RBWords - Volume 24 - Number 7: July 2011
Something to Think About
Like many of you, I suspect, I have watched the budgetary arguments and antics in Washington, DC, with feelings of amusement, frustration and bewilderment! When I was a seminarian, in January of 1969, I was in a group of seminarians who visited Washington, DC, to see how our government “worked.” It was a course in “political theology,” taught by a professor from a neighboring Presbyterian seminary in Dubuque, IA. We met members of both houses of congress and lobbyists and interest groups as well. They all seemed like dedicated and conscientious folks. I have no reason to believe that if I were to visit our nation’s capital now that I would be of quite the same mind, although I’m sure there are sincere minds and voices on both sides of “the aisle” in the current “Armageddon” economic scenario. Ideological “impasses” are not unheard of in our government, but I am not a very ideological person and have little patience with the kind of stubbornness that characterizes the current debate. Many of the participants do not seem to care how the rest of the country feels. What seems to matter is ideology.
The media have not helped me much. The whole issue appears to be an artificial one created by our own legislation in regard to “borrowing” by the country against its own resources. So, the crisis is one of our own making and is serving the purposes of particular emotional and political drama. I think it will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the 2012 elections, which, I suspect is the fundamental rationale for much of the noise-making. Underneath it all is the issue of “power” and who gets to wield it for whose benefit! Given the protected economic status of most members of congress, I doubt they will suffer very much as long as they can manage to stay in office! There are “labels” galore being tagged onto the players, none of which seem to accurately identify anyone. Can it be said, “By their votes you shall know them?”
I was a political science major as an undergraduate. I did some additional studies in political science over two summers at the University of Minnesota, studying congressional and executive functions. Lastly, I studied judicial processes as a law student. The balance of powers written into our constitution does not seem to me to have ideological stalemate as its goal. As the cartoon character, Pogo, once said: “We has met the enemy and it is us!” IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
It is by serving men’s general welfare that law gets its force and character of law, so when it fails to do so it has no binding force. Now often we find laws the observance of which advances the general welfare on most occasions but is highly harmful to it on some. The lawmaker cannot foresee every single case: and in framing the law to fit most cases he has the general good in view. So if a case crops up in which the general would be harmed by observing the law, the law must not be observed.
St. Thomas Aquinas, SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, I-II, Q.96, a. 6