Ask a random collection of Americans what they know about how a bill becomes a law and almost assuredly some of them will break into I’m Just a Bill – the most famous song from Schoolhouse Rock – a staple of Saturday morning kids’ programming from the 1970s to 1990s.
In the three-minute cartoon, the process by which a bill becomes a law is hastily but accurately sketched out. It fails, however, to mention the two most powerful humans in the process – the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Majority Leader of the Senate – without whose consent bills rarely, if ever, make it to a vote of each full body. So comprehensive is their power, these two individuals could conceivably deny a floor vote to legislation that might be favoured by every other member.
The current and wildly undemocratic locked gate is over funding the Ukrainian war effort, and the gatekeeper is House Speaker Mike Johnson. The bill passed the Senate by an astonishing 70-29, and would pass the House if it were put to a vote. Johnson won’t allow such a vote because it will likely piss off just enough America-first extremists in his own party to cost him his job as Speaker.
And so, the population of Ukraine – 43 million and tragically dropping – looks down the barrel of a successful Russian invasion and annexation, thanks to the self-serving cowardice and utter lack of leadership skills of the leader of our supposedly most representative branch of government.
Johnson’s Senate Republican counterpart is Mitch McConnell, the malevolent architect of our diminished and desperate democracy. No one did more to elect Donald Trump and turn the US judiciary into the handmaiden of the extreme right than him.
And so now, as our democracy teeters on the edge of an orange cliff, the fate of 330 million Americans is fundamentally in the hands of nine people: Johnson, McConnell, President Joe Biden, and the six Supreme Court Justices who form an impenetrable conservative bloc. If Trump reclaims the White House in November and the Republicans win majorities, however slim, in the House and Senate, the United States will likely become an unrecognisable and frighteningly unhinged superpower.
The founding fathers purposefully made it difficult to enact legislation, as they worried about an overactive Congress infringing upon the rights and power of individual states. They were even more concerned about the power of the presidency, and handed to Congress such key functions as government spending and declarations of war.
But I can’t imagine they imagined a scenario in which the de facto presidents of our legislative bodies acted as agents of a former president-turned-presidential candidate; Trump recently killed an immigration bill a group of bipartisan Senators spent four months negotiating because he’d rather use the issue to bludgeon his opponents than solve the problem.
Sadly, the tiny-minority-wields-ultimate-power dysfunction finds its mirror image in our upcoming presidential election. If you live, as I do, in any of the 44 states not named Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, the winner of your state’s electoral votes is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
Biden won all six of these battleground states in 2020 by a combined margin of 312,362 votes – so roughly one-tenth of 1% of eligible voters decided the election. Likely even fewer will decide who wins in November.
We are often reminded that the US is a republic, not a democracy, and that structures are in place to protect the nation from a tyranny of the majority. Our founders couldn’t see that, 250 years into the future, those same structures would, when controlled by darkly undemocratic people, enable a tyranny of a twisted minority.
