Constitution class seemed unusually subdued today. On the other hand, they were rapidly approaching the end of the course, at which point they had to take the test. So of course everyone would be paying close attention for a change.
Today Colonel Hearne was doing another of his “big picture” lessons, in which he pulled back from the minutia of articles and clauses and amendments to see how they all worked together. However, this one was a little different from the earlier ones because he was also trying to put the entire Constitution into the context of the Revolutionary War and the Framers’ concerns about putting too much power in the hands of any one person.
Cindy Margrave listened raptly, realizing that none of her American history classes back in Houston had drawn the connections between the colonists’ quarrel with King George III and the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. In retrospect it was obvious, once someone connected the dots, so why had none of her teachers ever done so?
As class wore on, she realized that Colonel Hearne was holding back. Although he was talking about the weaknesses and failure points of the Constitution, particularly as related to the Civil War and Watergate, he was very carefully avoiding the issues that had led up to the Sharp Wars and the Expulsions.
It’s not just the issues of human cloning and genetic engineering. If those were the real issue, he could just point out that the questions could’ve been resolved with an amendment any time after the revelations of the Lanakhidzist Revolution. And he’s talked about the issues of technological change as they relate to Constitutional law multiple times, especially when we were talking about the Twenty-fifth Amendment and its relationship to improvements in medical technology.
It must have something to do with President Flannigan that he doesn’t want to come out and say. Cindy recalled talks with her Uncle Carl, about a military officer’s obligations of respect to the Commander-in-Chief, and how it related to the peculiar situation that had obtained since the disastrous 2012 elections
So he has to walk around the edges, and trust our training in independent thinking to lead us to the conclusions he’s trying to point us toward. Presumably related to the way the Framers wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the disastrous 2012 elections, balanced against the dangers of specific language allowing for emergency powers, given how so many other countries have seen tyrants use them as vehicles for assuming absolute power.
Yes, she’d have to talk with Aunt Betty tonight. Unlike Uncle Carl, she was civil service, so she didn’t have the issue of not appearing to speak disrespectfully of the Commander-in-Chief. If she needed to say hard words about President Flannigan, she could.