Continuity and Governance

Managing tasks, programs and longstanding operations of any organization, takes constancy and continuity. Routines help people do their jobs consistently and accurately. Mistakes are made and repairs accomplished. Routine operations day after day. Mistakes made day after day. Fixes made day after day.

For the most part operations are continuous and perform well. There are exceptions. Always are. You’ve made mistakes and gone the extra mile to repair the damage.

Same in governing the peoples’ business. Government involves innumerable transactions. Taken together they represent the hoped for objective of the program or function of the government. The military is enormous. Several branches, each with its specialty in land, air, water and outer space. Millions of personnel, countless tools of war – defensive and offensive – and organizational structure. This is a human enterprise. Think of higher education, too. It is often state owned and public. Many of the programs at such institutions are federally funded to meet a national goal of some thing or another. Human tasks performed. Objectives reached in the main, sometimes not. Some programs work beautifully, others fail miserably. Trying is the key. New ways are formulated to do the people’s work.

This is governance. The building of roads, intersections with stop signs or traffic signals. Police functions to enforce traffic laws and keep order on our roadways. Criminal justice functions to maintain public order and keep people safe. Order that brings calm, confidence of stability, operating environments that give rise to commerce, education, invention and renewal of the body politic. This is governance in complicated entirety.

Electing people we trust to carry out our will as a people is at the core of American governance. There are so few elected compared with the administrative doers that actually do the work. Governance has more to do with decision making and enacting laws that make those decisions perform. Administrative functions are the Executive Branch of the federal government. Congress and lawmaking in general at the federal level is the Legislative Branch of the government. Ensuring laws and subordinate policies and regulations are proper and constitutional is the job of the Judicial Branch of the government. Headed by the Supreme Court, all other federal courts are subsidiary. Fine points of law are encountered every day and courts adjudicate those in dispute. Courts define the fine points and hand down decisions that make the remaining laws and regulations performable.

Making this complex of structures work for the people is modified, defined and argued by political parties. The parties develop political ideology and mechanisms that identify potential leaders and candidates for elected office. The parties work on a federal basis but also on the state level. Those parties are also populated by people, like you and me. The parties attempt to define what the people believe and hope how government works, the objectives of that work, and the people who will manage such tasks.

Political operations are personal and subjective because of all the people involved. It is not objective.

Perhaps that is the problem we have worked and worried through for hundreds of years. Subjective management of a huge complex of government. Objectivity gets lost on the governing journey. We get congresses that are gridlocked. We get court packing with ideologues. We get foot draggers and worse, actual people in our government who intend to slow or stop the actions of government. This is an ideological issue driven by subjective opinion.

The effectiveness of government gets frustrated and lost by all the shenanigans thrown in its way. The government stutters in its service to the people, to the common good.  National leadership suffers. International leadership suffers. The people suffer.

Trump is a nonsense person intent on damaging the American governance structure. For whatever reason. Who knows? Biden is the man in charge at the moment. He stands for reelection as President, so his governance structure continues to operate, to function. Trump’s is the exact opposite.

The age of each is perilously old. Both are subject to the frailties of aging. Their organizations do not suffer such, only the leaders. This election is not about the leaders in question but the administrative and governance structures they manage. Choose that which suits your hopes and dreams. Keep government operating for the people’s good.

Later, work in the parties so improve their succession planning. Leaders take decades to develop. Not all are ready at the best time to win elections at high levels and perform the tasks of government. Never again should our candidates be so old as Trump and Biden. Involve them in governance, just don’t elect them to high office beyond workable ages. Develop younger people to lead the systems of government.

Keep Biden in office. Fix succession planning to develop strong, experienced candidates for future elections. Oh, and please let’s fix the ideologies that tear us apart rather than unite us. That’s what the Founding Fathers hoped for way back when. We haven’t done a very good job of it. For a very long time.

July 3, 2024

 

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