Without Scrutiny Any System Fails
The Athenians were driven to put the vetting job into jury functions or ruling councils by experiences with demagogues or military rule. The difficulty of controlling officers was such that Athenian born philosophers came to be somewhat cynical about the prospects for survival of Democracy. But the lesson of history, including recent history, is that without formal vetting and accounting, monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy and plutocracy all degenerate into tyranny, kakacracy (rule by the worst) and kleptocracy (rule by thieves); and resulting violence, inequity, & misery. There really is no good alternative to creating a system of scrutiny that has integrity.
Vital to our Survival as a Nation and a World are:
- Separation of Powers
- Scrutiny involving:
- Free Press
- Legislative Oversight
- Executive Oversight
- Judicial Oversight/Jury Forms
- Scientific Scrutiny
- Establishing Measures
- Holding officers to account by those measures
Vetting Officers is a Necessity
The Athenians implemented two principles that recent events have illustrated as vital. They learned through hard experience they needed to vet officers and periodically review them. Both involved the use of "Scrutiny" or "euthenia" to review candidates for office in order to determine their fitness for, or continuance in, office. Our current system relies on legislative oversight. The election of Donald Trump, and scandals around the elevation of certain Supreme Court officers (Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh among others), have illustrated the vital necessity of updating how we do these functions. They also show we need to reform and strengthen our process application of separation of Powers.
Scrutiny
Athenian Officers underwent scrutiny before being eligible for office and on demand from other citizens.
“In fact, according to Aeschines, any citizen could call upon any other citizen to undergo scrutiny at any time, to determine whether he deserved the privilege of speaking before the Assembly (Aeschin. 1.32). Furthermore, every young Athenian man underwent a scrutiny before the members of his deme before he was enrolled in the list of citizens (Dem. 44.41; Lys. 26.21).” [stoa.org article]
Separation of Powers
In the original schema of the United States government (the constitution), each legislative body governs itself, for example the House “chuse[s]” their own “speaker and other officers,” and “has sole power of impeachment.” and in the Senate the body has similar powers over its own interior officers. That schema was based on a presumption that they be subject to the "ordinary law" and "ordinary courts" outside of their duties as legislators or officers of the Government. This never had to be spelled out before. We've been lucky until now.
Failures of Legislative Oversight
The Kavanaugh affair showed that our judges need to be subject to scrutiny in a more systematic manner. The Republicans had, in a partisan manner, blocked scrutiny of Kavanaugh and other judges, even before they held a majority. They could do this because US Democrats were blind to the backstage maneuvers and their program even before we lost the majority we once held in the Senate. This ceded judge selection to partisan institutions like the Federalist Society, when the GOP had control of the executive. Groups like Judicial Watch also took over the scrutiny and vetting of the Judiciary, to make a partisan hash of it. We can't let partisan groups take over these functions because it means biased reporting of issues and blindness to evidence of corruption, abuse of power or even criminality. Congress has proven inept at guarding against corruption because we depend on partisan legislators to do the necessary scrutiny.
Legislative Oversight is vital to the function of our system, but it is obvious it needs reforms.
Ad-hoc Scrutiny By Press and Citizens Groups
Improving our scrutiny of candidates and officers has been an issue for a long time. Organizations like "The League of Women Voters" setup ad-hoc systems that organized debates and tried to provide objective scrutiny of candidates, but that (admittedly ad-hoc) system was tossed aside more recently under the pressures of partisanship and big money in recent cycles. Judicial Watch took the opposite approach from the League of Women voters. To groups like Judicial Watch "liberal" judges or elected officers are considered guilty even if cleared of actual wrong doing. Yet, if potential judges met criteria of being for prohibition of abortion, pro-business and similar, they were "cleared" for nomination to higher office, even if they were personally repugnant and not meeting the constitutional requirement of "during good behavior." Blind spots reflect the manner in which these functions are performed not being built into the constitution of the groups performing them. In other words, bad constitution of oversight and vetting functions.
Likewise the Press has proved inadequate in performing it's role of investigating, scrutinizing and helping society vet officers. Elections depend on good information and if we don't have it, we elect demagogues.
Euthenia
The form of scrutiny that the Athenians used suggest a structure for this that, modernized, would work for our Federation and its member subdivisions. We need to systematize our governance around accountability. The ancient greeks used Jury like structures. We should use Jury like Panels:
Implementing Reforms
We aren't really that much more advanced than the ancients in many ways. But we do have some improved engineering methods. These can be used to improve the function and separation of powers that we need in order to keep our democracy.
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| https://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html |
So how do we implement these ideas in a manner that will work, be fair, just and enduring?
- Related Posts:
- Towards a More Effective Democratic Infrastructure
- Vetting and Accounting for Candidates and Officers
- What Electronic Democracy Means
- Further Readings
- References to Constitution come from my personal copies, electronic and physical
- Athenian Democracy Home Page
- http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/home?greekEncoding=UnicodeC
- Athenian Democracy: a brief overview by Christopher W. Blackwell, edition of February 28, 2003, [taken November 2018]
- http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_democracy_overview?page=all
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