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Alexandra Petri: Too bad we can do nothing about the excesses of this president
Boy, it is really awful what the president has said, and I could not denounce it more. I mean, I could denounce it more. I will denounce it more. I wish that there were something else I could do, but I am only a senator.
A senator, as you know, is someone empowered by the Constitution to go on cable news and state opinions. A senator can do nothing to restrain the executive branch. In the system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers, the Senate is neither.
The Senate is an appendix, a vestigial organ whose function no one can determine, so it just sits there and sometimes rumbles ominously after meals. Aside from its traditional role of acting as a rubber-stamp for judicial appointees, it is a kind of cheery bobblehead designed by the Constitution to stare at what the Executive is doing and offer tacit approval. It is decorative, not functional — like a pocket square, or a succulent in a dentist’s waiting room, or the “Share On Facebook” button at the bottom of an article.
It is sort of a VIP box, from which you can view your democracy careening helplessly like a malfunctioning Roomba, screaming but powerless to help. (Not to be confused with a VP box, where you have to sit with an expression of beatific tranquility and see only the good in whatever the president has most recently done, and blink maybe less than the average person should blink?)
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2018/07/18/too-bad-we-can-do-nothing-about-the-excesses-of-this-president/
A senator, as you know, is someone empowered by the Constitution to go on cable news and state opinions. A senator can do nothing to restrain the executive branch. In the system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers, the Senate is neither.
The Senate is an appendix, a vestigial organ whose function no one can determine, so it just sits there and sometimes rumbles ominously after meals. Aside from its traditional role of acting as a rubber-stamp for judicial appointees, it is a kind of cheery bobblehead designed by the Constitution to stare at what the Executive is doing and offer tacit approval. It is decorative, not functional — like a pocket square, or a succulent in a dentist’s waiting room, or the “Share On Facebook” button at the bottom of an article.
It is sort of a VIP box, from which you can view your democracy careening helplessly like a malfunctioning Roomba, screaming but powerless to help. (Not to be confused with a VP box, where you have to sit with an expression of beatific tranquility and see only the good in whatever the president has most recently done, and blink maybe less than the average person should blink?)
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2018/07/18/too-bad-we-can-do-nothing-about-the-excesses-of-this-president/
6 replies
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