articulate why a federal takeover of the entire health care system is constitutional. And mainstream Democrats seriously debate the destruction of the U.S. Senate.

This crowd of leftists are literally advocating the overthrow of the United States government. Tossing aside thousands of years of human experience and advocating a return to a centralized, authoritarian form of government that can’t work and has never worked.

What these Democrats offer is nothing less than treason.

 
Hat tip: W.   Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

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