| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Did The New Republic call for Obama to dissolve Congress?
TND Exclusive / By Eric Boehm /
COMPROMISE, RUSSIAN-STYLE: At least one writer at The New Republic thinks this is the best way to solve a governmental crisis.
Apparently, this is what The New Republic thinks about our old republic.
In a post Wednesday afternoon, Julia Ioffe made a not-so-subtle suggestion about how she thinks chief executives should handle opposition from democratically-elected legislators.
“What is a president in a presidential constitutional republic to do when faced with an intransigent, bull-headed faction among his people’s representatives?” she asks, rhetorically.
The answer, of course, is to do exactly what Boris Yeltsin did in Russia in 1993: dissolve the parliament — known at the time as the “Supreme Soviet” — and do what you want.
But Yeltsin didn’t just shut down the Russian parliament in 1993. No, he literally ordered tanks to shell the building, while some of the leaders of the parliament were still inside because they refused to let the chief executive act in such a dictatorial manner.
More than 100 people died in the riots that ensued during the 10-day siege of the parliament building, ironically called “The White House.”
According to an account from The Guardian on the 10-year anniversary of Yeltsin’s aggressive negotiations, he didn’t just sack the parliament, but “also scrapped the constitution, replacing it with another that gave him near-monarchic executive powers.”
No wonder Russia has such a highly-functioning democracy two decades later.
Thankfully, it’s nearly impossible to imagine President Obama ordering the military to shell the U.S. House of Representatives because he blames them for shutting down the government.
But imperialists on the left can dream.
# # # # #
Eric Boehm can be reached at EBoehm[@]Watchdog.org (remove brackets added to help curtail spam) and follow him at @EricBoehm87 on Twitter.
He writes for Watchdog.org, an online news organization that publishes articles by independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity. The program began in September 2009, a project of Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting new media journalism.
Follow All Of TheNewsDoctors.com’s Exclusive Articles:
http://thenewsdoctors.com/category/thenewsdoctors-exclusive/
Source: http://thenewsdoctors.com/did-the-new-republic-call-for-obama-to-dissolve-congress/
