Blackball

    The blackball is an unreasonable concept applied to a democracy that makes it no longer a democracy.  In a functioning democracy the will of the majority rules.  That required majority may be increased to 60% or even in cases of extreme importance 66.67%.  But what do you have when one member can overrule the entire body?

   One member should never be given this power.  Not if you wish to maintain the democracy.  So when the senior senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, stops the promotion of 165 US military officers in order to leverage an unrelated partisan issue, the system has stopped functioning.  The one member Blackball right must be removed from the parliamentary rules of our government.  The Republican senators will not apply pressure to this nut cake senator as our President suggested in a Finland news conference.  A ride down an escalator in the Trump Tower effectively removed the Party’s moral rudder.  The solution to the problem of any single vote ruling the Senate would be a secret ballot to remove the blackball option.   Even our President can have his veto overruled, but we currently have no system to overrule an authoritarian senator.

  There is another problem here that isn’t quite so obvious.  If you were to quiz the 100 members of the Senate and ask them individually: “What do you know about the performance of any five of the 165 military officers offered for your approval for promotion?”  It would surprise me if any of the one hundred had a comprehensive answer.  The obvious next question would be, “Then how is the US Senate qualified to take this vote, and shouldn’t these decisions be left in The Pentagon or below even that level?” Let the decisions be made where the knowledge exists to make them. 

  The original use of the term “Blackball” was to name a venereal disease.  We would have a more effective democracy if the concept returned to its original medical application. 

Cheers, Old Buz          07/13/2023

“You cannot change a person’s position with reason … if they did not reach it through reason.” – Anon