FUCK THEORY

Checks and Balances

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I guess you must have been absent that day in 8th grade history, Governor, but when the Founding Fathers designed the government of the United States they came up with something they called “separation of powers.”  The big round room where all those stupid Democrats sit is the “legislative” branch of government.  The office where you eat your hoagie every day is the “executive” branch of government.  Their job is to make the laws, your job is to enforce them.  The reason there are more Democrats than Republicans in the New Jersey state legislature - the reason there are enough floor votes to pass a gay marriage bill - is that during the competition to see who would get to sit in the big round room (“elections”), more of New Jersey’s voters wanted to be represented by Democrats than by bigoted assholes Republicans. 

The natural question, which I would no doubt find in my ask box if I wasn’t about to preempt it (ha-hah!) is, “Are you suggesting we eliminate executive veto?” or perhaps “Why is the executive veto built into the Constitution if the executive isn’t supposed to use it?”

There are two answers to this question. 
First and most simply, the executive veto, like the filibuster, was designed as an emergency measure, a back-up plan meant to enforce the separation of powers in case of a governmental crisis; it wasn’t meant to become an everyday feature of political life. 
More importantly, though, there are vetos, and there are vetos.  I have much less concern with an executive veto on, say, the state budget.  Why?  Because the state budget directly affects the executive’s ability to do its job.  Like every binary opposition, the line between the executive and the legislature is not a clear-cut one; it’s ridiculous to suppose a unilateral divide between those who create the law and those who execute the law, since the relationship between the two is obviously dialectical.  What I’m saying, in other words, is that the blurrier the line between the domain of the executive and the domain of the legislative, the more reasonable it is to activate a backup measure like an executive veto, which is designed to short-circuit precisely that blurring of boundaries. 

In this case, though, there’s nothing blurry about it.  The voters who put these legislators in office knew what they were doing and made a deliberate decision to be represented by a party that (officially, at least) supports gay rights.  A piece of legislation which protects the rights and freedoms of a minority population from discrimination by the majority isn’t in any way a blurring of the boundary between executive and legislature - it’s the epitome of how legislation is supposed to work in a pluralist democracy.  I’m not suggesting that executive veto should be eliminated in general - I’m just suggesting that in this particular instance, where there is no justification whatsoever for it, a veto would represent not democracy in action but an authoritarian intervention into democratic process, and any attempt to dress up systemic bigotry and discrimination with a freedom-colored ribbon is a disgusting and cowardly action on the part of a slimy and hypocritical kombinator.