Wednesday, December 03, 2008 Part 1
Over the years I have been amazed at any number of governmental machinations. For me the real interest in this stuff kicked in during the Watergate era. I was in my mid-teens then and my mind was still open to new things. (Quit snickering I know what you are thinking and you are all perverts).
At that time I watched the hearings going on in D.C. with a passion. John Dean, Sam Ervin, G. Gordon Liddy et al. made for fascinating television. However the process really intrigued me. The impeachment process was arcane, ancient and rarely used and thus had the mystery and aura of some almost forgotten rite of the ancient church. Cool. The impeachment hearings probably had as much impact as anything else on my ending up a lawyer.
Nixon’s imbroglio led me to take probably five courses in total on constitution law. My law school paper (read thesis lite) was on the then and still hot button issue of how to interpret the Constitution. No matter what political stripe you all know the battle lines. The choices are between reading the Constitution with an eye only toward the original intent of the framers and the alternative of accepting the Constitution as living document with lots of penumbras and the like. I still go with a principled living document theory in case you must know where I stand on this issue.
After a time though, I found myself drawn to the constitutional battles of our neighbor to the north. Canada has been struggling to resolve issues that we settled long ago in cases like Marbury v Madison and in places like Gettysburg and Selma. Documents like the Charlottetown and Meech Lake accords fascinated me. (FYI-These were attempts to deal primarily with division of powers issues left unresolved as to the status of Quebec when the Canadian constitution was repatriated from Britain).
Right now the government of Canada is a minority government and it looks very likely to fall soon. There is all sort of political intrigue with opposition parties trying to form a coalition that will work and will allow them to form a new government. There are arcane political procedures being brought into play to try and avoid a new government or a new election. Has anyone here ever heard of a prorogue before? I hadn’t. If you want a diversion from the oppressive economic news we are facing just give this link a check and see what I am talking about.
http://www.thestar.com/default
3 comments:
Okay just so you know a prorogue is the act that officially conclude a session of the parliment. Prorogation is different from dissolution in that the parliment itself is not dissolved. Prorogation normally occurs immediately before a new session of the parliment begins.
Silly me. And all this time I thought Bill Clinton was a "prorogue".
Perhaps he was just an amarogue???
Just when I thought I had no more use for the old oxford dictionary you come up with a word like prorogue...I found myself in the basement looking for the damn dictionary only to have you define the word in the comments section, well at least I found more things to sell on ebay while I was digging.
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