Service and Sacrifice: Thoughts from Independence Day, Memorial Day and D-Day Anniversary
As we look forward to celebrating the 243rd anniversary
of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this week, I have been
thinking of the sacrifice so many citizens in our history have made for the
rest of us in their service to the country.
There is no political divisiveness in those military units; there is
only the shared commitment to service and willingness to sacrifice one’s own
comforts or even life to protect our country’s freedoms and liberties.
This celebration comes on the heels of a very important 10
days in the history of our country during May 30-June 6: the 10 day period between Memorial Day and the
D-Day Anniversary. These two very
special days, along with our celebration of our Declaration of Independence, should
remind us of the ultimate sacrifices so many Americans have made to secure the
future of our nation and that of many other nations in the world.
On each Memorial Day, we recall the service and the sacrifices
of all servicemen and women who died in combat during all the wars since World
War I. And on D-Day this year, we marked
the 75th Anniversary of the sacrifices of 2,500 mostly young Americans
who died taking the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of France and
the balance of Europe, and preserve freedom in the 20th century.
There are 25 American cemeteries in 10 countries in Europe
with the graves of 130,000 men killed in action during the two world wars. There are also an estimated 124,000 missing
and believed to have been killed in action. What other nation on earth has lost
tens of thousands of citizens fighting on foreign soil for the freedom of
another country? Americans did not die
in an effort to conquer another country, or to ask “what’s in this for us?” They fought to free the citizens of other nations
from tyranny … citizens they never met, who mostly speak languages they
couldn’t understand.
It is often said about the American system of government,
based on our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, that it is the best
system of government invented by man to govern themselves. But I believe the memorials we celebrate on
these two holidays each year should remind us that the preservation of that
government has always required the service and sacrifices of its citizens; from
the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, to two World Wars, to the Cold War, and
to the wars against terrorism.
As we express our admiration and gratitude to those
Americans who served the cause of protecting our country and our democracy at
the sacrifice of their own lives, I’d like to challenge us to bring our
thoughts to the present. That same kind
of commitment to our country and our democracy is evidenced each day by the men
and women who volunteer to serve in our Armed Forces today. Nearly every one of us will make the small effort
to express a well-deserved and sincerely felt “thank you for your service” when
we encounter active duty or veteran service men and women.
But how do we feel about our political leaders, particularly
Congressional leaders? Do we view them
with the same level of admiration and gratitude? Apparently not at all. National surveys indicate that while the
military has an approval rating over the past decade between 72% and 82%, the
approval rating for Congress has been between 7% and 13%. Might it be that most citizens do not see
Congress committed to serving our country and our democracy as a whole? Or that most citizens don’t see Congress members
in general willing to make the smallest personal sacrifice to solve many of the
problems facing our country today?
I would ask you to consider that Congress as an institution today
no longer seems to govern the way citizens expect to be governed in the
representative democracy passed down to us by our Founders in the
Constitution. Over the past several
decades, members from both parties seem to focus more on serving their own careers,
their donors, their party’s base and special interest groups, than on serving
the nation.
In our representative democracy, don’t citizens have a right
to expect that their elected officials who take the Oath of Office will serve the
needs and concerns of all their constituents, including those citizens who
didn’t vote for them as well as those who did, and those who are not in their
party’s base as well as those who are? Today,
it seems that there is hardly an elected official who would make any degree of
personal or political sacrifice to place service to country over themselves,
their positions of power, or their party; even though the sacrifice required to
do so pales in comparison to the sacrifices so many ordinary Americans have
made and are still making today during times of war.
How has this situation with so many Congressional and
Administration leaders from both parties developed under our extraordinary
Constitution? Aren’t there protections
in the Constitution citizens can rely upon?
The short answer is “no”. Our
Constitution is not a document that defines HOW elected officials should
operate to serve the people in a representative democracy, or WHAT actions they
should follow in governing. Defining such
processes or actions would have been a difficult goal to achieve among the
drafters, none of whom had ever seen or lived in a representative
democracy.
So the Constitution our Founders wrote and passed on to us essentially defines the “structure” of our government, and the powers given to each independent
Branch – providing us with the critical system of “checks and balances” between
the Branches. However, the Constitution
does not define the “operational rules” of how elected officials should govern. These rules were left to the elected
officials themselves to define over time.
Our Founders believed that if the elected officials did not act to serve
the people, the people would use their votes to remove those from office who
acted to serve themselves, their party, or special interest groups, or who
acted corruptly.
It is understandable that our Founders could not possibly
foresee the rise in the influence of incumbency, of money, of donors, or of
partisanship, and the dangers to our representative democracy that these
influences now represent. But some of our
most prominent Founders did warn the country against one of the greatest
dangers they foresaw early in our history.
See how relevant these warnings seem today:
John Adams wrote on October 2, 1789, just 6 months after our current Constitution was
ratified, and 5 months after taking office as our first Vice President:
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the
republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting
measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be
dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
George Washington echoed this
apprehension in his Farewell Address on September 19, 1796:
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they
are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which
cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power
of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying
afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Does it seem that these fears of the potential risks of
partisanship to our representative government as expressed by our first two
Presidents in the early years of republic, may be coming true today? Over the past several decades, we have seen
officials in both parties when in the majority fail to develop policies that
serve the entire country versus their own base or donors. In election years, the candidates compete in
proposing new policy ideas that appeal largely to their party’s base. But no candidate talks about policy ideas
that might serve the major needs of most of the country, by taking into account
the needs and concerns of citizens in both parties.
As an example, the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was passed
by a one party marjority, as was the 2017 Tax Cut law. Neither has been a particularly effective
policy for the country overall. They
have resulted in great benefits for the party’s base they were designed to
help, but provided minimal benefits, or even created new burdens, for major
parts of the country outside of their base.
This is not how a representative democracy, focused on serving the country,
the nation overall, should act … it is more aptly how a one-party dictatorship
might act. And under today’s rampant
partisanship, that is perhaps a more apt description of where our current
leaders have taken our government today.
Perhaps after 238 years, it is
time to consider a “Renewal” of our Constitution; not to change the purpose or
structure established 238 years ago, but to update the Constitution by adding
some specific rules to define HOW our elected officials should govern. This “Renewal” would ensure elected officials
more directly serve the people than serve their own careers and interests, the
interests of their donors, their partisan bases, and special interest groups,
by defining new “rules” for how Congress should operate and govern within the
Constitution itself.
The purpose of these new operational “rules” would be to require
elected officials to focus on serving the country, and ALL their constituents,
even when it might require some personal and political sacrifices. The goal of these rules would be to attract
elected officials who seek office primarily out of a sense of duty, obligation
and service to the country, not as a career to enrich themselves; and to free
elected officials from the undue influences of needing to please their base
voters, donors and special interest groups in their desires to sustain a career
in office.
Today, this partisan focus on governing has led to an
incredible urgency in each party to win, and created an unhealthy fear of losing. This is true for both the candidates seeking
to sustain their careers and power in the institutions, and the citizen members
of each party, who fear not having their needs and concerns reflected in future
policies if their party loses. This
“winner take all” approach to majority power governing has led to a “win at all
costs” approach to elections. Thus, we have seen party loyalty and identity
supersede loyalty and identity to the country overall or even to the
Constitution and rule of law.
As evidence of this change, we have seen partisan “gerrymandering” of
Congressional districts be executed by both parties, whichever is in control of
the process, to protect their own candidates and majorities at the expense of
the basic principle of “fair” elections reflecting the true will of citizens. This
results in having representatives picking their voters instead of the voters
picking their representatives. Elected
officials from those areas do not come to Congress with the goal of serving all
their constituents, or the country overall, by compromising or collaborating
with officials representing different constituencies. As a result, the country either gets no
policies to address the country’s major needs at all, or we get only the
approach designed by and for a single party majority.
Elected officials in both parties have also made rules for the lawmaking process that benefit themselves and their parties and to ensure their own
re-elections, at the expense of following the Constitution. As a recent example, when there is a vacancy
on the Supreme Court, Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution states that the
President “shall appoint with the advice and consent of the Senate …” a
replacement candidate. Is there any
part of this language that indicates the Senate Majority Leader can block
a Supreme Court appointment by a President at any time by themself alone? There’s no exclusion in the Constitution that
says “only in a non-election year”, or “only if the Senate Majority Leader
agrees”.
Under our Constitution, there’s only one way to express the
“advice and consent of the Senate”, of the whole Senate, and that is to
have the whole Senate vote, up or down, on the nomination. But in 2016, the Republican Senate Majority
Leader, which is not even an office defined in the Constitution but an office
created and given powerful controls over the governing process by elected
officials for their own benefit, essentially violated this Constitutional
requirement, by deciding on his own that there would not be a vote on a
Presidential nominee from the other party, by refusing to hold a vote of the
full Senate.
In this case, why didn’t Democrats charge a Constitutional
violation? Why didn’t they go to the
people with the outrage that one party had just ignored their Constitutional
duty? Why didn’t they go the Supreme
Court and ask that the Senate be required to discharge their Constitutional obligations?
There were two reasons, both driven by
political and not Constitutional considerations. First, Democrats were very confident that
Hillary Clinton would win the upcoming election and be in position to appoint
the next Supreme Court justice, so they saw this only as an inconvenient
delay. Second, Democrats themselves had
proposed their own “rule” on when the Senate should consider a new Supreme
Court justice appointment in an election year (known as the “Biden” rule), and
they didn’t want to lose that precedent of choosing not to follow the
Constitution when politically inconvenient for them. They
were as equally motivated by political and not Constitutional considerations as
Republicans.
This is just one example of why it may well be time to
consider a “Renewal” to our Constitution … not to change the eternal principles
or structures enshrined in that wondrous document, but to add an element that
is missing to better protect our democratic republic. Instead of leaving the making of rules of how Congress
should operate to the Congressional members themselves, perhaps it is time for
“We the People” to define the rules … how we require Congress to govern in a
representative democracy. Don’t these
officials work to serve the people, instead of the people working to serve
them? This “Renewal” would incorporate
some clear operational rules within the Constitution that would limit or prevent
future elected officials from acting on the basis of building a personal career
by favoring donors, special interests and partisan political considerations
instead of serving the country.
What would the specific operational rules that would be part
of this “Constitutional Renewal”? And
how could these operational rules be added to the Constitution to ensure that
the “People’s Rules” can not be overridden, changed or ignored by Congress, or
negated by an increasingly partisan Supreme Court? There are a list of ideas that have been
presented in a course I created entitled “How to Get Congress To Serve the
Nation”. They have been shared with over
250 citizens in 4 Ohio counties in 3 university Lifelong Learning and Learning
in Retirement programs. Those ideas will be the subject of future blog posts,
so if you are interested, please continue to follow and share this blog with your
networks.
But in the meantime, please consider how important to our country’s
future are the final words from the Declaration of Independence from the days
well before we were a country:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with
a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
To me, this indicates that our
Founding Fathers believed that the survival of our Independence just declared
would depend on the strength of our Interdependence. I believe that is still true today … and
perhaps it is even more true for this time than for the time it was written,
243 years ago this week.
I hope you all have a safe and meaningful Fourth of July celebration!
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