Tag Archives: politics

Understanding the Constitution of the United States: Article 1 the Legislative Branch, Section 7: The process of making laws:

Section 7: The process of making laws:

The making of laws for the nation is a complicated process and in the past congress only two percent of bills became laws. Section seven of the constitution is fairly concise but the actual process of passing a bill into law is much more challenging. Unlike the School House Rock bill sitting there on capitol hill, most bills never do become law for various reasons. Below is a quick introduction based on the Constitution and the U.S. Senate’s flowchart and attachments for how a senate bill becomes law.

Bills must pass both houses before they become law and then must be presented to the president for their signature. The passage of a law can be a messy process since both houses of congress must agree to the same provisions in the bill for it to pass both houses. A bill may be proposed by a senator, representative, may come for the White House, be referred to the House or Senate by a State Legislature, Organization, Scholar, or Constituent. A bill will need a sponsoring Representative or Senator to introduce the bill into the Senate and the bill once introduced begins its long process of consideration. The one major qualification that the constitution stipulates is that any bill raising revenue must begin in the House of Representatives

If there are no objections to a bill being considered it is referred to an appropriate committee within the House or Senate, logged in the appropriate house’s journal, given a number, entered into the Legislative Information System (LIS) and made available in the Senate and House document rooms. The committee is then required to conduct hearings and is expected to hear witnesses from both called by the committee chair and the minority party members. Once the hearings are concluded the committee debates and considers amendments to the bill and determines whether the bill will be recommended to the full senate or house of representatives. A vast majority of bills never make it out of committee, in the 114^th Congress (our latest congress, which began on January 6, 2015, only has had 6% of the bills make it to the floor for a vote). A bill that makes it through the process of committee markup a member of the committee may move the order the measure reported to the Senate or House of Representatives. It takes a physical majority of the committee to report a measure to the Senate or House of Representatives. The bill may be reported with no changes, with amendments in various sections or in one amendment as a substitute. What this means is that the bill if it comes out of committee may be the same, may have individual portions of the bill altered or amended, or the entire bill may be rewritten as one amendment.

For those bills that make it to floor consideration they are now considered by the entire House of Representatives or Senate (based on which body they are moving through). The floor consideration typically begins with opening statements by the chair and ranking minority member of the reporting committee and appropriate subcommittees. The first amendments are typically those offered by the committee. Each amendment must be disposed of either by agreeing to vote on it directly or to table it (tabling an amendment effectively works as a vote to defeat the amendment if the motion to table passes). While an amendment is on the floor a Senator/Representative may propose an amendment to the amendment (second-degree amendment) and the second-degree amendment must be voted on before the original amendment (first-degree amendment) can change. This can become a complicated process but once all the amendments are acted upon the bill itself can be moved to the voting process.

One fifth of those present can ask for a roll call or recorded vote, otherwise a vote can be by voice vote, unanimous consent or by division (a process for obtaining a more accurate count of a voice vote). For example, if a bill is approved by the Senate then a final copy of the bill (reflecting all the amendments) is prepared, signed by the Secretary of the Senate, and delivered to the House of Representative (if the bill comes from the House then this process is the same except that it goes through the House and is delivered to the Senate).

Following the example of a bill that comes from the Senate and is referred to the House of Representatives, the House will then act upon the bill in a similar manner to what the Senate has. If the bill makes it through the House of Representatives and it has no amendments to the bill the Senate passed (it is exactly the same bill) it is returned to the Senate to be enrolled (this is the final copy of the bill that passes the House and Senate) and is signed by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House to be delivered to the White House. If the House has amended the bill the Senate may either agree with the amendment or request a conference. If the House and Senate go to conference, then designated members of both will negotiate to resolve the differences between the two proposed versions of the bill. Once a majority of House and Senate conferees agree to a conference report (a final version of the bill negotiated in the conference committee). Both houses must vote to approve the conference report before it is enrolled, signed by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House to be delivered to the White House.

Once the bill finally passes both houses it is sent to the President who has ten days to act, or it they do not act it becomes law in 10 days (Sundays excepted). If the president disapproves a bill (veto), that disapproval may be overridden by a 2/3 vote of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. This does not happen very often (of 2,574 vetoes only 111 have been overridden).

The making of laws for the nation is a complicated process and in the past congress only two percent of bills became laws and yet it is a process that slow down the process to consider the impact of the proposed legislation. It is a process that by nature requires compromise for legislation to become enacted. In theory it should ensure that voice both in favor of and opposed to the legislation should be considered prior to a piece of legislation being voted upon.

Image of the U.S. Constitution from http://wvconstitutionaladvocates.com/u-s-constitution/

Dueling Edicts: Esther 8:1-8

Esther 8: 1-8

On that day King Ahasuerus gave to Queen Esther the house of Haman, the enemy of the Jews; and Mordecai came before the king, for Esther had told what he was to her. ² Then the king took off his signet ring, which he had taken from Haman, and gave it to Mordecai. So Esther set Mordecai over the house of Haman.

³ Then Esther spoke again to the king; she fell at his feet, weeping and pleading with him to avert the evil design of Haman the Agagite and the plot that he had devised against the Jews. ⁴ The king held out the golden scepter to Esther, ⁵ and Esther rose and stood before the king. She said, “If it pleases the king, and if I have won his favor, and if the thing seems right before the king, and I have his approval, let an order be written to revoke the letters devised by Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite, which he wrote giving orders to destroy the Jews who are in all the provinces of the king. ⁶ For how can I bear to see the calamity that is coming on my people? Or how can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred?” ⁷ Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther and to the Jew Mordecai, “See, I have given Esther the house of Haman, and they have hanged him on the gallows, because he plotted to lay hands on the Jews. ⁸ You may write as you please with regard to the Jews, in the name of the king, and seal it with the king’s ring; for an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked.”

The king lives a sheltered life, and even here at the end of the story he basically passes authority to Esther and Mordecai. They may write and seal it with the king’s seal. The king himself doesn’t take any more responsibility for the actions of Esther and Mordecai than he did for Haman. Even though these are irrevocable matters, they are still delegated. Much as in the story of Joseph, now Mordecai ascends to be in charge of everything and second only to the king, which makes him the person who really makes the decisions.

This makes me think a little of our own system of elected government where we may elect officials, but these officials may have to answer to groups and lobbyists who may be pulling the strings more than we want to admit. Granted, if the king decides to act on his own people have two choice, obey or assassinate the king while elected officials find themselves having negative adds financed against them, or members of their own party who try to take their seat in the next election cycle. I want to believe that the people we elect are there to make the best decisions on behalf of the American people, but the skeptical side sees way to many hands trying to craft their own policies to place under the signet ring of officials.

For the Jewish people in the story this turn of events is a very positive thing, now they have their own guy who bears the signet ring and can craft policy for their benefit. Maybe I am naïve to hope for a government that is better than this, a government that can move beyond what is good for one group or another and look at what is best for the population and even beyond that, the world. Don’t get me wrong, I think we’ve come a long way-but in our antagonistic and partisan world we can dream of something better.

One final note, I’ve highlighted several times that Mordecai wouldn’t bow to Haman, but this is apparently not a Jewish thing since Esther has no problem bowing before the king. We will never know the why behind Mordecai’s not bowing throughout the story, it could be a personal hatred, an ethnic dislike or any number of other things (and even here Mordecai doesn’t bow with Esther-although it may not be the time or place).

We are left with dueling decrees that cannot be revoked. One that will allow anyone to kill and loot Jewish families and one that allows the Jewish people to assemble and allow for their protection. Perhaps what is most important is not the edict but who has the power to enforce it.

The Place of Authority 3-2:Byzantium, Triangles and the Quest for Stasis

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As a symbol and expression of the universal prestige of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Justinian built the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, Hagia Sophia, which was completed in the short period of four and a half years (532–537).

One of the things I’ve been doing as I took an extended break from my more historical work on the place of authority within society and religion was to do some broader thinking about where this all might be heading and to try to bring in some other disciplines that could help me process the large historical stories in a way that both made sense and was as fair as possible to the historical narrative. I’m going to take you on a brief journey into the sometimes scary process of how my mind thinks through things (clearing away as much of the clutter as possible) and hopefully you will be able to see why I am drawing some of the conclusions I am at this point and as I move forward and then I will apply the scheme I develop to the period of the Byzantine empire (what remains of the former Roman empire after Rome collapses based out of Constantinople) and then we shall see how far I move forward in history before I feel the need to re-evaluate.

One thing that every society seeks is stability, instability is notoriously bad (at least in the short term) for the people in any society and people will endure a lot of things to avoid a drastic upheaval of what is considered normal. That got me thinking about Bowen System Theory and specifically his (and other’s who followed Murray Bowen’s work from the 1970s on) work on triangles:

“The theory states that the triangle, a three person emotional configuration, is the molecule or the basic building block of any emotional system, whether it is in the family or any other group. The triangle is the smallest stable relationship system. A two-person system may be stable as long as it is calm, but when anxiety increases, it immediately involves the most vulnerable other person to become a triangle. When tension in the triangle is too great for the threesome, it involves others to become a series of interlocking triangles”[i]

If any place in this time period could be talked about as stable and able to resist major changes it was the Byzantine empire and the Orthodox Church which was the dominant expression of religion within the empire. Thinking about what a triangular system might look like from the Byzantine perspective might look like took me back to another three fold characterization.

There is an ancient way of talking about Jesus which is called the three-fold office, which goes back into the ancient church, at least to the early church father Eusebius (263-339) and probably earlier than that. It breaks down the offices of Jesus as: prophet, priest and king- and as I mentioned in an earlier post for the early followers of Jesus he occupied the central defining role in forming their identity as Christians. Let me expand each of these roles briefly:

The kingly role is the role of political power, to those familiar with a Lutheran two kingdom way of thinking this is the left handed kingdom which deals with military power and security, taxes and wealth, roads and trade. Typically in every layer of society there is someone who occupies a place of political power and who guarantees safety, peace and security for the price of obedience and taxes. This is the role of the secular power, and it can be abusive or benevolent (although it more often trends towards abusive) and it often depends on the next office for it’s authorization in some manner.

The priestly role is the role of religious authority, this would be the right hand kingdom of Lutheran two kingdom typology, which deals with placing people in a right relationship with the sacred, whatever that may mean for a society. In almost every society that I am aware of the priestly function is carried out by those who are closely aligned with those in the kingly role. In a theocracy the priestly office will dominate the political office, this is less common but there are societies and times where the priestly office will hold sway. More commonly the political office will exercise greater power than the priestly office and the priestly office will give additional legitimacy to the political office. This may sound skeptical and there is give and take in the relationship, however for stability there is a mutual self interest involved since the political office protects the priestly office and the priestly office legitimizes the political office.

The prophetic role is that place, person or thing within a society which places a check on the political and the priestly offices when they are not acting in accordance to whichever divine source of authority , they are the mouthpiece of God that challenges the excesses, abuses, deceptions, oppression, idolatry or hubris of the other two offices. The prophetic role may be occupied by a person or persons or it may be an idea, book, etc…as we will see in some of the upcoming transitions. All three roles are necessary and linked together.

In the Byzantine empire the emperor remained the dominant political figure, and had a lot of authority within all realms of both political and religious authority. The bishops had and exercised their authority with the protection and in cooperation with the emperor, but for the Orthodox church and the Byzantine empire the prophetic role was occupied by tradition. Tradition was what the church had believed and confessed, hence orthodoxy, and anything that deviated from that tradition of the earlier church fathers and councils was considered heresy or at least unorthodox. After the reign of Theodosious I (379-395 CE) the eastern half of the empire based in Constantinople would remain in some form with the emperor reigning and the Orthodox church intact until Constantinople falls in 1453.

In Gruene, Texas there is a dancehall which proudly proclaims “Gently resisting change since 1872” and in many ways the Byzantine empire was able to gently resist significant changes for 1,000 years. The world around its borders changed and went through a number of upheavals and eventually it would find itself caught between the Catholics on one side and the Muslims on the other, and yet the emperor, orthodox priests and the tradition of the fathers provided stability while the world around them was filled with chaos.

[i] Murray Bowen, 1976 quoted in Roberta M. Gilbert, The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory: A New Way of Thinking About the Individual and The Group, Falls Church and Basye, Virginia: Leading Systems Press, 2004 and 2006, 47.

Goodnight (Promised) Moon

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On the great big tube
There were blue states
And red ones too

And a picture of….
A politician who had promised the moon

And there were three derrieres sitting on chairs
And a donkey in blue and a red elephant too
And a divided house and a perplexed spouse
With a bunch of attack adds full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush”

Goodnight tube, goodnight moon
Goodnight politician who promised the moon
Goodnight blue states, goodnight red (the elections over it’s time for bed)
Goodnight derrieres and goodnight chairs
Goodnight polls, goodnight clocks
Goodnight divided house, goodnight perplexed spouse
Goodnight attacks, goodnight adds
Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush
Goodnight pundits, goodnight hot air
Goodnight noises everywhere

Adapted from Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon by Neil White in expectation of the close of the 2012 election cycle. Happy voting to all and to all a good night 🙂

Something Different: Are We Losing Faith in Religion?

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On the front page of yesterday’s Omaha World-Herald the central story was “Are We Losing Faith in Religion?” The article highlights Gallup’s 2012 survey on the Confidence of Institutions which has been taken annually since 1973. To me this is not surprising, honestly I am surprised that organized religion scored as well as it did, with the way in which the perception of authority is changing. In general people have become much more skeptical of the political process, the economic world, the medical system, news sources, and big business. Organized religion scored better than any institution other than the military, small business and the police.

Gallup does not report reasons, only breaks down responses into six categories of confidence in institutions:

Great Deal of Confidence

Quite a Lot

Some

Very Little

None

No Opinion

But since I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about authority lately here are some of my reflections:

This is a part of a broader cultural and philosophical trend to distrust authority, as Eileen Burke-Sullivan (who is quoted in the article) says there is “a general malaise in the United States about leadership of any kind.” There has always been some level of questioning of authority built into the type of governmental system that we have, but we live in a time of increasing polarization in many institutions. Television news, for comparison to organized religion’s 44%, only received a 21% great deal/quite a lot of confidence and newspapers only 25%. Even the people communicating the news to us are not to be trusted. Postmodernism’s hermeneutic of suspicion (the idea that every source of information needs to be evaluated suspiciously) is firmly imbedded in our sub consciousness. As the X-Files used to say, “Question everything.”

There are many ways in which each of these organizations have failed to live up to the standards they set for themselves. Probably the two most common examples are sexual and fiscal impropriety. In religion there are certainly numerous scandals across denominations, from the Catholic Church’s continued struggle with priests who sexually abused minors to the indiscretions of mega-church pastors. Financial mismanagement, fraud and theft are not new but it receives more news coverage and visibility than at other times in history. This is not merely a function of religious organizations; it applies in government, economic institutions, and medical. Ultimately the increased visibility of these very real moral failings continues to feed the perception that those in various positions of authority are not looking out for our best interest.

Even though authority of religious institutions has been affected by both of the above criteria, there is a broader set of re-evaluation going on as the church (along with society) enters into a period of re-examining what it believes in light of a rapidly changing world. This is not always an easy process and there will be conflict which sometimes elevates into combat. The way the church has dealt with controversial issues (and it has done this rather frequently since the 1960s) as well as trivial issues has often not been healthy and many have walked away from the conflict wounded and with a deep mistrust of the organization.

For me this is a challenging but exciting time to try to re-think what is means to be Church. I am convinced that at the center are the questions of authority-which ultimately has to do with the ability to narrate the stories in which we make sense of our world. There are a lot of stories out there, Richard Lischer in The End of Words makes the claim that the average American is exposed to 6,000 messages per day (conversations, advertisements, stories, songs, tweets, texts, etc…) and honestly that is one of the primary reason I am doing the work of relooking how the story was told across time and who got to tell it. I’m not convinced I have the answers yet, but I am convinced I am asking the right questions.

On a different note, why did the military, the police and small businesses score as well as they did? Here are my thoughts on that, which are by no means scientific. In contrast to the Vietnam War where the military was lumped in with people’s feelings about authority in general and the war in particular, since the 1980s, regardless of the public’s feelings about a war or a political leader, the perception of the military has remained high. Partially this may be guilt related; since people no longer have the threat of being drafted to serve there is a feeling that the military is making sacrifices that the rest of us are not. Even though the police have had times where they are viewed negatively, for the most part people have a fairly positive attitude towards police officers who they believe put their lives in danger for their protection. Small business has been trumpeted across the political spectrum as the group that will save us from recession and so who doesn’t like small business? Even each of these groups has seen some small declines in recent years, but they still enjoy broad confidence.

The Place of Authority: A Brief History Part 2: King, Temple and the Prophetic Critique

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David and King Saul, Rembrandt

So Samuel reported all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day.” 1 Samuel 8.10-18

At roughly 1,020 BCE a decisive change takes place and Israel enters the time of monarchy. Power becomes consolidated briefly under King Saul. Two men, King Saul and Samuel, whose title before had been that of a judge but functioned as a mouthpiece for God at this point, hold the religious and political authority. Israel begins to act as a powerful actor in the region, constantly moving from one conflict to another, but internal conflict emerges when David emerges on the scene. Without getting bogged down in the story or trying to parse out what happened historically by 1000 David would unify his power as king and Israel became for a brief shining moment a power player on the world stage, Jerusalem becomes the capitol, and then perhaps decisively for this era the temple is established under Solomon. Especially for the Southern Kingdom of Judah this is decisive because the monarchy and the temple become linked as the dominant secular/religious authority. There is a prophetic voice within that critiques the monarchy and temple, but for the most part the people give up a portion of their freedom for the relative security, power and identity of being a part of the unified kingdom of Israel. That is not to say that family, clan and tribe have lost their power or authority, but that the people become much more linked to the kings and temple than at any previous point in their history.

This is probably a good point for a fun interlude, it is hard for us to imagine being bound in systems where our autonomy is defined so externally. We don’t have any experience of a monarchical system and so our reaction might be somewhat like the peasants in this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Even a romanticized king when we look from our perspective seems like a tyranny or despot.

Even though King David is often looked upon romantically like the King Arthur of legend, one of the incredible things is that the recorded memory of David includes many ugly situations, many family struggles, many times where he is at odds with the prophetic voice of the time. The whole Bathsheba and Uriah episode (2 Samuel 10-12), incest within the royal family (2 Samuel 13) and eventually the usurpation of the throne by his son Absalom (2 Samuel 15-19) as well as other internal rebellions are a part of David’s roughly forty years of consolidated rule. Even though the King amasses incredible authority previously unattainable in anyone’s imagination the constant warfare and internal struggles begin to wear on the people. By the time Solomon, David’s son, ascends to the throne it is a relatively peaceful time but the energy is directed internally on large building projects, the temple, but also many houses and palaces for Solomon and his entourage. The temple becomes, at least for a large group of people, the central focus of worship, and yet again just like with the idea of consolidating power with a king there is a large amount of space dedicated to the critique of the temple

King Solomon conscripted forced labor out of all Israel; the levy numbered thirty thousand men. He sent them to the Lebanon, ten thousand a month in shifts; they would be a month in the Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the forced labor. Solomon also had seventy thousand laborers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hill country, besides Solomon’s three thousand three hundred supervisors who were over the work, having charge of the people who did the work. At the king’s command, they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. So Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders and the Gebalites did the stonecutting and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house. 1 Kings 5.13-18 NRSV

This is a huge commitment of people and resources which are directed internally. In fact it is such a strain that immediately upon Solomon’s death when Rehoboam takes power the people come and plead for relief:

Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed upon us and we will serve you. 1 Kings 12.4 NRSV

To which the narrative has Rehoboam reply three days later in our language, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet, you think my father made things hard on you? Well prepare to be screwed!’ Most translations clean this up significantly…but the little thing that is thicker than his father’s loins is probably not a finger (see 1 Kings 12: 6-15 particularly v.10) Things are not nearly as clean in the Bible as we sometimes want to make them. The people are offended, the kingdom splits apart and now there are two kings, two places of worship, a prophetic voice that continues to grow louder…but even with this prophetic voice within the Kingdom of Judah in the South and the Kingdom of Israel in the North growing stronger the fate of both nations is linked to the actions of kings and the worship at the temple in Judah and the worship at various sites in the North. Particularly for the Southern Kingdom of Judah, so long as there is a Davidic king and the Temple who they are as the people of God seems secure. Yet this too will change….

Sign of the Rose

Searchings: Sacred and Secular