There are many good reasons our government is based on three “separate but equal branches.” The men who wrote our Constitution 250 years ago had just fought a bloody war against an incredibly powerful monarch whose empire was based on extracting wealth in all its forms from merciless colonial exploitation of weaker nations.
Few expected the victory of those brave men and women that gave birth to a new nation. A nation of people free from the dictates of a monarch — and designed to preserve that freedom through carefully crafted “checks and balances” that would assure no one branch of government could trample the people or their Constitution underfoot.
Yet now those checks and balances have been abandoned in favor of so-called “loyalty” to one political party over the long-standing mandate to ensure the branches of government remain separate and diligent in their primary function to serve the people and govern true to the Constitution.
The excesses of one-party rule have long been known from the actual history of what has happened here in Montana — and now in the nation — when one party dominates all three branches of government. In short, the checks and balances on which this nation was founded disappear into the sordid hole of party politics.
When a president decides to become a Mad Emperor, it is the legislative branch — Congress — which is charged with countering actions that abuse and ignore the rule of domestic and international laws and make a mockery of Constitutional governance.
But when Congress is cowed into submission, that fealty to the Constitution, which all members swear to uphold in their Oath of Office, is sacrificed — not for the benefit the populace, but for the benefit of a political party and its brutal leader.
Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, plainly laid out his vision for how the world, and our nation, should work. Namely, by what he called the “iron law of power, control, and dominance.”
Of course you won’t find that “law” anywhere but in Miller’s fevered mind. And it’s a long ways from participatory democracy and the duty of Congress to check the extremes of the executive branch.
Unfortunately, Congress, and Montana’s entire congressional delegation, are complicit in that dereliction of duty and violation of their Oath of Office.
Given that three of Montana’s four members of Congress are veterans, it seems they have confused being in the military — where the “Commander in Chief” gives the orders and they obey — and being in Congress, which is specifically charged with serving the people, not whomever sits in the Oval Office.
That distinction is critical to the functioning of the nation which, by most measures, isn’t doing all that well right now as citizens struggle to feed, clothe and shelter themselves and our families.
Add to that the wide international condemnation being directed to the actions of an out-of-control president whose avarice now extends to openly confiscating the resources of sovereign nations, deposing their leaders through military force, and threatening traditional allies with similar actions in violation of international law.
There’s still time to bring honorto the positions Montana’s congressional delegation holds. But that requires acknowledging that Miller’s “iron law” doesn’t exist in law or the Constitution and has no place among the community of nations in the 21st Century.
Your sworn duty is not to the president and his toadies, it’s to “We the People” — and that call to duty could not be more pressing as our democracy now hangs by the thinnest of threads.
- George Ochenski is Montana’s longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana’s natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.
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