Jefferson Review

"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

Home /  Archives / Links / Quotes / Book Reviews / Advertise /Contact us / Subscribe / Calendar

Do We REALLY Want to Break the Gridlock? 

Gordon Francis Corbett

To study how men should act, Aristotle invented the branch of philosophy called, "ethics."  To study how men should treat one another, Thomas Aquinas invented the natural law.  To provide an ethical ground for our public guardians' power, and for limiting it strictly, John Locke discussed individual's rights.  

Dan Smoot conservatives, libertarians, and Objectivists hold that the natural law created individual's rights.  They believe that these rights are few and non-contradictory, and that they enjoin every individual from violating his fellows' identical rights.  Finally, they agree that, ideally, the natural law and its rights not only limit government-made law, but control those who enforce it.  

Modern law little resembles the natural law.  Modern law comprises three categories:   legislative statutes, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic regulations.  All are bewilderingly complex and contradictory.

Legislative bodies create civil and criminal statutes.  Some of them empower executive-branch bureaucrats.  The bureaucrats create and enforce regulations.  Courts try suspected violators, accumulating precedents that sometimes modify their authority.  

Ideally, the Legislative should only enact the natural law and check the Executive and the Judiciary.  Ideally, where applicable, the Judiciary should only adjust Legislative statutes and check their Executive enforcement.  Ideally, the Executive should check the Legislative and the Judiciary.  Ideally, this tripartite gridlock should keep the course of governance consonant with the natural law. 

Alas.  Most modern lawmakers, judges, and executives ignore the natural law.  Some lawmakers respond to sophisticated bribery and perpetrate Byzantine extortion.  Judges' appointments often stem from interests that do much of the bribing.  And, of course, holders of executive authority, although sensitive to popular pressure, respond most sedulously to economic interests' campaign contributions.  Sanitized, the relevant adage reads, "Money talks and manure walks."

Perhaps the worst feature of this schema are the bureaucracies.  The bureaucracies form part of the Executive, but function under Legislative delegation of authority.  Worse, they make their own rules and sometimes function judicially by trying their rules' alleged violations in their own special courts.  This fusion of duties does not abolish the separation of powers, but it comes alarmingly close.

Today, the biggest difference between the natural law and modern law lies not only in the latter's resulting largely from bribery and extortion, but also in its application.

Today, trials in civil and criminal cases are statistical anomalies.  Civil cases are usually settled out of court by secret agreements.  Criminal cases are usually settled in plea bargains that deny justice to everyone:  the victims, the accused, and especially the people:  not "the people" as lawyers say in court, but real individual citizens who deserve to see that a jury of the defendants' peers determines their innocence or guilt.

People accused of breaking bureaucratic regulations may be tried in courts, but usually receive administrative hearings.  These hearings often generate, not verdicts reflecting statutory content, but ad hoc agreements called "consent decrees."  Consent decrees compare closely to the "contracts" that regulate youngsters in today's schools.  

A school "contract" imposes authority, identifies a malefactor, condemns his wrongful act, and makes him promise not to repeat it.  The authority's right to rule, the nature of its ruling, and the coerced promise may, or may not, involve concepts of the natural law.  Almost the only thing making "contracts" even seem good is that they may elicit aid from the miscreant's parents.

Consent decrees affect only adults, but because they result from ad hoc agreements, their concepts rarely flow from the natural law.  Very often, to borrow a phrase from Ross Perot, they result from "stress in the [economic] system."  Their purpose, therefore, is to ensure that the person forced to sign the consent decree refrains from conduct that would renew that stress.  Whether the offender's action actually injured someone's natural-law rights may, or may not, be addressed.

What a picture:  disregard for the natural law, corporate bribery, legislative extortion, plea bargains, administrative hearings, and "consent decrees."  They are not a crack in the Liberty Bell, but a network of fractures, awaiting only one big shock to shatter in all directions.

One of the few things militating against that fragmentation is the remains of the "gridlock" prescribed by the Founding Fathers:  that division and separation of powers which has not only made our Constitution famous, but perhaps even unique.  We dare not repeal or ignore it.

Weather (Louisville) / Mapquest /  White Pages / Business Search / CNN / Dictionary / E-card / MSN