DEMOCRACY ISN’T DEAD … IT’S ALIVE AND WELL
|| By RICK MANNING || Many Republicans are bemoaning the populist ascendancy of Donald Trump as if it was the end to the republic itself; that we are somehow entering a new age which is the equivalent of the runaway mobs with their guillotines during the French Revolution. Surely tyranny will follow.
What a bunch of nonsense.
Here is a clue for those just waking up to the political phenomena that we are witnessing, don’t blame Trump, Ted Cruz or even Bernie Sanders. Blame those in the Washington, D.C. political establishment who refused to stand up to Obama’s destroying what remained of the rule of law under the Constitution. Blame those who accepted the premise that allowing the federalization of our nation’s schools (at all levels) was acceptable and could be managed.
We are in post-Constitutional government. This is not a good thing, but it is objectively true. Congress has ceded all of their authority to the executive branch. The Supreme Court has ruled in King v. Burwell, with a GOP nominee agreeing, that the actual words in legislation don’t matter, and can be reinterpreted however the executive branch decides suits their purpose. The GOP in Congress continues to give lip service to things like executive amnesty and concern about the borders, while funding Obama’s every move. The GOP in Congress pretends to want to stand up to Iran, while giving Obama’s Iran deal an okay through the original Corker bill.
Congress, the branch of the government that was supposed to be the closest the people, for all intents and purposes is on life support – and has been for years. And with it, the consent of the governed has effectively been eviscerated.
After the disappointments of 2010 and 2014 Republican Congressional landslides, the people understand this, and that is why they are now flocking to a Trump who they see as their last, best hope of staving off the forces of darkness that are destroying the nation. They don’t care about the Constitution per se, we have allowed Americans to graduate from high school without having any appreciation for its genius. They don’t care about free market theories, they have seen their jobs outsourced with big corporations and big government rigging the system against them. And they don’t care about speeches at the border, they want someone who they believe has the strength to tell everyone to go pound sand and send the illegal immigrants back to wherever they came from.
The appeal of Trump is an expression of democracy and representative government, not a rejection or end to it. He is representing his supporters by offering them a voice they have lacked – and he’s doing a better job at it than any of his competitors …
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Rick Manning is president of Americans for Limited Government. Follow him on Twitter @RManning957. This excerpt (reprinted with permission) originally appeared on The Hill.