When I left off in my moment of glory, it was with the hope that we’d tackle larger themes first and then, over time, develop them into more detailed topics. Yeah…that didn’t even last until lunchtime.
To be fair, a couple of delegates tried. Following up on my resolution, Dabney Thom rose up and spoke for about twenty minutes about the Bill of Rights and other Amendments. He talked about removing the forced servitude loophole, about clarifying the limits of the police, and about redefining who, if anyone, got to “keep and bear arms”. It was passionate if not always eloquent. I recommend checking out the official transcript.
Next came Emmy Manheim who said it was important that we remember not only tradition as well as progress. She first proposed that we retain the Preamble substantially as it is, but offered a change I hadn’t thought of (and one I think is going to be contentious): using epicene (or genderless) pronouns in place of the current male-only pronouns that fill the document. She acknowledged that such pronouns weren’t universally accepted in the country, but if they were in the Constitution, that would certainly validate them. To that end, she suggested that we use pronouns designed to be singular — either from existing options or some that we construct here — so as to avoid the confusions that normally plural pronouns were known to cause.
Murmur scale: about a 3.7 out of 10.
From then on, any hope of a top-down debate pretty much fell apart. Some did. Most didn’t. Lunch couldn’t come soon enough for me.
Unsurprisingly, I joined the TIC-talk as soon as we recessed. After filling them in, we started fretting about how we were going to wade through all of the interests. George suggested that we request that sessions be debate-only for the first three or four cycles. That way delegates wouldn’t have to worry about make the proper resolutions and we wouldn’t waste time with endless votes. That would allow the three of us to pour through the transcripts of the sessions and suss out common themes as well as ones that were definitely going to need serious politicking.
We felt strongly enough about this that we three sought out the PoC as well as Macy, Will, and Roger (the three leaders) to ask them to manage the debates in this way. Martha also suggested that they track who were staying quiet during the debates so that their thoughts could be included either on the floor our behind the scenes. All three leaders were less than enthusiastic over our proposals (clearly, there were machinations afoot we weren’t privy to), Roger especially seemed to be champing at the bit to open the floodgates on resolutions, but they all agreed that it might do some good and the worst that would happen is that we waste a few weeks.
Hey, we took that as a win.
When the Blues reconvened, Macy and the PoC put forth this new procedure — which had to be voted on. They put the number at three cycles, or more if a new vote requested it an at least one other of the groups also agreed. The vote was 88 yea 39 nay. (I’ll let you know that that other two groups also agreed when they met.)
This was probably the best move we made during the early days. There was actual give and take debate/arguing about things that mattered and some things that didn’t (at least not at this level). And I got to sit back and take it all in. It was great.
I once read that, during the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson would sit quietly and note all of the debates happening around him. When he was tasked with writing the first draft of the Declaration, he mostly just regurgitated what had already been said in Congress. It didn’t mean that it didn’t emerge with heavy edits, but the foundation was there for common ground and compromise. I don’t pretend to be of the stature of a Jefferson in this regard (and, modesty aside, I’m way better than him in others), but the strategy seems sound.
The evening after the end of the second Blue day, I met with George and Martha and was gifted with a database with a breakdown of everything discussed during the session. Seems Martha thought that doing nothing on their off days was a waste of time, so they indexed my sessions from the live transcripts since they didn’t have much else to do. Martha will show me their system while George has at it with the Whites for the next couple of days. I’m thinking that we might be able to have staff people do a fair portion of this, but not only do we need to hone what we need, it’s helpful to actually have our hands in all of this. The only real downside is that it limits the time we have to talk with others behind the scenes.
