Several years ago American Heritage explained the real meaning of Murphy's Law. You are probably familiar with it: "If anything can go wrong, it will." But something went wrong with Murphy's Law. People blame the machine or the system for their own mistakes and failures, chalking it all up to Murphy's Law. But Murphy's Law was intended to suggest the opposite: if somebody can screw it up, then somebody will screw it up.
Murphy's Law is a statement on the capacity of humans to inflict disaster on themselves, willfully or not. I recall this illustration: if it is possible for an individual to drown in a 2-inch pool of water, somebody eventually will. The most unlikely of accidents will eventually happen, and fools will always find a way to mess up anything that's "foolproof."
Perhaps it is better to say that if anything can go wrong, sooner or later, it will. A machine might work fairly well for a long time, but it will not withstand persistent abuse, and may destruct or cause injury if used by people who don't follow instructions. And somebody will abuse it; somebody will fail to follow instructions.
Things go wrong because of human stupidity; things get worse when stupidity is mixed with pride, greed, envy, or some other "deadly sin." And that is how organizations "go wrong." Human organizations function best when the people involved are committed to the procedures and purpose of the organization. If the organization loses its focus it could become bloated and collapse on its own weight. Or, members may tell themselves, "this is not why I joined," and leave. Likewise, if its leader earns some measure of fame and prominence and becomes "bigger" than the organization itself, lines of accountability might break and tyranny may ensue.
This can happen even when procedures for accountability are still used. Personal loyalties and quid pro quo distort the process. When there is abuse, an "official investigation" might take place, and there might even be a hearing, but that doesn't prevent bias: "He's done so much good for us, he ought to be given the benefit of a doubt." A cult of personality emanates a spirit that spreads into every crevice in the organization, dissenters are silenced, and even people who want to leave find it difficult and stressful. Whether the leader is a pastor, priest, CEO, coach, college president, or head of a non-profit, everyone has either experienced this kind of abuse or knows someone who has.
The "letter of the law" may still exist within the organization, but it becomes a hollow shell. Or the "spirit" of the organization's purpose may remain, but because the rules aren't followed, the scene is chaotic. And some organizations lose both the letter and the spirit of their original mission; they are barely recognizable.
No matter how wise the organizational structure may be, and no matter how worthy its purpose, sooner or later something will go wrong. This is especially true in politics: the country will go wrong; the Constitution will go wrong. On paper, the Constitution functions fairly well in restraining government power. Relative to other countries' experiences, blatant abuses have usually been corrected. But the odds told us that eventually the procedures and original purpose of the Union would be lost, that America would lose her freedom. That time has come.
The death of the Constitution was a long time coming, with many unsettling precedents that won't be detailed here. I will mention one telling development. Ninety years ago, alcohol prohibitionists sought to criminalize drinking nationwide. They knew this was impossible; the Constitution did not grant Congress the power to ban the manufacture or sale of liquor. So they pushed through the 18th Amendment to grant Congress this power. This was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.
A hard lesson was learned from the disaster, but not the obvious one that prohibition doesn't work. Instead, the busybodies learned to just by-pass the Constitution the next time they wanted to impose their morals on everyone. And so laws against certain kinds of drugs entered the books, even though the Constitution didn't authorize Congress to write them. The Constitution was ignored when it was inconvenient. And no built-in Constitutional checks - Presidential vetoes, Supreme Court reversals, elections to throw out the petty tyrants in Congress - were employed to stop or repeal these laws. The War on Drugs appears Constitutional because it survived the "process," the checks and balances within the Constitution – even though it is clearly unconstitutional. The checks and balances didn't work because Congress (and those aspiring to Congress from both major parties), the President, and the federal courts would all enjoy more power - more authority over other people's lives - if we had a War on Drugs. Accumulating power is what they do.
Every federal social welfare program exists for the same reason. There is no provision in the Constitution providing for a program like Social Security, but the program brings more power and prestige to the federal government as tens of millions become dependent on it. The people didn't seem to mind, because they perceived they were benefiting from the new system.
The people became accustomed to Big Government. The high taxes (on other people) weren't bothersome. Neither were the welfare programs. Or the regulatory agencies supposedly protecting workers and consumers from evil and greedy businessmen. In addition, World War II inflated the American ego – the USA became the Savior and Policeman of the world. And so nobody objected when Presidents started taking the country into war without a Congressional declaration, against nations that did not attack us.
But many who previously defended an expanded federal government are just now seeing the consequences of playing fast and loose with the the Constitution. They're realizing that the Constitution is being ignored by the Administration, and that our rights and freedoms are in mortal danger. Thanks to the Military Commissions Act, it is possible for an American citizen to be branded an "enemy combatant," taken away, and tortured merely for criticizing the President. The first time this happens, civil libertarians would raise a fuss. They would invoke the Habeas Corpus clause and the 1st, 5th, and 8th Amendments in their arguments. And if this "enemy combatant" was identified only because government agents tapped his phone without a search warrant, they could also bring up the 4th Amendment. But their cause will fall on deaf ears; Congress has prevented these detainees from getting their cases heard in the civilian courts.
Many who speak out now against the Military Commissions Act, however, were silent when Campaign Finance Reform assaulted the First Amendment. They never condemned the (literal) assaults on the Second Amendment at Ruby Ridge and Waco. They never took to the streets when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia without provocation. And they still love Big Government programs that run counter to the Tenth Amendment.
For some reason, many Americans believed everything else in the Constitution could be explained away or ignored, but that we'll always have habeas corpus and due process of law, that the government would never detain American citizens indefinitely or, worse, torture us. But with the
Military Commissions Act, our rights to a day in court, and to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, are gone. Because we didn't stop the assault on our rights earlier, the last of them has now been taken away.
Some may conclude that there is nothing wrong with the Constitution, only that it's been ignored and that we'll be better off if we restored Constitutional limits. Others may say that the Constitution is defective for the very reason that it could not stop this concentration of power: we need amendments list and define our rights more explicitly, and then we'll be better off.
But no blueprint for government is going to work forever. In a country that grew as fast as the United States, too many things could go wrong, and eventually they did. Murphy's Law predicted they would.