The Reformation, American Style
Or, let’s do that Constitution thing all over again
For 234 years now, the American people have lived under this, the second constitution our founding fathers created for “us.” (Hmm, love that paternalistic phrase, huh?) And yes, I’ve mentioned before how they truly did it for them, but let’s move on, shall we?
Have you ever wondered why this was the second one? Did your history/civics teachers go over that or did they just mention that attempt and move on?
Without really going into the kind of detail that means I’d have to go read back up on those details (yes, I can be lazy — high school at Allen Academy was 52 years ago, and that was graduation, not when that civics lesson happened), but as I recall, the major issue was that the states had almost all the power and the feds basically had to grovel and beg just for enough cash for their own salaries, much less enough to run a government on. Eventually, (after just a few years), even the most stubborn states finally agreed that enough was enough and another try was needed.
That resulted in our current Constitution, the one pictured above.
So, for 234 years, “we” have been happy with it. Of course, as time went on, “the people” decided that it wasn’t just “property Owners” (read that as “Rich White Men” RWM) who should be able to vote, and expanded that to all men. (Of course, women still weren’t good enough, and by dang, the more common rich men outnumbered the really wealthy ones, so eventually they got to change that to all men.) Then the twentieth century came along, and by gum, The People did it AGAIN, and let those pesky women vote! (I imagine those RWM were starting to get annoyed!)
But things got busy for a while, and the Depression helped keep the common man down and distracted, so they let things go on going on, then World War II distracted even those RWM, and more decades passed.
Then, something else happened — the civil rights movement and that push to actually enforce the Amendments meant to give those pesky uppity blacks real voting rights, and trust me, THAT pushed a few RWM buttons!
So, they started the conspiracy that we’re fighting today, because the RWM are used to long-term conspiracies. Thankfully, the Republicans they chose to command in this little effort aren’t, so they keep screwing it up, which really made things take longer and so they had to get really harsh — hence the current push for authoritarianism — democracy just wasn’t getting the job done. Too damn many uppity poor people just weren't getting distracted enough.
OK, enough with the history lesson. Fascinating, yes, but what do we DO about it? As Jim Wright said in his latest article in Stonekettle Station, “What’s your plan?”
Well, I’m no expert politician, historian, or lawyer, nor have I ever played one, on TV or off. But I did pay attention in school, and I’ve kept that copy of our Constitution around and refer to it as needed, and look things up online, now that I can whenever I need to, (thanks, Google and Wikipedia), so I do think my opinions here aren’t that bad as ideas of a layman go.
Besides the reforms of the Supreme Court I’ve outlined before:
I’ve got more ideas on how things have gotten so screwed up recently.
To begin with, we do owe Trump a favor. (Yeah yeah, I know, shocking, but there it is). Why? because he showed us exactly how the founders fucked up.
To start with, remember how on Inauguration Day the press was telling us how a ton of those foreign diplomats were staying in his DC hotel? That, folks, is a violation of the foreign emoluments clause, or certainly enough for a court to rule on. Plus, how he charged the US Government outrageous, sometimes over-the-market prices for the Secret Service to stay at the hotels HE stayed at for free because HE owned them? THAT, my friends is a violation of the internal emoluments clause that restricts what a president can be paid by the government HE oversees to just his salary. And yet, because there’s no law enforcement agency that the president doesn't oversee, it took two Democratic Congresscritters to file a PRIVATE lawsuit to attempt to stop that. It failed because he managed to drag that out with delay after delay until he was out of office, so the judge declared the case moot.
Shall I go on to how he managed other things that got his daughter’s patents approved in China in record time, or how his son got to manage two billion dollars of Saudi money? Or how he overruled the DOJ and gave his kids classification clearances in spite of them not being eligible? And then the nepotism (illegal also) that gave them both jobs?
And let’s not forget the January 6th thing and the fake elector thing that had to be handled AFTER he left office because — again — there’s no law enforcement agency that the POTUS doesn’t oversee, so who, exactly, is going to even investigate their boss, much less indict him?
Nobody, that’s who.
And that, my friends, is just the beginning. We not only need an enforcement mechanism to ensure that none of the major players in each branch of the government can mess around with those rules without repercussions (Thomas, Alito, anybody?), but there’s more.
What is one of the most egregious problems with US elections? Well, besides the obvious ways in which the red states deny minorities their right to vote, that is. (Hint, hint)
OH, gee, you’re smart! Yes, it’s how states manage their own elections! Take a magic ticket, you earned that one!
I know there are arguments about how states should do it their own way. But what we know from experience is that they often use those arguments to deny people they don’t like the right to vote, and often, through gerrymandering, their right to representation at all. Those things affect the federal government and how it does its job, which is supposed to be determined by The People. If States are denying some people their rights to having representatives who will properly represent them, and/or their rights to vote at all, that foils how it is supposed to work in the first place.
I contend that this is one of the examples of how state sovereignty is still foiling the way our democracy works in similar ways to how the first constitution failed. The states have too much power. That’s how the Civil War occurred, those southern states that seceded did so because they wanted MORE sovereign power. And it took a war to frustrate that and to establish that secession is not legal nor possible.
So, now to get around that, they’re trying to just dump the baby out along with the bathwater.
There are other things to look at, but those are the biggest. Our representatives are not managed enough, there’s no independent law enforcement mechanism for enforcing the basic rules of the Constitution itself, as Trump has shown us. Checks and balances aren’t enough if one party gets strong enough in relation to the other to frustrate those checks.
And talking about parties, I do think the founders were right in not wanting them, but then people are always going to flock together with others who think alike, so what we truly need is a hybrid system. I’m not satisfied with the Parliamentary system, either, but at least they allow more than two parties to be involved and actually have some say in a coalition style government. So let’s see what our own experts could come up with to allow more parties to form in this country, yet with ways to regulate how they form governments, to avoid some of the issues both our system has and the Parliamentary system does, too.
Hmm, let’s see. (Tap, tap, tap). I know! Donuts! (Back in a half hour!)
Okay! (Sorry, it was a bit longer, but dang, those donuts are good . . . as was the conversation, but I digress.)
Ahem, where was I?
Oh, yeah, Constitution, right? Right. So, let’s get back to the states and elections. The recent 2020 elections showed us that our methodologies are a bit dated, not to mention that we allowed ourselves to be distracted by the red states’ efforts at limiting voting rights by the use of IDs, when it has always been clear that no such issues were ever truly a problem. But we let them get away with it.
And that has caused problems and has limited the voting rights and caused other problems with elections since, and you can bet your bottommost dollar that they’re gonna do that again in November. So how do you manage that?
Simple, put elections into Federal hands. Take the regulation of them, and the handling of them out of the states’ control completely. Now don’t get your nose outta joint. I’m not all that excited about that, either, given that we also have local and state elections that don’t have federal positions at stake. But look at it this way.
Right now, elections depend on volunteers. UNPAID volunteers. In the past, that hasn’t been a problem, but I can tell you from my personal experience in local senior affairs in the town I live in now, getting people to volunteer for even the most easy and short jobs is a true effort these days. Now that elections official are getting threatened? I wouldn’t want to be the guy responsible for having that failure on my hands.
So, don’t tell me that both states and localities (both in towns and counties) who now have to get local places like churches to agree for elections to be held there wouldn’t be perfectly happy to have federal people around to handle those efforts, AND for them to have federally owned and operated voting locations (and drop boxes, and federally prepaid ballot envelopes) to take those expenses off their budgets. It’s also be easier to provide security to prevent any kind of explosives being planted there before the elections folks show up. The kind of security that the Feds use would certainly prevent that.
Yes, I’m suggesting that ALL elections, local, State, and Federal, be completely funded and operated by federal employees. That way, you have one system dedicated to that, a single set of rules universally enforced, so there’s no issues with people not knowing how to vote or where to go if they move away from where they’re familiar with how it works. One system that you change your address in, and boom, done. You show your ID to register, perhaps again when you vote the first time after you move with your new State ID to prove the address. Any other time you vote, you show a piece of mail with that address, perhaps a letter from the election system to that address to validate it, and no other requirement needed. Or, hey if that state DL floats your boat, why not that also?
In fact, I’d be perfectly happy with a completely vote by mail system. In Oregon, you have two ways to vote. Mail, which you can drop off or mail in (at no cost), or you can walk into your local elections office and vote there. Your choice. Your vote is validated by your signature, which they get when you register to vote or get your driver’s license (where you register to vote also if you wish). That signature is required for both anyway. And that office will make sure your mail-in vote isn’t also counted on top of that walk-in vote, so that’s covered.
And yes, we can certainly make the rules so that law enforcement must get a warrant to get into that system to get any kind of information about you, including past addresses, etc., and that nobody else can, even other government agencies, federal, state, or local.
I’m no more trusting on that than anyone else!
Such a system is much less subject to corruption, since it is easily watched, and certainly can be observed by representatives of each political party addressed in that election. Since the people there are paid professionals, they’re going to be much less subject to corruption than someone doing that job for free. (And again, easier to watch, since you can require them to sign employment agreements allowing such enforcement efforts during each election season to ensure compliance.)
Of course, there’s a lot more to running a country than what I’ve mentioned, and I am certainly not going to remember or even be that familiar with every single issue our current Constitution is in trouble with today. Just what we’ve noticed in the last eight years to me, is enough to get us started on thinking about this, and if the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity isn’t enough to get your dander up, then, well, nothing probably will.
But, yes, setting THAT to rights should be our number one task. I may, to an extent, trust Biden’s public denial of ever using that ruling, but frankly? I really don’t trust ANY politician that far, really.
Seriously,
Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I don’t know nor care who first said that, but if ever a human being has uttered a more true statement, I’ve not heard it yet. I know a lot of folks have made suggestions for how Biden could use that to fix our issues, and a few were actually pretty decent. But I go back to Rachael Maddow’s statement on her show with Joy Reid where she just said that to defend democracy the right way, you need to use the processes of democracy. By using less democratic means you pollute your system and become no better than your opponents.
So, let’s join our collective political hands and vote BLUE in November. Give our Democratic Party officials the power to begin to adequately fix this and then push them to work to fix the entire system.
Because I may disagree with our authoritarian opponents, but I don’t disagree that we could use a more effective Constitution. I just have a real problem with the way THEY’D do it.
And you should too.
