Senate Faces Challenges Passing SAVE America Act Amid Trump Criticism
The Senate’s All‑Nighter Shows a Government Forgetting Its Own Trust
When legislation lives or dies by public shaming and procedural games, the problem is not a single bill but a legislature losing sight of the people’s consent and the law of nature that limits its power.
I read of a Senate sitting through a chaotic night, of a so‑called SAVE America Act left on the shelf, of members departing for recess while some voices complain that the work is unfinished. I read also of a president publicly attacking the Senate’s leader to “pressure” him, of allies coolly explaining this as a tactic, expected to change after an election. The facts are sparse, but the pattern is plain enough: political power, which ought to proceed by known rules and open reasons, is here driven instead by personal force and calculation about future advantage. When a legislature begins to move by such winds, one must ask whether the original trust is still clearly before their eyes.
In my *Second Treatise of Government* I defined political power as the right of making laws with penalties, only for the public good. I added that this power is held on trust, by consent of free and equal persons who give it for the preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates. Consent is not a mere cheer for a favourite leader; it is a rational submission to rules that can be owned by any as if he had framed them himself. A bill that cannot secure passage except by inflaming factions, threatening leaders, or promising that tactics will “change” after votes are safely counted, may perhaps be lawful in form; yet it already smells of something less than free consent.
I am told that the Senate operates under a rule requiring sixty votes for many measures, and that this frustrates rulers who wish to see their whole programme quickly enacted, including this SAVE America Act. That rule may be wise or unwise; I have no warrant, from so little evidence, to judge it as such. I insist only on this: those who wield the legislative must justify every change of its settled forms as necessary to secure the people’s property in the broad sense. If men clamour to abolish rules merely because those rules obstruct their present desires, they forget that law exists chiefly to bind the powerful when passion runs high.
The story also speaks of an acting attorney general, examined by the Senate and then newly confirmed; and of a senator urging this officer forthwith to prosecute some “Dr.,” whose name and alleged offence are left unclear. I cannot tell whether that call is just or groundless. Yet the temper is familiar. When legislators, displeased that a favoured bill has not passed, turn at once to criminal punishment of particular persons, they come dangerously near to making the law an instrument of party quarrel. The civil sword is given to punish known offences against standing laws, declared beforehand, not to avenge the defeats of last night’s procedural bargain.
In the *Second Treatise* I argued that whenever legislators invade the people’s property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people first. Now, have these present confusions yet reached that pitch? I do not see that they have. A chamber that fails to pass one bill, however loudly urged, has not on that account dissolved the government. A chamber that sits late, quarrels, and goes on recess is still a chamber, not a robber band. The people are not absolved from obedience by a single night’s chaos. Resistance answers only to a long train of abuses, steadily tending to enslave; one must not cry tyranny whenever one’s own side cannot reach sixty votes.
Yet it would be a grave mistake to dismiss all this as only normal sport. When presidents learn that they can bend the legislative by public shaming of its leaders; when senators learn that they can move the criminal power by calling on attorneys to pursue their enemies; when everyone learns that rules such as the filibuster are things to be wished away the moment they stand in one’s path, then the constitution of power is silently altered. Men cease to see the legislative as a fiduciary body bound by known law, and begin to see it as an arena where victory justifies the means. From thence to arbitrary power, the road is straighter than they think.
The remedy is not ceaseless upheaval, but recall of first principles. Legislators ought to speak plainly what public good a measure like the SAVE America Act serves, how it guards life, liberty, and estate, and by what rule it treats all as free and equal. They ought to endure procedural limits that protect minorities today, remembering that they themselves may be in the minority tomorrow. Executives ought to propose and persuade, not rule by insult. Prosecutors ought to know no master but the law. If these things can still be said of your Senate with a straight face, the government yet stands. If, over time, they cannot, the people will have to remember that power was theirs before ever it was the Senate’s.
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From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.
- Second Treatise of Government — The dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.