Gongol.com Archives: September 2019
September 19, 2019
Federalist Paper No. 75 was apprehensive about putting powers of negotiation solely into the hands of an executive: "The qualities elsewhere detailed as indispensable in the management of foreign negotiations, point out the Executive as the most fit agent in those transactions; while the vast importance of the trust, and the operation of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation of the whole or a portion of the legislative body in the office of making them." And further: "An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States." Perhaps we need the "Federalist 75 Act": A means by which any whistleblower within the executive branch (or within independent agencies of government) can bring a complaint or warning to the attention of two-thirds of the Senate. We need an Executive Branch to carry out diplomacy. But we cannot abide a neutered legislature that takes a back seat to that role. Foreign affairs must be conducted on a model of pilot-and-copilot in the cockpit with both sets of hands on the controls...not taxi driver in the front and passenger in the back.
Part of Houston get two feet of rain
One location may have reached an unbelievable 43". And all from a storm that blew up out of nowhere. It wasn't even a tropical storm until Tuesday at lunchtime. It's really just an amazing amount of rainfall in a very limited period of time.
