DISSOLVING CONGRESS

          How often as the cry echoed down through the years: The Republic is never safe
when Congress comes to town. Life, liberty and property are all in jeopardy!!
            I believe it was the British philosopher and political thinker John Locke who first hit
upon this deeply prophetic truth. Never was it said too often and never more truthfully than of the present congregation in Washington.

            Like most philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to
modern existentialists, Locke occasionally sought refuge behind the abstractions of
metaphysics. But mostly he was a plain-spoken man, and certainly there was no
mistaking his meaning when he suggested, not once, not twice, but at least three
times, that when legislators have no business to conduct in their seat of government
they should simply STAY HOME.

            When could such an insight have been more useful than at the present moment, mired as we are in a financial crisis brought on largely by greed and an incompetent House of Representatives—and a slightly less incompetent Senate?
            Possibly the finest idea Locke ever had, though unfortunately it never made its way
into any of our founding documents, as so many of his others did. Maybe the
Founders thought the idea too obvious to deserve mention. Still, it is an idea that has
never caught on in Washington and apparently not in his own country either—not even at a time when the need for good, sound common sense was never more in need.
Even when Congress supposedly has this sort o great work to do, somehow it can never quite get down to the task. But, winter and summer, where are they? On Capitol Hill,
drawing down their pay as usual or else on some tax-paid sojourn in one of the world’s
many exotic trouble spots.
            One cannot even cursorily read Locke’s works without concluding that young Thomas Jefferson must have committed to memory practically every word the man ever wrote. Not only Jefferson but all of our famous Founders owed a profound debt to the British
political thinker.
            His words echo throughout the Declaration of Independence—more perhaps in
Jefferson’s draft than in the product that emerged after heavy editing by his elders—
and at the same time provided the constitutional foundation stone upon which our
system of government is built.
            Yet nothing the philosopher ever said has more meaning for today’s Democrat-
controlled Congress than a series of statements that can be reduced to a brief
phrase: Go home! Or if not home, go wander Europe with your mistresses, paying
your own way of course, or take to your yachts and vacation condos.
            Now it is a great misfortune that Locke had nothing to say about the concept of a
Supreme Court that appears to be running the government and often without any real
sense of control or responsibility. But let that go. How could he ever have thought of
it, when it didn’t even occur to our most profound thinkers until Chief Justice John
Marshall and those who followed him created the concept of judicial review, with the
power to overthrow acts of Congress and to hell with checks and balances—and
Congress let him get away with it. And is still letting him and his many successors get
away with it.
            Now the idea of reigning in the court—and Congress does have that power even if it
has seldom exercised it—is truly a great business that would justify the time and effort
spent on it; but nary a word about that, nary a suggestion that the time has come to
limit the court’s judicial excesses that grow more expansive by the year.
            Consider for the moment Locke’s thoughts of legislative responsibility, when it begins, when it ends and when it ought to disband and get out of Washington and spare the
country an embarrassing spectacle pointing up the farcial doings of a
mollycoddling president, the most recent example being a womanizing Bill Clinton and his servile aides.
            Said Locke: “The Legislative Power is that which has a right to direct how the Force of the Commonwealth shall be imploy’d for preserving the Community and the Members
of it. But . . . there is no need, that the Legislative should be always in being, not
having always any business to do . . . ” And again: “It is not necessary, no not so
much as convenient, that the Legislative should be always in being . . . because there
is not always need of new Laws to be made.” Even more to the point: “Constant
frequent meetings of the Legislative, and long Continuations of their Assemblies,
without necessary occasion, could not but be burthersome to the People, and must
necessarily in time produce more dangerous inconveniences . . . “
            In simplest terms, as it relates to our present Congress: Go home and stay there until somebody invites you back—and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that.  An obvious point by now to almost anyone who has kept half an eye on the non-doings of the House and Senate.
            To paraphrase the author of Hamlet: Thou needs’t no philosopher come from the
grave to tell us this.
            The last Democrat presidential candidate I ever voted for was the corrupt and
devious Lyndon Johnson, a vulgar, venal and thoroughly disreputable character, yet
too shrewd to leave behind him tapes that could have got him thrown out of office by
impeachment or perhaps sent to jail. Yet for all his shrewdness he lacked the deeper
sense or “vision,” the term now in common use, to foresee where his mistaken
policies in Vietnam were tending or that his big-spending Great Society would come to
nothing –or in many cases to worse than nothing.
            What a lesson so many of us learned after Johnson’s election in 1964! A lesson too easily forgot, however, now that the Democrat Party, or rather the far left-wing, are again holding all the power that seems to have little on its mind but the punishment, whose greatest crime, apparently, at least to his critics, was to save the nation from a second 9/11 attack and alert those paying attention that we are far from immune from a far worse calamity. Will they actually take action on George W. Bush’s ambitious agenda, punishing him and his aides for failing to treat captured terrorists like gentlemen brought up in the tradition of Jefferson and his peers—or maybe just dawdle away their time in bordellos and fancy bars? Will they besmirch themselves with the same ‘do’nothing’ stigma that put Truman bak in office against seemingly overwhelming odds?

            Have we forgotten that Bush was the first president with the first original idea for reforming Social Security that has come along in our lifetime.  But who among us believes Congress will ever get these or any of his other ambitious proposals done within a reasonable amount of time, or indeed that it will ever get them done at all.
            With the example of the paralysis that affects not only this Congress, but most of
those that have gone before, old Locke would have had a good many reasons to
expand his thoughts on the proper way to conduct a government.
            Whether there is no business before Congress, or whether the majority simply doesn’t know how to proceed with many unfinished matters now hanging fire or whether their
numerical majority is so thin that they are simply cowed by leftover Republicans—
whatever the case, it is all one: The words John Locke are more applicable than even
he could have imagined, though certainly he did understand, as many have since,
that the longer Congress remains in session the greater the jeopardy of the country.
            It would be too easy to assume that our legislators have simply taken leave of their
senses, when they somehow manage to turn every issue, whatever its importance,
into a matter of inconsequentiality, in which they appeared to be slogging about
confused and weary and out of sorts and desperately in need of a change. So just let
them get out of Washington and go home to and explain themselves, if possible, to
their constituents.
            Have any of these people ever thought of running on a “do nothing” ticket. Some
might even approach the well-nigh unattainable status of the learned and unexcitable
Calvin Coolidge. Let them go home and stay there until a national emergency calls
them forth. Better still, let them wait the “emergency” out and, depending on whether
it threatens national security, maybe it will go away by itself, as the Great Depression
almost certainly would have done if, as many revisionists now believe, Herbert Hoover
and Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t taken it upon themselves to tinker with naturally
sustaining and self-correcting market forces.
            So let them go home and stay there and, above all, DO NOTHING! Let them drink
their toasts to the likes of William McKinley, who didn’t even leave his front porch to
campaign for reelection, and William Howard Taft and Franklin Pierce and the Filmore
Fews, a famous organization paying tribute to the non-accomplishments of the man
who may have been our greatest President, Millard Filmore, sneeringly and unfairly
impugned by his disclaimers as a “Copperhead” or “Cotton Whig”—in other words, as
a Southern sympathizer.
            Certainly he managed to get fewer your Americans killed in unnecessary wars than
the Lincolns, Roosevelts, Wilsons and Lyndon Johnsons. If he could have been
around long enough he might even have managed us to avoid to the calamitous Civil
War or, more correctly, War between the States, fought on the pretext of freeing
slaves when, in actuality, the only real reason for it was the fear of Northern
moneychangers that the South would soon surpass their region in industrial might,
what with all that cotton lying for the taking just outside the doors of their new-grown textile mills.
            If you have something to do, congressmen, and are willing to do it, which is seldom
the case, then for god’s sake do it and get the hell out of Washington! Go back to
your wives, your swimming holes, your summer revivals, your family reunions, your
backyard barbecues, your singles bars, your long days when there are no easy women to sooth your pain. Just get the hell on out and let the rest of us LIVE! As soon as we can get hold of what money we have left and stick it under our mattresses.