What About The Case For Normalizing Changing The Constitution On A More Fundamental Level

As Lawrence O'Donnell points out here, Mr. Klein makes a very good case for normalizing impeachment. The framers left the "High Crimes, and Misdemeanors' clause vague for a reason. It had to have interpretive room because things change; obviously then making the ways various contingencies play out demonstrate evolving factors of causation; thus evolving descriptions of what makes for necessary standards of official behavior.

As Mr. Klein also points out, however, things are changing a lot faster now, with actions having far greater power, and range of effect, so we need to be even more sensitive to being OK with kicking bad actors out of critical positions of legislative, Judicial, or administrative, power. And in that statement does Mr. Klein inform you of the intrinsic substance of what I am talking about when I refer to this new "Operating Environment" we are now in. And in my opinion, it informs it now not only as it regards power in the public sector, it informs it in the private as well, because great wealth has bestowed nearly pharaoh like power on those who possess it. So they may not be the equal of super power presidents, but they are still possible purveyors of great ill, and terrible sufferance of public well being.

My emphasis here, however, is on this part where great new ability has changed things so profoundly, and boy, aren't we glad the creators of our Constitution made it so organically flexible. Unless, of course, we become too timid to actually use that flexibility. And if Mr. Klein can make the case for using the change adaptive capabilities of the constitution for holding various office holders accountable, for evolving, performance based metrics, why can't the rest of us do the same for the current economic operating system; the very system that was put into its "office" of leadership (in a systems encompassing other systems sense) some one hundred years ago at least (I know it came into being further back than that, but the point here is where it became the dominant system). A system that is absolutely subject to a kind of impeachment precisely because it does not perform at all now, in any primary sense, for the public good. And has, in fact, become just as dangerous as any bad player now in public office could be. And this is so precisely because of the condition of the planet now, and all of the social turmoil that centuries of doing the economics of scarcity has bestowed upon us.

Accepting that notion must then lead you to accept the idea that how we have organized ourselves in the past must also, now, be open to honest discussion as to what might be a better way to do things; allowing that we will seek to find this new methodology within the very process of Democratic change the framers of that constitution wanted to preserve. And so that Democracy itself must stay in place so as to effect that proper process of both finding new organizational definitions (with their negotiated rights, and proscriptions) as well as the new physical reality that must flow from that negotiated, and voted on, process. It may not be an ICBM, push of the button threat, but it is an existential threat nonetheless.

THE LAST WORD -- LAWRENCE O’DONNELL [FULL] 11-30-17 BREAKING NEWS MSNBC NOV 30, 2017

See Also:

The Case For Normalizing Impeachment