Davis Merritt: Our paper moon is sailing over cardboard sea

It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, just a phony as it can be.

But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.

Our 21st-century political seizure gives a perverse twist to those lyrics from the mid-’30s ditty “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

The founders embedded in the Constitution the most flexible and enduring democratic governance plan in human history, but the corrosion of the politics that necessarily drives the plan is putting that legacy at risk.

Three of many ongoing examples:

▪  Nationally and in Kansas, political leadership seems incapable of leading. Those who yearn to lead, such as the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, offer mostly slogans, hazy visions, hyperbole and childish personal attacks.

▪  Once again, congressional extremists want to shut down the federal government, this time to punish Planned Parenthood’s 4.6 million mostly poor clients.

▪  In Kansas, an outrageous attempt to intimidate the state’s judges thankfully is unraveling. If successful, it would destroy the crucial constitutional balance among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, leaving individual citizens’ rights exposed to majoritarian tyrannies by the two elective branches.

The bottom lines of those adventures: Only one or two of those GOP candidates have any shot at winning; the far-right congressional minority has no chance of defunding Planned Parenthood; and the extremists who threatened to close down the state court system are doomed to failure.

So why this continuing insistence upon gaudy demonstrations of ideological puritanism at the expense of functional governance? Do the extremists actually believe that their phony-as-can-be-Barnum-and-Bailey world would come about if only more people believed in them? Only the most dim-witted or purblind could possibly think that the way to make true believers is by destroying the constitution and the government it establishes.

A more plausible, though more reprehensible, explanation is that their distrust and distaste for government is so deep they prefer chaos to order and tyranny to freedom, so long as the chaos and tyranny are on their terms.

Thus the Legislature passes a bill that would defund – and thereby close – the entire court system if the state Supreme Court overturned a law changing the way chief district judges are selected. The bill is unarguably unconstitutional on at least two grounds, but the Legislature’s lawyer, Attorney General Derek Schmidt, averts his eyes and does not advise against it, and Gov. Sam Brownback signs it, though both took oaths to support the state constitution.

Incredibly, Schmidt said last week: “Key legislators have indicated that the Legislature did not intend … to eliminate funding” and that Brownback has indicated he does not want to shut down the courts. That’s beyond weird, because the bill was unambiguous on that point, and all of those people can read.

Meanwhile, nationally and in Kansas, complex and compelling problems go unaddressed, and any notion of common good is lost in a blinding fog of ideology. That will not change so long as the ideologues keep getting elected, which they do by looping back each cycle to a core constituency of angry and unhappy extremists while the majority of potential voters are not paying attention.

Kansas’ longtime distinction as a moderate, well-run state has leaked away in this century because of the studied indifference of too many. Until that changes, the extremists’ paper moon will continue to sail over a cardboard sea.

This story was originally published September 28, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Our paper moon is sailing over cardboard sea."