Thread by @jbf1755

1/ OK.
So, I've had a word bouncing around in my head for awhile, and I want to say a few words about it:
PROCESS.
NOT as in -- I need to process some information, but rather as in -- the process of government.

2/ In a sense, the most fundamental idea underlying our Constitution is process. The Framers saw the Constitution as a framework of a government. A new political process put in motion -- with the structures of that process committed to paper & ratified.

3/ Part of the reason for James Madison's amazing note-taking at the Constitutional Convention? He was recording and preserving the process of creating a constitution and thereby a government.

4/ In the government's early years, this idea of "process" loomed large. How would these new processes of government work? Would they work? What happened if they didn't? Was a government grounded on such processes feasible? (Remember: the world was largely monarchies at the time)

5/ Sometimes (happily for historians), people put this idea on paper, as in 1801, after an election that seemed tear the nation in 2. After it, T.Jeff said if things had gone wrong, they could fix the Constitution as they would fix a watch. Resort to a process to fix the process.

6/ As T.Jeff put it (regarding using the convention process to fix the process of government, and the VITAL importance of that process:

(Ignore the first quotation mark. Oops.)
"

7/ A "peaceable & legitimate resource, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience, superseding all appeal to force, & being always within our reach, shews a precious principle of self-preservation in our composition"

Commitment to shared processes as self-preservation.

8/ This isn't to say that those processes are perfect and never need reform. They do. But they are a vital starting point for instituting political change.

9/At times of ferment such processes can be a lifeline for some. You see it in the chaos of the 19th c. Congress. (I can't help it! It's at the front of my brain!) Violence peaked & congressmen grabbed at process--rules of order, the meaning & impt. of the institution of Congress

10/ .....and, those processes didn't fix things. And we had a Civil War. You couldn't "fix" the existence of slavery.
Still, the 1850s Congress shows you people in real time grasping at shared beliefs & processes of governance for the sake of order between warring parties.

11/ At the heart of our process of gov't?
*a balanced nat'l government that divides power so no one person or group can seize total & permanent control
*institutionalized channels for people to make demands of their gov't.
*regular reliable elections as tools of change

and....

12/ ...less institutionalized but no less important, a free press to hold government accountable.

13/The DJT administration is offering a real-time lesson in eroding that process, and they're doing it from the outside in, by stripping away norms -- things that we take for granted in gov't due to a shared agreement on some basic ideas.

14/ It's easy to hear "violated norms" & tune out. The phrase has been all over cable TV news for months.
But it says something important.
It's a way of saying that a basic shared agreement on the basic foundations of our government is slipping away.

15/ Our process of governance and its spirit are bolstered by some fundamental norms. Strip them away, & you erode the grounding of democratic governance.

I didn't make it in a lucky-13 number of tweets.
But I came close.