Movements are afoot

For a while now I’ve been picking up on movements that have advanced from inchoate mutterings to full voice plans and plots. I’m liking this a lot.

Aside from the already written vital legislation which got stopped, i.e., postponed, by the Republican senators, but can, with a Democratic House and Senate, be enacted, some of these ideas below will move from plans to policies to legislation.

  • Supreme Court limited terms. People are coalescing around 18-yr terms and don’t seem to be considering grandfathering the current justices. Under such a law, therefore, Clarence Thomas would have to retire or be removed to senior status, as other district and appellate court judges are. Except there’d be no senior status on SCOTUS. I suspect the Kansas referendum has pushed this movement from ideal into the reality camp.
  • With news about the Catholic Church’s “investment” in the anti-abortion mob, a movement to tax churches for their financial involvement in politics has awakened. I wonder how far this can go. Today, with realized hopes sitting in a majority Democratic Senate, am I to be blamed for feeling all good things are possible?
  • Sheldon Whitehouse’s DISCLOSE Act, mandating that dark money PACs publicly expose all their donors.
  • Whitehouse and Ro Khanna’s bill to tax fossil fuel companies’ windfall profits.
  • Numerous senators, including (or led by) Elizabeth Warren, want an act banning congress members from trading stocks.

Oh please don’t give me your cynicism! Instead, read The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union, by John F. Kowal and Wilfred U. Codrington III. You’ll learn, as I did, how actual amendments and laws get enacted. Bottom line: they take a lot of persistence, often by only one congressperson, go through waves of “we’re almost there!” that ebb, until revived decades later.

It’s a tidal thing.

I’m repeating myself somewhat. It bears repeating.

 

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