Any dry fly fisherman who has learned to fish "wet" can tell you that when you add extra flies and sinkers and indicators to the end of a leader, you encounter levels of "tangled" that you had never before imagined possible. Experienced wet fly hands use a "two-minute rule" for these situations. If the knotted condition of your leader, or your leader and rod, or your leader, rod, creel, hat, arms and legs is such that it can't be untangled in two minutes, simply cut the line and start over with new gear.
One day on the upper Sacramento river, in the time before I knew of the two minute rule, it occurred to me that with a knotted leader, as with many other situations in life, no problem is ever as simple again as it is the moment before the first solution is applied.
Looking down on a tangle, it is often easy to see the progression of moves that will undo it. "Three wraps of the sinkers around the rod, push the indicator between the leader and the fly line, two twists of the fly around the right side of that loop and we're outta here!" Once one's fingers become part of the system however, it almost invariably becomes an unrecognizable mess after the first two seconds.
I find myself today looking for a way to apply some knot theory to Congress.
Just read Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. Congress is charged with some really important stuff besides providing the pathetic tragi-comedy that rabbit punches us in the face from the morning paper each day. Today, it's the debt ceiling "supercommittee" FAILING to agree on a way to pull our collective chestnuts out of the towering inferno of public money that is US fiscal policy in the post-Reagan era, but every day it's something, and the ironic part is that the central issues preventing Congress from getting ANYTHING done are no mystery. In fact, they're common knowledge.
Let's break it down:
1. These people have to fund their campaigns every 2 or 4 years while building connections for their post-Congress gravy trains should those campaigns be unsuccessful, and the campaign funding and the post-Congressional careers are provided largely by the same large-money lobbying interests.
2. There is no number two.
Strangely, the simple solution to this knotty problem (scissors please!) is broadly acknowledged by luminaries on all sides of the American political cheesescape. John McCain co-sponsored a campaign finance reform bill with Democrat Russ Feingold which was signed into law by George W. Bush. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul have weighed in as vociferously as Barack Obama, Bill Bradley and Ralph Nader on the subject. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that it's time to cut the leader above this money/access/influence tangle and start fresh with a new rig.
So what's the holdup?
It's that gift that won't stop giving, the Reagan/Bush "conservative" Supreme Court bloc. Misters Justice Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy have either struck down or removed the teeth from every significant piece of campaign funding and lobbying legislation to come before them, ruling that they either don't meet the criteria for corruption or political inequality or, in the most tortured piece of prime-time judicial advocacy since Mr. Justice Scalia slithered out of his coffin on a Saturday(!) and stopped the counting of Florida Presidential ballots, that they violate the free speech rights of corporate entities, which must enjoy the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to human citizens. "Hey," you may say, "judgment call, they ruled as they saw it based solely on legal grounds. Whaddya gonna do?"
You'd be heckamuch wrong.
In an stunningly bald-faced acknowledgement last year that, in the Supreme Court at least, Lady Justice sees 20/20 or better, Mr. Justice Kennedy told friends and relatives that he will serve through the first Obama term and will only retire should a Republican win the win the White House in 2012. So much for trusting the "Rule of Law", eh Tony?
Only one Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Chase (one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence), has ever been impeached. In 1803 Chase got into trouble with the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans when he severely criticized their policies in front of a Baltimore Grand Jury. Chase explained that he objected to recent changes in Maryland law that gave more men the privilege of voting. Such changes as these advanced by Democratic-Republicans, Chase exclaimed, "would rapidly destroy all protection to property, and all security to personal liberty, and our Republican Constitution, [would] sink into mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments.… The modern doctrines by our late reformers, that all men in a state of society are entitled to enjoy equal liberty and equal rights, have brought this mighty mischief upon us, and I fear that it will rapidly destroy progress, until peace and order, freedom and property shall be destroyed."
"Mobocracy", good one, Sammy!
This little rant so angered Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans that in 1804 the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Chase on charges of misconduct and bias and of seditious criticism of Jefferson in the 1803 Baltimore grand jury charge. In 1805, the Democratic-Republican–controlled U.S. Senate moved to impeach Chase. Democratic-Republican senators charged that Chase had been guilty of judicial misconduct and that his partisan acts showed that he lacked judicial objectivity. Federalists defending Chase argued that he had committed no crime and that he could not be convicted under the constitutional definition of High Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Senate failed to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to impeach Chase and he remained on the Court until his death.
Chase's acquittal is commonly acknowledged to have set an important precedent for the Court: That no Supreme Court justice could be removed simply because of his or her political beliefs. The failure to impeach Chase allowed Chief Justice Marshall to assert and define the powers of the Court in future decisions with more confidence. It was thus a step in the process of defining the independence of the Supreme Court as one of the three primary branches of U.S. government.
Huh?
Not sure how we get from a one-time failure to get a two-thirds majority to a major constitutional precedent, but that's how it came down. As a result, like a six-year-old at grandma's for the weekend, the Supremes now operate with complete impunity and without fear of consequences for biased, politically motivated rulings.
Kinda begs the question, "Who's holding the rod, and what are we fishin' for?", don't it?
Here's an interesting read on the topic of Judicial Supremacy by Stanford Law School Dean, Larry Kramer
