The Way the Future Blogs

 

Remember that great old black-and-white movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That was the one where Jimmy Stewart, the Boy Scout leader who becomes a senator by accident, discovers what a gang of crooks many politicians are and filibusters until their misdeeds are exposed. It’s a great moment in the movie — unfortunately not quite as great when the filibuster is used in real life to paralyze action.

For instance, there’s what is going on in the Senate right now. A few Republicans in the Senate don’t like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Congress voted into law over their objections. Now they’ve got a second shot at crippling it.

By Constitutional law it is the President’s duty to appoint someone to head it, and the Senate’s to vote, aye or nay, to confirm. When the President did what the Constitution requires and passed the name of his nominee to the Senate he learned that one senator was blocking it by filibuster. So the headless Bureau can’t function as well as it should, and “financial protection” for many Americans is still just a promise.

A handful of senators have pulled the same trick on scores of other nominees, particularly judges. There are nearly a hundred federal courthouses sitting vacant today because a senator has filibustered a veto on voting for them. This has caused some real hardships, not just for judge-appointees who sometimes can’t take other jobs before their confirmation hearings (are they supposed to apply for unemployment insurance?) but for many persons up for federal trial. The Constitution promises them a speedy hearing, since “justice delayed is justice denied.” But any single senator can delay a trial indefinitely.

Most Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, will admit that the filibuster rule needs to be fixed, since it is just as immoral when the roles of the two parties are reversed, as it was in the Bush years. But that doesn’t stop almost all Republicans from chiding the President for not getting enough done, even when it’s their own party that does its best to tie his hands.

(Did you notice we were gone?)

Gone we all were, and for weeks on end. There were the bugs that were flying around, for starters. We didn’t get any of the more popular brands, but we got some mysterious upper-respiratory hits and several others at other locations, and that’s without mentioning the plagues that, without warning, took our computers out.

But now we’re back, healthier and happier than ever — so give us a look and let us know what you think.

A recent Pulse — the Union of Concerned Scientists’ bulletin warning civilians about new threats to their life, liberty or good health — reports some alarming scientific findings about ground-level ozone pollution levels and what they are doing to our ability to breathe freely. The numbers are scary. By 2020, millions of people will develop smog-related asthma and other breathing illnesses, and thousands of them will be overloading our hospitals.

That’s really bad news, but —

It has at least one good aspect. The same measures that will be essential to trying to save people from new breathing problems are the ones that will slow down the far worse consequences of unrestrained global warning. If we can’t persuade the unbelievers that global warming is a certain deadly consequence of our enslavement to the burning of fossil fuels, maybe they’ll be willing to do what needs to be done for the survival of the human race as long as that is also what needs to be done for the ability to breathe easy.