DebatingChambers.com is a site focused primarily on federal process in two branches of government – deliberative public process in lawmaking, and due process in enforcing federal law – because that process is so essential to the realization of America’s founding ideals – namely, securing liberty and equal justice under law, and with them the nation, through the means of self-government and Constitutionally-separated, limited federal power.
My main aim in this quiet corner of the internet is to provide a collection of information – untainted by Party allegiance or bias – about the actions of those two vital branches of our government, whose irreplaceable roles in our federal system the national media, and too many – of both Parties – in Congress and the judiciary, seem determined to assign to the dustbin of history. To wit: The separate and independent Article I Legislative Branch, and the separate and independent Article III Judicial Branch.
If we hope to make the above-stated ideals more than empty “parchment promises,” I believe that Americans must regain an appreciation for what our democratic, egalitarian federal legislature, and independent federal judiciary, could be, and should be, if freed – particularly in the case of the House and Senate – from the corrupting, top-down, backroom control of the national fundraising groups known as the Democratic and Republican Parties. All indications are that both of those Parties – and, as a result, much of America’s national commercial media – are now privately nurtured and guided by and for the interests of a small group of self-interested (mostly corporate-underwritten) donors, who have the means to repeatedly contribute large sums to expensive, Party-coordinated campaigns for federal public office in Congress and the presidency.
The task of restoring respect for the democratic legislative process at the federal level thus necessarily involves repudiating the Party-generated, authoritarian-beloved President-as-American-idol view of the government of the United States, that’s now widely promoted by the national media. Those who share that view – which exalts the office of the presidency out of all proportion to its Constitutional role at the expense of the other branches – are supporting a reckless and profoundly-undemocratic rejection of the Constitutional system that created our federal union. Yet it’s nevertheless a view of the presidency that’s evidently embraced by most incumbent members of both Parties in Congress today, who are distinguished only by their self-serving anti-incumbent-president, or pro-incumbent-president, alignments of the moment.
Some readers will be familiar with my comments and reader-diaries at Glenn Greenwald’s Salon.com blog and/or at Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake.com blog. This site came about in large part because I had the opportunity to read and comment [Salon, FDL] at length at those sites for the last several years, as they and their commenting readers steadfastly struggle, like so many patriotic citizens on-line and off, with the urgent problem of how to successfully go about righting the listing American ship of state. My reader-diary posts at FDL make up the pre-loaded content of this site, and my intention is to continue to add to that material in similar fashion, with a new approach or two made possible by the new site. I’ll maintain a focus on original reporting about the actions of incumbent legislators and judges, but without resorting to the carelessly-misleading, Party-framed narratives present in almost all national reporting about the actions of our federal government. I hope that this site’s material – posts and comments – will constructively contribute in some degree to meaningful efforts by outsiders – perhaps even joined soon by a few insiders – to bring long-overdue democratic reform, and a careful, lasting rebalancing of power, to America’s runaway federal government.
– pow wow, February, 2012