Here We Are
“There is no daylight.”
“There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives. July 21
Truer or scarier words have rarely been spoken.
For “daylight” is precisely what the framers sought to build into the Constitution in the first place.
Here is what James Madison wrote in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Madison’s thinking on this derived from Montesquieu, who wrote in The Spirit of Law: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.”
While the separation of powers is itself fundamental to democracy and to human liberty, it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by a system of checks and balances in which each branch can check the overreach of the other two.
“A Legislative, an Executive and a judicial Power, comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by Government,” wrote John Adams. “It is by balancing each of these Powers against the other two, that the Effort in human Nature toward Tyranny can alone be checked and restrained and any degree of Freedom preserved in the Constitution.”
The language, punctuation, and capitalization of these quotes may seem old-fashioned, but the message could not be clearer. A constitution in which the three branches operate separately but have certain abilities to check the aggrandizement of the others is the bedrock of democracy and of the liberty that comes from self-government.
This is no longer happening in the United States.
Speaker Johnson went on to say, in his very next sentence, that the president “has asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court; all of that is in process.” This is the same attorney general, Pam Bondi whom, The Wall Street Journal reported, had told Trump in May that his name was in the Epstein files. The White House called the report “another fake news story” – and tried to change the subject by accusing Barack Obama of treason. The speaker then refused to hold a vote on the release of the files and sent the house into summer recess to prevent the matter from being brought to the floor. All that remains is for the supreme court to weigh in with yet another 6-3 decision boosting the power of the president. Then there will be no daylight indeed.
And for what? To cover up, once again, the personal peccadilloes of the president of the United States and to make the three branches of government protect him at all costs.
That the future of the republic should rely on such a sordid foundation as the assignations of Jeffrey Epstein and the questions surrounding his suicide in prison (while he was supposedly on suicide watch) is the latest example of how low we have sunk in just six months. Starvation stalks Gaza. Climate change has brought unprecedented heat levels from Houston to Chicago. Almost 12 million Americans are at risk of losing health care coverage, and U.S. Marines have been sent into the streets of our own cities.
That the Congress of the United States spends its time protecting the predations of powerful men at the expense of the lives of the young women who were their victims, not to mention the country they are supposedly governing, defies belief
Yet, to borrow from the last line of the Dorothy Parker story: “Yes, here we are,” she said. “Aren’t we?