TGIF?

 I wake with rebellious sinuses. Hope lies with ingesting enough caffeine.

Yesterday, it rained. I got home without getting soaked thanks to one of my co-workers giving me a ride. I made it to McClure's around 2:30, after getting some bad news on a legal matter.

I spent the next 6 hours eating dinner (chicken and black beans that came out just okay) and working on that legal problem. I surprised myself by finding out I can write a decent Complaint.

I read a little about Shakespeare and Marlowe. I watched a little of a movie with Michael Keaton and Maggie Q – The Protégé – in which both were brilliant, but I could not stay awake to the end.

So far, I have read most of Chaos in Congress points to failures in the U.S. system from The Washington Post; not a happy read if you worry about America's future.

 

But the concerns harbored by onlookers abroad grow far deeper. They see an American political system lurching down the path of dysfunction and a legislature increasingly dominated by politicians uninterested in actual governance or democratic deliberation. And they see the asymmetry of what’s in motion — where the Republican Party, beholden to former president Donald Trump and a far-right Trumpist base, is the principal vehicle for the destabilizing forces coursing through the American body politic.

McCarthy’s tenure, the first speaker to be voted out of his post in the House’s history, was a symptom of the problem. The pact he made with the radical fringe of his party to win power in January proved to be his undoing. But, as noted by an editorial in leading French newspaper Le Monde, the House’s disarray reflects the bigger issue of a legislature where gerrymandering and low voter participation in primaries has yielded a cadre of lawmakers who view compromise as “anathema,” especially among the GOP.

***

U.S. scholars now warn of the ways in which the political structures bequeathed by a centuries-old Constitution — including the anachronistic electoral college, a Senate more empowered than most upper chambers in bicameral parliaments in other democracies, and a Supreme Court where justices have lifetime tenure — have arguably incentivized the far-right drift of the Republican Party, where numerous politicians now seem to reject some of the basic democratic rules of the game.

“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” wrote Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their new book, “Tyranny of the Minority.” “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”

Work, grocery, reading on my agenda for today. Probably clearing off what I did not get to last night. Staying close to home this weekend. Get back to my pretrial detention journal. Find a doctor. I have things piled up while working on the novella. Right now, I wish I could just go back to bed.

And in all this gloom, I offer this:

This I found entirely by accident.

 

And: What if the British were sent packing? Writer dares to rethink history

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