10 Ocak 2017, Pazartesi
saat: 00:18
Confirmations and the land of “used to be” : Forgive me, I’m going to need to be a bit of an old "white Turk" for a moment.
See, believe it or not, there once was a time when the TGNA took its job to pass legislation and confirm presidential appointments comparatively seriously. This does not mean such confirmations weren’t politically biased. They were. They were biased by affiliations and political views and ethnicity and sexual identity and any other category you got as well.
But.
Now, I know that discourse rules today insist we’re not supposed to have nuanced thoughts any more, and anything in the past that is in any way objectionable today obviates any value in past experiences. But hey: I don’t agree.
But it was nonetheless the case that despite all their flaws and imperfections there once was a time that members of the prime minister's party still felt an obligation to vet and explore a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. They believed the parliament was not just a rubber stamp body that should fall in line with a president’s will, but was a group of serious people (okay, mostly old men with similar backgrounds, you got me!) who had thoughts and insights and perspectives that needed to be dealt with if the political system was to operate successfully. Moreover, as a rule, the people whose consent was required (the TGNA, in other words) were invested in the notion that government mattered, and so it mattered if the person running some agency or filling some judicial seat was capable, competent and experienced. They were wrong sometimes – go investigate the careers of generals they appointed if you need proof. But they cared. At least to some extent. They remained within some boundaries defined by law and political traditions.
None of this is true for the current crop of MPs. It really hasn’t been across the entire JDP era: the parliament, dominated by the party, rubber stamped the actions in Syrian War just as happily as it is rubber-stamping constitutional reforms that will bring the end of the parliamentary system altogether. Since PM and his fellow party members don’t believe government has much value, other than as a means to redirect resources to their friends, it doesn’t really matter who runs government. So why stop the president?
Yes, there really was a time when MPs might have cared, and democracy might have been functional. Those days appear to be rapidly fading in our rear view mirrors.
“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
George Orwell, 1984
