Enhancing our political immune system - Granite Grok

Enhancing our political immune system

Consider the COVID-19 virus.  Or any virus, really.  But not what it does.  Rather, how it works.  Very briefly, it works by exploiting a general-purpose mechanism that your cells use to build the proteins that make up and operate your body.

Every cell knows how to take a messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence, which is a copy of some part of its DNA sequence, and hand it off to a ribosome, which uses it to link together a corresponding sequence of amino acids to form a protein.

The proteins that a cell forms at any given time depend on which part of its DNA is uncoiled, which depends on (among other things) what kind of cell it is, and what state of development the organism is in.

If you’d like to be amazed, try Googling ‘ribosome animation’, and watch some of  the videos that come up.

When a virus infects a cell, it tells the cell:  Stop making whatever proteins you were making, and make copies of me instead. 

It can do that, because a ribosome doesn’t know, or care, what it’s making.  Hand it some mRNA to make hemoglobin, and it will make hemoglobin.  Hand it some mRNA to make insulin, and it will make insulin.  Hand it some mRNA to make COVID-19, and it will make COVID-19.

And that’s the key idea:  As long as the proper form is followed, the mechanism can be used to create things that are actually destructive in their function.  It is as if the infected cell has forgotten its proper role, and has been hijacked to fill an entirely different role.

Maybe the cell was supposed to participate in muscle contractions, or pass electrochemical messages along, or secrete a digestive enzyme, or in some other way participate in the proper functioning of the body of which it is a part.  But now, it’s actively working to undermine that function.

Now consider a legislature.  It’s a lot like a ribosome, isn’t it?  Someone introduces an idea, encoded in the proper form (as a bill), and the next thing you know, an institution whose proper function is to protect rights is actively working to undermine that function.

It is as if the legislature has forgotten its proper role, and has been hijacked to fill an entirely different role.

Remember, what makes a viral infection possible is that a ribosome will happily copy a virus instead of creating the proteins needed by the body.  It doesn’t know any better.  It can’t compare the mRNA from the virus against the DNA in the nucleus to see if it’s legitimate.

What makes things like gun control, licensing, state-run monopolies, and grants of ’emergency powers’ possible is the fact that a legislature will happily enact a bill that destroys rights instead of protecting them.

The difference is this:  While a ribosome has no way to compare mRNA against its DNA, a legislature can, in theory, compare a bill against its constitution.  But, except in rare cases, it doesn’t bother to.

Right now, Legislative Services will take any hare-brained idea — Let’s make it illegal for people to criticize elected officials!  Let’s allow the police to take away people’s guns without due process!  Let’s allow the governor to act like a dictator when there is an emergency! — and encode it in the proper form so that the legislature can process it.

But what if there was some sort of mechanism to prevent that?  What would it look like?  Well, for inspiration we can turn to the body’s immune system.

Suppose we find a vaccine for COVID-19.  How will it work?  It will teach the body’s immune system to recognize and destroy instances of the virus before it can make its way into cells whose ribosomes it can exploit.

A ‘vaccine’ for unconstitutional proposals might work the same way — by recognizing and destroying such proposals before they can make their way into to the legislature.

In principle, that could work.  But while the destruction part is easy — you just toss proposals in the trash — the recognition part is difficult.  It’s difficult because it has to rely on humans to do it.  And that’s difficult because at this point, most adults have been trained to believe, for example, that ‘shall not’ means ‘may sometimes’ if a court has said that’s the case.

What we need is an advisory group of people whose ability to understand English has not been compromised in this way.

What we need is a panel of… fifth-graders!

Imagine a process in which fifth-graders are randomly drafted, like jurors, to read proposals for bills and check them for conflicts with the plain language of the state and federal constitutions, without worrying about how that language has been distorted by our befuddled judicial system.

Just think of the benefits that would accrue from this — how much time, effort, money, paper, gasoline, and energy that would be saved if people didn’t have to come to Concord, year after year, to fight over the same blatantly unconstitutional proposals, which arise as predictably as each year’s flu.

And — what’s more — after a while, we’d actually have a state full of kids who have read the state and federal constitutions!

It’s possible that we’ll never be able to create a vaccine for COVID-19, or for any number of other biological viruses that we’re sure to see over the coming years.   But there’s nothing except inertia to prevent us from defeating the political viruses that plague us.

 

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