Cogitamus

The Washington Redskins Stand For Brain Damage

Just like the other 31 teams of the NFL, of course.

The reason I mention this is that a banner's been following me around the Web, as such things do, saying, "The Washington Redskins stand for strength, courage, and respect."

This is all about the word "Redskins" in the team name, of course.  I might feel differently if I were a Native American, but as someone who isn't, this strikes me as the last war when the next one is already in our face.

According to the NFL's own actuaries, it can be expected that 28% of NFL players will experience brain damage as a result of all those collisions they endure on the playing field.

The NFL, the Redskins, the Cowboys, the Ravens, the Packers, da Bears, the Seahawks, and all the other NFL teams - they all stand for making a buck by mashing the brains of a substantial number of their players into pulp.

That is not an acceptable way to make a buck.  Hell, I don't see how anyone can continue to be a football fan, knowing that this is true.  Men's brains are being destroyed so that I can have something interesting to watch on TV on Sunday afternoons?  I can't be a party to that.  Forty-five years of being a football fan came to an end when I realized that this was what I was watching.

Josh Marshall has asked, "didn't we know this all along?"  But his own illustrations show that we only knew that football destroyed the body.  And the reality in America (and much of the world) is that many people work jobs out of necessity, just to put food on the table and pay the rent, that use up their body by the time they can collect Social Security, leaving them a retirement that they are unable to enjoy.  Until that underlying reality is changed, it's hard to criticize football for paying people a lot more money for having their bodies prematurely messed up.  

But maybe we ought to think about changing that reality.  It's unreasonable, especially in a time where there's plenty of surplus labor, so to speak, that we have to use up the bodies of working men and women in the course of their work.  We need to find a way to bring that to an end.

Constitutional Amendments We Need (1): Supermajorities for and Sunsetting of AUMFs

That the Obama Administration is willing to stretch the 2001 AUMF pertaining to Al Qaeda to cover its use of force against ISIS shows just how important it is that no AUMF should be in force forever, without any reauthorization by Congress.

And while we're on the subject of war-related amendments, the notion that we can go to war by a simple majority vote of both houses of Congress has always struck me as absurd.  If a 2/3 majority of the Senate is required just to ratify a treaty, then surely a 2/3 majority of both houses should be required to go to war.

So we need a Constitutional amendment that says these things. 

Obviously there will be no such amendment anytime soon, but any push for a Constitutional amendment starts off as something aspirational - a way of saying, this is what we're for, this is how things should be.

Then after you've said that for enough years, it either starts to make overwhelming sense to enough people that it becomes possible, or you get to a point where it's clear that it just ain't gonna happen.

So I believe the Dems, or if necessary, a group of more progressive Dems, should start pushing a number of potential amendments to the Constitution.  This is one.

First, it would require a 2/3 amendment of both houses to initially authorize the use of force in a given country or conflict.

Second, it would limit such an initial authorization to five years.

Third, it would allow Congress to extend an existing authorization for three years at a time by simple majorities of both houses of Congress, and allow Congress in so doing to restrict the scope of the existing authorization going forward.  Expanding the scope would require a fresh AUMF.

So for instance, if this had been in effect when Bush became President, Congress would have had to extend the 2001 AUMF in 2006, 2009, and 2012 for it to remain in effect now.  Maybe Congress would have, at each juncture, extended the AUMF as is.  Or maybe in 2009, they would have limited it to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But absent actual votes by Congress, the AUMF would eventually end.