The Hawley proposal provides us with several important points. It shows how politicians are skilled at talking about legislation to make it seem like a good deal even when it isn’t. And it shows that news sources are often pretty slack about analyzing what politicians are really up to.

Unfortunately, the parties don’t stop at, “We’ll keep the lights on, gas cheap, and the schools adequately funded.” Increasingly, it is the business of both political parties to tell people who to hate and who to shun.

Writing a new constitution for 21st Century America would not be easy. The new one is not out there waiting to be found. It would have to be written. It would demand time and effort and coordination. It would especially require good behavior from all citizens. It would require them to set their hats and flags and shouts slogans aside and attend to facts and details.

The Congenial Iconoclast believes that bestowing good will on others is the citizens’ most urgent duty. The top priority for elected officials and public servants is regaining trust in themselves as individuals and in the nation’s public institutions and processes.

When someone robs a bank, the police investigate and do their best to track down the robbers and arrest them. The police don’t ponder whether the crime matters, or whether too much or too little time has passed, or whether it’s best to forget about the crime and let things get back to normal.

If the founders had set out to diminish voters’ influence on national legislation, they could have done no better than they did — pulling the members of Congress far away from their own constituents and congregating them in one place where corporations and special interests and foreign government lobbyists are close at hand but the voters are hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Since her election to Congress in 2018, some citizen have fretted about the supposed dangers that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez poses to the nation. In more recent weeks, other citizens have taken up a similar cry about the supposed dangers posed by Marjorie Taylor Greene.

As a means of expressing voter preference, mass migration could be better than elections. If all the people who want some policy priority (say, legalized marijuana or clean water or better schools or more guns or less guns) would all move into the same community, they could adopt the policies they want with nobody to oppose them. If the population of the community strongly supported the policy, it would not be resisted or defied. People would get the government they deserved.

The best possible government would serve the best interests of the citizens. It would not drive the people to work and sacrifice for the benefit of a king or a corporation or any other special interest. It would create a system where the benefits of the people’s work and efforts and sacrifices would go — as much as possible — back to the people themselves.

It ought to be a wake-up call to all citizens that “the greatest possible evil” has come upon us. The problem is not the Republicans. And it is not the Democrats. The problem is the hyper-partisan two-party system itself.