The habits of dishonesty that are guaranteed to take hold in those who want to rule to the disadvantage of the majority of The People - they have to lie to get elected - are and have always had some of their most pungently putrid expression in the most elite of offices. If Republicans were honest about their intentions and the results of their actions, that they would screw The People for the advantage of the rich, even the overtly racism motivated part of their base might be less likely to put people in office who will raise their tax burden, allow their bosses to treat them like shit and pay them shit, pollute their environment, prevent their children from receiving a real education or healthcare. That is what we are seeing in the pantomime of outrage staged by the "moderate" Republicans and the feigned suspension of disbelief that was immediately pretended by those in the media who either overtly favor Republican-fascism or who are entirely willing to service their interests for their own professional and financial advantage.
It's largely a cheezy snake-oil peddler act dressed up to make a thinly veiled appearance of propriety. And those other masters of appearance over reality, the media, entertainment and infotanement are in on it. It is one of the dangers of allowing lying in the media that they can aid in that suspension of disbelief such as those who are used to the daily watching of TV shows and movies are all too much in the habit of doing.
It's apparently to James Buchanan, one of the worst American Presidents to whom the lie that the U.S. Senate is "the worlds greatest deliberative body" is attributed. One of our worst and most irresponsible presidents, down in the lowest levels of that to which Trump will certain go when he is out of power and dead, eventually. And a real scumbag, someone who, like our "principled moderates" today, straddled the fence on the most important moral issues of his time. In the way of that, he personally "opposed" slavery while favoring its retention due to "it being allowed in the Constitution". Like that stage manager of Senatorial "shock and outrage," the director of the likes of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, Lindsay Graham, Buchanan was an in-the-closet gay man who, like Lindsay and gay men with a thirst for power and the graft that comes with it, will live a lie, at the least compromising with those who could expose them and end their political career, at worst, becoming their complete and willing tool, as one of the gangsters.
The United States Senate may develop skills in the cheap form of deliberation, debate, in that what happens there is coming up with marginally plausible reasons for doing terrible things but more often for refusing to do the right thing. It is a laboratory for lying in ways that people inclined to want the bad thing to happen will pretend they don't know is a transparent lie. That was what kept first legal slavery going in the period that ended with Buchanan's slavery friendly administration and, with Rutherford Hayes, a beneficiary of an Electoral College corrupt deal, reinstated on a de facto, though not legal basis. It was what kept the United States federal government from passing laws against lynching, the white-supremacist terror campaign that was so vital to maintaining that long period of virtual enslavement, what the Republicans have sought to restore in the period after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were passed in that last great period of traditional American liberal power under Lyndon Johnson.
The "founders" that we have heard so much about during the past week certainly were wrong about the nature of the Senate that they adopted, largely as an insurance policy for slave owners and northern merchantile and financial interests who feared democracy happening in a truly representative body elected by The People. The Senate, through most of its history and least of all today, is not a place of superior morals and intellect, it is, as will be seen as the Republicans, probably acting as one, will vote to not have a real trial of Trump and so enable the crimes the House Managers proved beyond any reasonable doubt. They will almost certainly not vote to have the further proof of those crimes in the form of evidence or witnesses put before them as they do, probably in a unanimous caucus, let Trump off of some of the most serious crimes any American President has ever been proven to have committed. They will do so for partisan reasons, they will also do it for their own, personal self-interest. The Senate is more a place of that kind of corruption because it is the Republican Party which controls it, though as can be seen from the periods in which Democrats have held it during most of the period since 1980, the place is not set up to be honest even then. Johnson, one of the great masters of congressional reality, had to leave the Senate in order to force it to do some of the greatest things it ever did and, as a great realist, he predicted that it would lead to catastrophic disempowerment for the Democratic Party.
The Senate gives a minority the power to thwart the will of the majority, that makes it inherently a place of immorality. It was set up to give the slave states enhanced power over states in which the majority were developing a consensus against slavery, it was intentionally and explicitly set up that way, Alexander Hamilton peddling the Constitution with such anti-democratic features to the Northern legislatures by appealing to the financial benefit they derived from the slave economy of the South. He said to the New York ratification convention:
It is the unfortunate situation of the Southern States to have a great part of their population, as well as property in blacks. The regulation complained of was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention ; and without this indulgence, NO UNION COULD POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN FORMED. But. sir, considering some peculiar advantages which we derive from them, it is entirely JUST that they should be gratified. The Southern States posses certain staples --tobacco, rice, indigo, &c., – which must be capital objects in treaties of commerce with foreign nations ; and the advantage which they necessarily procure in these treaties will be felt throughout all the States.
Though as the country developed, especially through the mechanisms that ensured that regional rivalries and resentments - and their potential use in the worst kinds of politics - would develop to ensure that the Senate was a power for a right-wing minority, preventing change that favors equality and morality.
And it is to that body that the "founders," expecting some version of their fantasy Roman republic (which never was more accurate than a cable costume drama) that the founders gave the power to judge Supreme Court "justices" and other appointments of presidents selected by the Electoral College, which is even more a corrupt thing.
Update: Rereading this during post-publication editing - my secret public vice - I was reminded of what Marilynne Robinson said in characterizing the "deliberations" that are the history of elite British social thought.
This is only to say that their reflections on the subject accumulate rather than develop, in the manner characteristic of rationalizations. Their disputations produce a welter of harmonious contradiction, the sort of thing that happens when any argument is welcome that will prop a valued conclusion. So the centuries pass.
If I'd thought of that before I wrote this piece, I'd have written it slightly differently and titled it "in the manner characteristic of rationalizations."
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