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It's the Sejm old story [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-13
In the 17th century, one of the largest countries in Europe was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious empire stretched from today’s Ukraine to Estonia to Poland. It was surrounded by empires also looking at it hungrily: Muscovy (Russia) to the east, Austria-Hungary to the south, and Prussia to the west. It was mainly ruled under the Polish king, but it was not an absolute monarchy. Power was held by a legislature, the Sejm, which was essentially a collection of regional nobility.
What did it in was a rule adopted at the request of a noble who was in cahoots with Moscow. The rule required unanimity of the Sejm before conducting warfare. Any single member could paralyze the country and leave it open to attack. And they did. And it was. It got nibbled away piece by piece, the east becoming part of the Russian empire by the early XIX and the south slipping away too. Eventually there was just a small Poland, and soon that fell, not to be restored as an independent country until after World War I.
The Senate’s unanimous consent rule for military promotions is not quite as extreme as the PLC’s, but Tommy Tuberville is doing his best to please the czar in Moscow. It is time for the Senate to use its majority-makes-rules power to blow the whistle and exempt military promotions from unanimous consent. My ancestors from Warsaw, Russia or wherever in that region would have been happy to explain why.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/13/2193214/-It-s-the-Sejm-old-story
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