The US Constitution brought stability to a new nation, a confederacy that found itself on the brink of dissolution because of economic chaos and uprisings. America’s Founding Fathers wrote the document hastily over a single summer. The delegates, while presenting the document as creating a ‘more perfect’ union, left too many loose ends unresolved.
But this essay is not about the loose ends. Instead, it focuses on the responsibilities the Constitution delegates to officers of the federal government. We will examine how these responsibilities have morphed in the past 200+ years. Many changes came about via the Constitutional feature of amendments. Other changes happened because of the rise of the duopoly and descent into free market capitalism. The political duopoly, the rise of Free Market capitalism, and the previously noted Constitutional loopholes and gaps created opportunities for Constitutional officers to abdicate their responsibilities.
The preamble to the Constitution informs the reader of a list of responsibilities that federal government officers and employees are required to perform. Somehow, the Supreme Court, the Executive branch, and the Legislative branch have never ruled on a law that overturns any of these requirements as a justification for ruling it “unconstitutional”. A blatant abdication of responsibility. A quick example is that the Patriot Act enacted in the wake of 9/11 dissolved many of the “blessings of liberty, ” such as the requirement for a warrant to search for evidence of a crime.
The Vice President of the United States serves as the President of the Senate. Yet, after the 1st Vice President, John Adams, no Vice President performed as the leader of the Senate, except to break ties. This abdication delegated the responsibility of managing Senate activities and rules to the Majority Leader. A simple example is that from early on, the two leading parties would eventually dominate all political discourse. This was the first abdication that handed power to the political agendas and pushed aside constitutional order. Incidentally, the founders failed to delineate the Senate President’s duties. A gaping hole large enough to drive Mitch McConnell’s ego through.
The only branch with the power to declare war lives solely with the House of Representatives. Especially since the Cold War, which itself was an actual war. – except for the antics we have read about in Mad magazine’s Spy v Spy – the United States has been constantly engaged in military actions throughout the world. The House abdicated its responsibility of representing the will of the people by handing over the power of the purse to manage military actions on the ground, air, and sea. Instead, with only a few political objections by a handful of members, the House has not turned down any President’s request for funding the military and even provided the President with the power to engage in military actions for a limited time. However, should our soldiers land on foreign soil and suffer a single casualty, Congress will undoubtedly continue military action.
The House has the power to prevent wars from starting and to refuse to fund wars to stop them. The Senate has the power to approve peace via their authority to approve a treaty, they also approve or disapprove of most high-level Presidential appointments. Political attention slid into party affiliation, driving the individual representatives’ and senators’ voting decisions.
The Supreme Court has a history of two abdications. First is their tendency, from time to time, to echo popular sentiment or follow political headway with little regard for the words in the Constitution. Their decision that schools may be separate but equal delayed the Civil Rights movement until the 50s. They were ahead of history when they legalized abortion, only they hid the legalization behind a privacy argument. This provided an escape from applying the right to bodily autonomy just to please the religious sensitivities that wanted abortion banned. The recent overturn of Rowe V. Wade was a present to those religions by utilizing logic from 14th-century English ruling. This is also an example of the legislature abdicating its responsibility to draft a law declaring bodily autonomy as a right not enumerated in the Constitution.
Technically, we ought to raise these Constitutional abdications every time they happen. It was the primary aim of denoting a free press within the Constitution in the same clause as free speech. The redundancy was to place on the press, already a powerful institution in the late 18th century, a responsibility to provide the public at large with a source that would speak truth to power. Our history is overflowing with examples of press bias regarding parties and issues. Because the press is the only private sector business to enjoy Constitutional protection, the current state of our free press is as irresponsible as our elected officeholders.
But the abdication of responsibility by Congress via the aforementioned two-party monopoly, and their subservience, as public institutions, to serve the oligarchy is most evident in the legislature. Lawmakers pass laws whose stated purpose and actual beneficiaries are demonstrably at odds. The Federal government constructed, for example, until the Federal government constructed housing until the 1970s to meet the needs of lower-wage workers for shelter. These so-called projects became subject to entropy and outdated living quarters requiring replacements to be built. The laws that were enacted to allow modern housing construction gave investors profits while allowing most of the living quarters to be at market rates. The result was that low-wage workers were less likely to get shelter and mansions in the wealthy suburbs for the investors.
The Senate has installed rules that function to amplify the agenda of the majority political party. Initially, the judicious use of the filibuster gave the majority party senators an advantage over publicly controversial legislation. The Constitution plainly lays out that a majority (50% +1) vote is required to pass a law in either house. However, the Senate contrived the filibuster rule to require a supermajority to stop debate and proceed to a vote. Functionally, the use of the filibuster has made it impossible to ever have a vote without the majority allowing it. Clearly, common sense would demand that the rule as it is being used today is an unconstitutional power grab for one party over the other. The solution is simple: the Vice President presides over the Senate and can (and has) ruled a Senate rule out of order. Only the first few Vice Presidents have taken their legislative role seriously, and then they either used their position as easy money or as a step toward the presidency, which usually only occurs by a president’s death.
The Supreme Court has the responsibility to judge laws passed by Congress and can validate the Constitutionality of those laws. This power is also available to Congress in two manners. First, is to just pass a law that cancels the Unconstitutional one, or they can limit the power the Court has over the law. How often are these actions ever taken by Congress? How often do they react to the Court’s ruling by rewriting a law ruled unconstitutional or otherwise flawed to correct what is problematic about the law? This lack of response is surely an abdication of power by the United States Legislature.
By an accepted implication, the United States Supreme Court has the last say on issues related to the application of the US Constitution, such as the scope of democracy, the powers of the President, and the validity of laws and regulations. In short, they have the power to mold our future, alter the shape of our social norms, and define the accepted norms. It is a large ask, and perhaps more complex than envisioned by the founders. There have been cases of failure to reach these aspirations for the Court, but also eras of success.
There is one arena that the Supreme Court has shied away from during its entire history. That is democracy’s scope. Congress has expanded democracy, and recently it has walked back the executive’s ability to enforce the right to vote or failed entirely to react appropriately to controversies. Specifically, in 2000, the Court significantly interfered with the election; they stopped a desperately needed statewide recount of the presidential election to meet the certification deadline. Effectively declaring that the correct count was irrelevant. They abdicated their own power of judging; a critical reason for having judges (duh!). Ensuring democratic governance requires the precise counting of all votes. The Court easily could have noted that accuracy outweighs meeting artificial deadlines when needed.
