What is not happening with constitutionalism in the United States and the United Kingdom

The first journalist who I knew by name was Lloyd Mangram, the writer of a monthly round-up of news for that wonderful 1980s magazine for Sinclair Spectrum users, Crash.

(Yes, I was a Speccie – less earnest than the BBC micro users, less bombastic than the Commodore 64 users, and less exotic than a Dragon 32 user.)

The Merely Mangram column was cheerfully discursive and leisurely, and it gave a better sense of what was going on (and not going on) generally in that world – especially for this then-teenage reader – than the news reports, interviews and reviews elsewhere in the computer press.

So you can imagine the devastation when I discovered one day that Lloyd Mangram did not actually exist – that this supposed author was actually a composite persona put together by the other magazine writers.

Lloyd Mangram was a fiction!

This was when I first learned to be cynical about the media.

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Nonetheless, there is merit in that sort of discursive commentary – especially about human affairs.

News reports are necessarily narrow; op-eds often promote a preconceived “angle” with motivated reasoning; explainers invariably work backwards from what topical particular point needs to be quickly explained.

But if [A] has some connection to [B], and in the meantime [C] is not happening, then a discursive approach can sometimes give more insight in what is going on, than any news report, an op-ed, or explainer.

And as Kenneth Tynan (who I think definitely existed?) says somewhere, the job of a critic is not only to say what is happening, but also to say what is not happening. This must also be true of a commentator.

Yet commenting on something which is not happening is not really what our media is geared to do, if you think about it. There is enough going on report and analyse, without setting out what is not happening.

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In respect of the United States, what is not happening explains a great deal of what is happening.

What is not happening is any overall sense of constitutionalism.

President Trump and his circle are doing the worst of things, at home and abroad. There is a general approach of cruelty and violence, from Minnesota to the Indian Ocean .

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But.

There are always Trumps. There are always Vances and Millers and Hegseths and Noems.

There are always knaves and fools, and there always those those who will serve knaves and fools.

The question is how constitutional arrangements – the division of powers, the checks and balances, the rule of law and the guarantees of certain fundamental rights – have failed and are failing to prevent what is happening.

The arrangements are there: Trump and his circle could face removal by impeachment at a stroke, and their antics could be consistently held to be unlawful.

Yet that is not happening.

What is not happening is any constitutionalist approach to restrain Trump and his circle.

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Here in the United Kingdom we have a different sort of thing which is not happening in respect of constitutional matters.

We have a supposedly left-of-centre government with a former human rights lawyer as Prime Minister – and with similar lawyers and ex-lawyers in prominent positions.

But we do not have any consistent overall view to constitutionalism and constitutional reform.

Yesterday – hurrah! – there was a vote passing the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, some 115 years after such peers were allowed to remain in the legislature with what was intended to be a temporary stay.

This reform is the minimum required – and a great deal of Lords reform is undone, as is any (and arguably more important) Commons reform.

And also yesterday – boo! – there was a vote restricting trials by jury.

This change, of course, will make little or no difference to court backlogs, which to deal with requires resources at scale.

And as this blog has said many times, juries are less important for the powers that they have, than for the powers that they prevent others from having.

Again, this change is not part of any overall constitutional vision.

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Many of the problems in the United States and United Kingdom come about from what is not not being done.

And in our focus of twenty-four news and doomscrolling, we are perhaps less able to notice what is not happening.

As one Speccie computer game character would have said:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

(Source)

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This post is also cross posted at The Empty City substack, which is run in parallel with this blog.

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