Today’s Merriam Webster Dictionary app’s word of the day is abeyance. I first learned this word October 2, 1989. Why would I remember this specific date for learning a word, you might ask? I bet that you remember the dates of events as obscure as this one – whether they are words learned or something else. Memory is a curious thing.
I remember the day that I learned this word because I was watching The Ensigns of Command – Season 3 STNG Episode 2. In that episode, the Enterprise crew has to deal with an impending taking of a populated human world by a highly developed, non-human species. Picard struggles to deal with the intransigent Sheliak who, like Samuel Alito, are strict textualists. They will not brook a delay in their taking of the planet so that the Enterprise can move the human settlement to another planet.
In the end, Picard proposes third party arbitration, and gives the Sheliak the choice of accepting arbitration, as specified by the treaty binding both parties, and holding the treaty in abeyance. Queue my trip to the dictionary.
The gist is to suspend something – an agreement, a law, some arrangement. That’s abeyance. And that brings us to democracy in abeyance. I don’t care whether you hold that ours is a democracy or a representative democracy or a constitutional republic (the RWNJs favorite explanation why we live under a minoritarian ruled government). What is undeniable is that the principles of American Democracy are and have been in abeyance since Mitch McConnel, former Senate Majority Turtle, decided that using the Senate’s procedural rules to vanquish the opposition was more important than maintaining the give-and-take fairness of democratic governance.
Having used those rules to capture the Supreme Court, and then holding moderate Democrats by the balls, in fear of retribution for holding the Filibuster in abeyance, the Republican minority has been empowered to rape the American majority whenever and however it chooses. Nice.
If not Democracy, Fairness is now in abeyance. I think that this can only end in violence. If it does, I know with which side I will align.