Karl
Patterico’s Pontifications
10/8/2011
It is a shame that Reuters was about the only media outlet to report on this part of this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Wednesday rejected concerns by Americans of a dysfunctional government because of disagreements and difficulty in getting legislation through Congress.
Such complaints escalated earlier this year when Congress squabbled over the debt ceiling while President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in the Senate battled with Republican lawmakers, especially in the House of Representatives.
Scalia’s remarks, which you can watch (for the time being) at roughly the 37-minute mark of the Senate’s archived webcast, are worth reading in full. Scalia begins by noting how little Americans know of their Constitution, even when he speaks to law students who presumably have an interest in it…
…The Europeans look at this system and say “It passes one house, it doesn’t pass the other house, sometimes the other house is in the control of a different party. it passes both, and this president, who has a veto power, vetoes it,” and they look at this, and they say (adopting an accent) “Ach, it is gridlock.” I hear Americans saying this nowadays, and there’s a lot of it going around. They talk about a disfunctional government because there’s disagreement… and the Framers would have said, “Yes! That’s exactly the way we set it up. We wanted this to be power contradicting power because the main ill besetting us — as Hamilton said in The Federalist when he talked about a separate Senate: “Yes, it seems inconvenient, inasmuch as the main ill that besets us is an excess of legislation, it won’t be so bad.” This is 1787; he didn’t know what an excess of legislation was.
Unless Americans can appreciate that and learn to love the separation of powers, which means learning to love the gridlock which the Framers believed would be the main protector of minorities, [we lose] the main protection. If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard on some minority [and] they think it’s terribly unfair, it doesn’t take much to throw a monkey wrench into this complex system. Americans should appreciate that; they should learn to love the gridlock. It’s there so the legislation that does get out is good legislation…
Read the entire article at Patterico’s Pontifications.
