A headline in The Hill reads, “McConnell’s vow: No more government shutdowns.” The story begins “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says he will not allow a government shutdown this fall … He added that he would find a way forward ‘Through negotiations.'”
And some self-styled conservatives wonder why I evoke the name of quisling when I speak of GOP leaders like McConnell. People like him never approach what they are pleased to call “negotiations” without some words meant to convey their submission to the reality of their situation. But why should the leader of the party that controls a majority in both Houses of the U.S. Congress behave like the representative of a conquered people?
Some of you will mistakenly assume that when I refer to those who have conquered I mean Obama and the Democrats. But Obama’s approach to his so-called negotiations with Iran smacks of the same submissive quisling attitude McConnell affects as he deals with the Obama faction. In both cases one gets the impression of a “negotiation” in which the outcome will be (or has already been) determined by some authority that has no visible role in the negotiating process.
Something else appears to be true of both of them. Their attitude of pre-emptive submission is not directed toward the U.S. Constitution, or the people of the United States by whose sovereign authority it was ordained and established. By simply ruling out use of the legislature’s power to refuse the resources required to perpetrate unjust or irresponsible abuses of the U.S. Government’s powers, McConnell surrenders the most readily available means the Constitution provides for Congress to respond to such abuses.
Meanwhile, Obama blatantly disregards the decisive consultative role the Constitution prescribes for the U.S. Senate before international agreements can have the force of law. He purports to evoke the force of “international consensus,” instead of consulting the constitutionally represented will of the people.
McConnell casts aside the legislative power through which the Constitution aims to assure the U.S. government’s due dependence on the goodwill of the American people. Obama’s subversion of the U.S. Senate’s responsibility to confer the status of law on the provisions of international agreements, or withhold it, directly assails the independence of the American people. In neither case is the issue involved merely a matter of competence when it comes to negotiating tactics. What is at stake is the exceptionally decisive authority the people of the United States have exerted, by Constitutional means, over their government. What is at stake is the question of whether they shall submit to the de facto abrogation of that Constitutional authority, thus overturning the republican form of government the Constitution was intended to guarantee.
This is also what is at stake when it comes to lax enforcement of border security, and the purposeful effort to change the character of the American people by conniving at a massive influx of illegal immigrants, and of refugees careless admitted from areas of the world infested with deadly hostility toward the United States. Put it all together and it adds up to a general assault against the people of the United States, involving not just their sovereignty but their identity as a nation. At the moment the facts compel us to admit that the assault has thus far been largely successful.
From the start, the identity of the American people has been, as it were, a work in progress. It was challenged initially by clashing religious differences. Moreover the societal implications of our founding principles, and the decentralized geographic and constitutional framework of our common political life, opened our land to people from all over the world. Some were brought here by the force (sometimes quite literally speaking) of material ambitions. Others were attracted by the scope of freedom given to individuals as they pursued them. People engrossed in the pursuit of their respective dreams found it easy to believe that the formal allegiance to a way of doing business was an adequate substitute for the more tangible elements of family, faith and history that have usually defined human tribes and nations.
But in the moments of poignant crisis that actually impelled the American people into some trial of their common identity, the breath of life by which the nation became, as it were, a living soul inevitably formed itself into words that evoked something more generally human in its scope than the identity of any nation known to man before us. They invariably brought into focus ideas of right, justice and decent liberty that our nation’s Founders consciously derived from an understanding not just of men, but of humanity itself.
This is why, in these days of our threatening demise, the most deadly aim of the attack against us has to do with dissolving the good conscience that ties us to that understanding. It was our dedication to the vocation of humanity that made us exceptional as a nation. Our common heart was deeply stirred in response to words (like those of the Declaration of Independence) that acknowledge that vocation as a noble endowment of truth and right, made evident by God. The forces that celebrate the end of America’s exceptionalism have driven us toward it by encouraging us to deny this calling. For it cannot stir the hearts of people for whom there is no truth; no God, no humanity but in the common bondage of self-regarding appetites, pleasures and passions.
Bereft of our common vocation, we are being torn apart by the treasons of so-called “leaders” who, to serve their common ambition, encourage not our common bond but our common bondage. They enslave us first of all to our own selfish passions, so that in consequence they may more easily enslave us to their common ambition. By this means they are restoring a world where the rule is of those who see no humanity but what is made in the image of their own success and power, and who see, for those not yet “evolved” enough to qualify as human, no role but slyly forced submission to that rule. “There is no God,” they say, “but we are Him.” They are not atheists, after all, but rather the returning idols of a world that has no place but for themselves and those seduced or intimidated into worshipping them. A sum total of humanity that is, they seem to think, a reasonable measure of what they call the carrying capacity of the earth.
