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Accountability media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Asleep at the Constitution

Are we at war in Niger, too? Do our “representatives” in Congress know?

The answer to the first question is, obviously, yes. The answer to the second is, admittedly, no

Yesterday, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑S.C.) what the four U.S. soldiers ambushed and killed weeks ago were doing in Niger. “I can say this to the families,” Sen. Graham offered, “they were there to defend America,” before conceding that, “[W]e don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.”

Oh.

Graham acknowledged he had been unaware U.S. military forces were even in the African country. And still hasn’t “been briefed.” Later in the program, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D‑N.Y.) also confessed his profound ignorance … before reading in the newspaper about the deaths of four soldiers there. 

Still, Sen. Graham expressed great hope that Sen. John McCain (R‑Ariz.) could “create a new system” to ensure that “if somebody gets killed there, that we won’t find out about it in the paper.”

Huh?

Doesn’t Congress’s job description include something about debating and deciding on policies, providing funding, and checking executive power?

Not, surely, cuddling in ignorance and burping up pablum.

Cradled in their long-​term careers, our congressional delegates neither debate, deliberate, nor oversee much of anything.

In any case, we can be sure that Congress’s role in our constitutional system is not to scoop reporters to war news.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
term limits

Niger’s Presidential Term Limits

Until recently, things had been looking up for Niger. Europe provides the nation with quite a bit of dough. Uranium is being mined there. Money money money. 

Alas, that money perhaps explains President Mamadou Tandja’s dissolution of parliament several months ago. There had been no perceived threat. There was just the institution itself. And it did not want to go along with Tandja’s no-​term-​limit notion.

So then the 71-​year-​old leader trotted out his constitutional revisions to the people themselves, in a vote held in early August. But a huge segment of the voting population didn’t trust the man. After dissolving parliament, the stink of a power grab was upon him. 

Many, many Niger voters boycotted the referendum.

With voter turnout way down, Tandja’s revisions won. But with a parliament suppressed, a boycott in play, and “ruler for life” on everybody’s lips, the whole thing smells bad. A whiff of it even caught the jaded noses of America’s news hounds.

In America, when leaders seek to escape term limits, media folks too often seem to support them. But, about Africa, anyway, even America’s most elitist media mavens realize that an end to term limits is a move to dictatorship. 

Yes, at least regarding African politics, virtually everyone in the U.S. can see that term limits are essential to democracy.

Not much of a bright side, but there it is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.