Political Power and Weakness

I read a newspaper article the other day, and it keeps coming into my mind and displaying different facets of what it is telling me.

It speaks of President Gorbachev and what he tried to do to open Russia up to the outside world, and to live in harmony with it, despite the reluctance of the domestic vested interests to accept the erosion of their power. Unfortunately, Gorbachev was too late to save the Soviet Union from fragmentation and years of financial depression. The article drew a comparison with America, and it was that aspect which exercised my mind.

Certainly there is some similarity between the Chernobyl atomic disaster and the British Petroleum fiaco in the Gulf of Mexico, but to what extent can you suggest that there is a common lesson to be learned. I think it may be in the substance of political power.

I am accustomed to think of America as the beacon of liberty offering every citizen an equal opportunity to participate in its government, but that is not so. America is governed by three separate units: the Supreme Court, of nine justices, with life tenure; the President, who serves a four-year term; and Congress, which is composed of the House of Representatives, and the Senate. The House has 435 representatives, each with a discrete physical constituency, comprising one fourhundred and thirty fifth of the national population: the Senate has one hundred senators, and each state elects two of them for six-year terms. In short, the president is elected every four years, at which time one third of the Senate faces re-election, and every member of the House also faces reelection, although he has been in office just two years. This constitution may have been a model of fairness when Jefferson, Franklin, and their associates negotiated it more than two centuries ago, but it is not so now.

Recently there was a case which came before the Supreme Court, in which the President's representative, the Solicitor General, argued that foreign corporations should not be allowed to make cotributions to the re-election campaigns of American politicians. The Supreme Court ruled that such contributions were legal. I suggest that they were wrong, and the President was right.

Much, if not all, national legislation requires the concurrence of both Houses of Congress, but let us compare their comparative strength. The representative has to seek re-election every two years, while the senator only faces re-election every six years; the representative has a local constituency while the senator's is state-wide.

There are somewhere about 310 million American residents: California has perhaps 37 millipn and, at the other extreme, Wyoming has a little more than a half-million. California's population, and interests, are diversified, while Wyoming's are dominated by mineral extraction. The votes of the Wyoming senators are just as valuable as those of California.

President Obama made his first priority providing health insurance for every American, while there are those who say he should have placed his priority elsewhere, while he was still at the peak of his strength. He disagreed,to the extent that he said he did not care if, as a result, he was a one-term president, and devoted much of his strength to a battle which he barely won, because those who lurk in the darkness saw a dilution in their profits, while many ordinary, but relatively successful, Americans saw a dilution in their standard of living.

Will President Obama be able to achieve some worth-while energy-saving policy for the American nation? I don't know. Will he be able to convince his fellow-citizens that time is running out on a commitment to a national policy consistent with all of our needs? I don't know that either. I certainly hope so, because I think the stakes are higher than President Gorbachev faced.