Parliament comes to America

Our elected officials have the responsibility to resist the impulse to react to their own desperation. Statesmanship isn’t about finding loopholes or forcing change at any cost—particularly when the belief in that cost is not shared by the people who must pay for it. The great statesmen, the ones who remain in the wax museum of our collective nostalgia, understood that the better part of power is knowing when not to use it.

And yet in these much vaunted “teachable moments” Washington seems to be conveying the saddest lesson of all: in this hyper-communicative age without reason and context, you don’t have to go about the trouble of changing the Constitution or adhering to its rules, when you can simply ignore it.

Eben Carle served in the White House as an Associate Director on the Homeland Security Council from 2008-2009. He received a master’s degree in American studies from Columbia University and is currently writing his first novel.