On Capitol Hill, where the House banking committee is to begin drafting legislation Wednesday to lend billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the battered deposit insurance fund, lawmakers are running scared.
No incumbent sees anything to gain politically by voting to put more public funds at risk, although everyone recognizes something has to be done to avoid further damage to the nation's financial system. Many members blame themselves as much as the regulators and the Reagan Administration for the savings and loan debacle - Congress, after all, approved the industry's deregulation - and they see the possibility of a repeat performance. . . . [3]
And problems that hit even closer to home are ignored. Alarming statistics have been released in recent years regarding children: 500,000 American children are runaways, 360,000 American children are in foster care, 14,500,000 American children suffer emotional illness or developmental deviations, suicide is the second leading cause of death among children, and 1,000 "crack" babies are born daily. [4] Yet in the face of these appalling statistics, the Legislative Branch has taken no decisive action. Nor has the Judiciary, the protector (in theory) of individual rights. As Judge Charles Gill stated, "It is ironic that, although corporations in the United States have long been held to be 'persons,' and thus are eligible for constitutional protection, the extent to which children, as individuals, have comparable constitutional rights is still not entirely clear."[5] The working-out of ineffectual social policies continues:
In 1989, there were 1,200 babies born in the Yale-New Haven clinic. Ninety percent of those mothers had used illegal drugs during their pregnancies. Fifty percent had used cocaine within forty-eight hours of delivery. Child abuse cases are up eighty-five percent in the last decade. Sexual abuse cases are up 250% in the same period.
Like most states, Connecticut has a child protective agency. The Connecticut Department of Children and Youth Services (D.Y.C.S) has a child abuse hotline number. It is conceded that sixty percent of such calls are not afforded any response. [6]
This indicator of social collapse is not confined merely to Connecticut, according to The United States Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which concluded that "child abuse and neglect in the United States now represents a national emergency," and made three findings:
1. Each year hundreds of thousands of children are being starved and abandoned, burned and severely beaten, raped and sodomized, berated and belittled;
2. The system the nation had devised to respond to child abuse and neglect is failing; and
3. The United States spends billions of dollars on programs that deal with the result of the nation's failure to prevent and treat child abuse and neglect. [7]
Of course, the "band-aid solutions" America has offered are the only ones it can offer, in a Congressional world where substantive political changes are impossible. This litany of infirmities, and their persistence over time, indicates a causality that is chronic. Something is wrong at the deepest levels of our Government - perhaps in that glass case in Washington, D.C.
Due to these recent developments, it should be no surprise that the focus in the academic world has turned to our political structure. Many academics and former officials of Government have seen the existence of these social developments as symptoms of a disease in the body politic, a disease which is itself rooted in the structure of the 1787 Constitution. Few have stated the issue as succinctly as Abe Fortas, the former Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote that
The controls that the Founding Fathers adopted are no longer adequate. The balance that the Founding Fathers ingeniously devised no longer exists. It has been destroyed by the complexities of modern life, the vast expansion of governmental function, the decline of Congress . . . and, principally, by its failure to effectively reorganize its management and procedures, and by the enormous increase in presidential power and prestige. [8]
Fortas was seconded by C. Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury under President Kennedy, who stated that "until we are prepared to examine the basic structure of our federal system . . . our problems will remain . . . and, in all probability, increase in severity. [9] Over time, many in the academic community have attempted to "examine the basic structure of our federal system" and identify the flaws inherent in the 1787 Constitution. To give one example, Whicker, Strickland, and Moore (1987) listed in their book The Constitution Under Pressure five such structural defects:
(1) Limited number of representatives results in
(a) higher constituent to representative ratios.
(b) unreasonable workloads for representatives.
(2) Selecting senators on the basis of states
(a) violates the democratic criterion of one-person one-vote.
(b) malapportionment biases power against citizens from large states.
(3) Non-functionally specialized houses
(a) leaves citizens unable to effectively disaggregate electorally their policy preferences.
(b) undercuts representative responsibility and accountability and leads to single-issue voting.
(4) Bicameral passage of all legislation
(a) results in lengthy delays in developing programs.
(b) creates multiple veto points where interest groups can wield disproportionate power.
(5) No hierarchical accountability between the Senate and the House of Representatives
(a) undermines long term planning, national interests, and coordination.
(b) leads to internal committee specialization which disenfranchises voters from most policy initiation. [10]
This list, of course, is only a starting point. In fact, there have been several books and many, many articles on the imperfections of our Constitution. What is interesting is that while there has been disagreement as to which particular structural feature or features are primarily responsible for the decay of our Government and society in general, there is a general consensus as to the genesis of the problem - the political theory of the Framers, which molded the fundamental shape of our Constitution.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
