Representatives Owe Their Constituents The Truth

 

The overriding obligation of both journalists and political representatives was best expressed by Edmund Burke in a letter to his constituents. “Your representative,” Burke said, “owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Try always to say the truth, never say more than you know, and always know more than you say. Representations of any kind, journalistic or political, swing on the notion that the representative – whether a journalist presenting propositions to his readers, or a politician claiming to represent the true interests of his constituents – is obligated to present the truth without fear or favor. He owes this to his constituents, if he is a representative, or to his reading public, if he is a reporter or commentator.

Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, has been in office long enough, nine years, so that congressional ways are familiar to him.  Prior to filling U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s vacant seat, he served two terms in both Connecticut’s State House of Representatives and the State Senate before moving to the U.S. Congress.

He knows, for instance, that the Congressional filibuster provides equity to the minority party in Congress. In the absence of a filibuster, used in the past by both Republicans and Democrats, the ruling party, Republican or Democrat, may simply ride roughshod over minority dissent.

Murphy recently told a Washington Post commentator that Republicans, once they have taken charge of Congress, will eliminate the filibuster in order to pass a law that would abolish abortion nationwide.

Conservative Republicans, the Post opinion writer noted, “have feverishly anticipated for decades” the overthrow of Roe v Wade. “So do you believe,” he asked his readers, “that once back in power, they’ll let a trifling procedural relic like the Senate filibuster stand in the way of decisive, absolute, rapturous triumph?

“Sen. Chris Murphy doesn’t. If the court overturns Roe, the Connecticut Democrat says, once Republicans take control of Congress and the White House they’ll end the legislative filibuster to pass a national abortion ban with a simple majority in the Senate.

“’When the opportunity presents itself, there’s no doubt in my mind that they’ll change the rules to pass a bill criminalizing abortion federally,’ Murphy told me in an interview.”

This absurd notion has quickly become the leitmotif of all Democrat incumbents running for any office, including dogcatcher, in the upcoming 2022 elections. Indeed, it already has been prominently featured in countless stories, headlines and commentaries by a captive mainstream media attentive to Democrat media releases.

President Joe Biden and two prominent Democrat leaders in Congress, Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and leader of the US Senate Chuck Schumer, are piping the same tune. Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, who is up for re-election in 2022, have added their voices to the chorus. Once Republicans have regained ascendancy in the Congress, both believe, emboldened Republicans will nix gay marriage, and the Supreme Court will find absolute prohibitions on abortion constitutional.

These are campaign fantasies. Republicans have long argued that the filibuster should be retained. And the Supreme Court, in its preliminary draft opinion regarding abortion, has plainly stated that its ruling – which transfers decisions on abortion from an unrepresentative judiciary to state legislatures -- would apply ONLY to abortion and NOT to gay marriage, which, by the way, was brought under the shelter of the 14^th Amendment in a ruling written by “conservative” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. The Supreme Court is wisely neutral on politics, neither conservative nor progressive, and the Court so far has preserved itself as a non-partisan body.

Blumenthal and Murphy, both postmodern progressives, opposed the nomination of Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Cavanaugh, the later in rhetorical flourishes that put conservatives in mind of former U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy’s denunciation of Robert Bork. The “conscience of the Senate,” it will be recalled, said “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, and rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids…”

Reasoning that Gorsuch would be little more than a Trump factotum, Blumenthal noted in a media release, “President Trump has said he will only nominate someone who is ‘pro-life,’ ‘pro-Second Amendment,’ and of ‘conservative bent.’ Judge Gorsuch must state his own views or else we will be left to assume that he meets the Trump litmus test.”

Murphy thought Gorsuch a brash ideological partisan. In his media release, he wrote, “I want a Supreme Court Justice who will fairly interpret the law, uphold the Constitution, and keep politics out of the courtroom. I want a mainstream judge, not an ideological partisan. I’ll take a close look at Judge Gorsuch’s record and judicial philosophy, and ultimately make my decision based on whether he meets those straightforward expectations.”

Both Senators, highly partisan, are aware that the Court marches to its own juridical drummer. Both know that the surest way to “fairly interpret the law, uphold the Constitution, and keep politics out of the courtroom” is to plot a course of action that would leave political decisions on abortion to state legislative officials. That is exactly what the Justice Alito draft decision on Roe v Wade hopes to do. Both Senators know full well that the filibuster can be eliminated only by a two-third majority vote and both know that a Supreme Court decision permitting the federal government to abolish abortion in all the states of the union is well-nigh impossible – after the Court affirms the Alito draft ruling.

So then, why all the huffing and puffing, when nearly everyone but a confused media knows that if the Alito ruling is adopted, it would be virtually impossible for the Court to rescind its decision under pressure from Republicans or Democrats who, in any case, will not have the votes to eliminate the country’s filibuster rule?

All the sound and fury indicates only that the election bell has been rung. And, as usually happens at elections, the nation’s politicians, rather than thinking seriously how to advance the public good, are putting in order their lies and dissimulations.