Pascal in his Pensées once said that to write about politics “was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.” Now there are two aspects to this statement. First, there is the laying down of rules. This task befell our founding fathers during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They were fully cognizant of Aristotle’s words, “every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good” (the opening line to Book One, Politics). In the Preamble of the Constitution they laid out what good they hoped to achieve: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” What follows the Preamble were the rules by which they hoped to structure and organize the new United States of America. Emmanuel Kant, though not a political philosopher, believed that reasonably intelligent people would establish universal laws and “a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions” (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals). Echoing the second part of Pascal’s statement, he concluded that “the problem of organizing a state . . . can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.”

Generally, I would refrain from characterizing my fellow Americans as lunatics or devils, but our current legislators do give me some misgivings about their intelligence. As I write this blog, they are unable to agree on a bill that would fund the Homeland Security Department. The “good” the majority party is trying to obtain is the defunding of the President’s administration of immigration policies. The irony, of course, is that they would be defunding border patrol agents, the very people assigned to control illegal immigration. In the process they would be severely limiting the effectiveness of a department responsible for the safety of all Americans. Is there a logic here that any intelligent person can identify for the rest of us? I doubt that the founding fathers ever intended to grant Congress funding authority so that they could shut down the government they vow to serve or any key part thereof designed to preserve it from harm. While the majority party accuses the President of overstepping his Constitutional authority, it clearly is trashing several of the primary goals stated in the Constitution’s Preamble, specifically, to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare . . .” Even if you believe the President exceeded his authority by prioritizing deportations—as several Presidents before him have done—his Constitutional authority to do so is already before the courts and will be adjudicated in accordance with the rules set down in our Constitution. With respect to the Republicans in the House, their current action defies the very purpose of the Constitution.

Elsewhere I have written about the failure of our leaders to compromise (ref. “Compromise: An Unfulfilled Promise”), but this new standoff is something different. It is an abdication of Constitutional responsibility. Further, it replaces statecraft with criminal-like blackmail. Remember who the victim is here: “We the people . . .”