Princeton/Northwestern study concludes business has representation but Americans do not

Here, where however there isn't the slightest suggestion that increasing representation for the majority of citizens by restoring the size of US House to its constitutionally intended proportions might help mitigate the problem:

The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded. ... Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organisations: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it." ... The theory of "biased pluralism" that the Princeton and Northwestern researchers believe the US system fits holds that policy outcomes "tend to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations."

h/t Business Insider

The Pantywaists at National Review Finally Notice the Hutaree, After Vindication

Mark Steyn does a nice job here in National Review of covering up for the way "the right" ignored the significance of the government's ridiculous entrapment of a bunch of religious nuts with guns in southeast Michigan the week ObamaCare passed in March 2010, but still misses the point by connecting their treatment to that of . . . Conrad Black!

I guess it's Canadian obsessive compulsive disorder, or something, on display there.

And I'll bet Conrad isn't too flattered with the comparison, either.

While some of these Hutaree ne'er-do-wells had to rot in jail for two years and others were released with monitoring devices attached to their ankles, all of these hapless souls had to rely on government attorneys to defend them against trumped-up charges while conservatives all across this country pretty much ignored them, except when the left tried to tar the right with their example.

What we got was the right stiff-arming that charge by participating in the marginalization which the Hutaree saw as confirming their peculiar position as God's chosen warriors against the imminent appearance of the AntiChrist. Only extremists or nuts buy guns and train on weekends in the woods. They might as well be the same as those who threw rocks through local Democrat Party offices to show displeasure at ramming government healthcare down our throats, or who made intemperate or even threatening phone calls to Congressmen, some of whom got tracked down, arrested and convicted.

Now vindicated, the Hutaree can become an example of "who's kookier?" Steyn writes:

But they weren’t paranoid, were they? They were convinced that one day the black helicopters would be hovering overhead. And one day they were. Or, actually, one night – in the wee small hours, descending from the skies with searchlights circling. Oh, and Humvees – just like in Waziristan. So Eric Holder proved their point. In Lenawee and Hillsdale counties, they still talk about it – and the general consensus is the pseudo-commandos of the federal constabulary looked way more ridiculous than the survivalist kooks.   

As at Waco, our feeble tyranny finds itself constrained to choose targets who are already estranged from the mainstream of society, in order the more easily to make an example of them to the rest of us who had better not get out of line when government decides to force its will on the people.

This week Rush Limbaugh has been complaining that it's astonishing that the question of government force, the individual mandate, at length comes down to just nine people in black robes who will decide the fate of a once free people.

It is astonishing. He's had the power of a microphone in all this and has done nothing to stop it coming to this pass, all because he's afraid of being called an extremist, just as are almost all conservatives. Rush Limbaugh is most certainly afraid of what people will say, which is why Rush protests so often that he doesn't care what people think. It's his livelihood to care, otherwise he's out of a job.

Let's suppose the Supremes uphold the mandate. What will become of people's fear then? They will have a choice, to let their children become Red, as we now know John F. Kennedy was prepared to do in the Cuban missile crisis, or to fight.

I have just one question for all you pantywaists. When George Washington and his ilk decided it was time to start shooting Red Coats (over taxes which were paltry compared to what we endure), was he an extremist?

Jonah Goldberg Wants More Federalism, Doesn't Realize It's Spelled 'Representation'

In the closest thing yet to a nationally recognized columnist calling for the founders' vision of localization of the political, Jonah Goldberg here misses an opportunity to score a blow for constitutional originalism:

What if instead the solution is to disempower the national elites who think they’ve got the answers to everything?

Federalism — the process whereby you push most political questions to the lowest democratic level possible — has been ripe on the right for years now. ...

But that may be changing. In an essay for the spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Yale law professor Heather K. Gerken offers the case for “A New Progressive Federalism.”

Gerken’s chief concern is how to empower “minorities and dissenters.” ... [S]he makes the very compelling point that the current understanding of diversity — having minority members as tokens of inclusion — pretty much guarantees that racial minorities will always be political minorities as well. ...

A Left-Right federalist compromise would make America a happier, freer, more prosperous and interesting country. It would also dethrone those in both parties who think they know what’s best for more than 300 million Americans.

The theoretical talk is welcome, but the practical application is the rub.

That's what's missing from these discussions, and where the genius of the authors of the constitution shone brighest.

The founders long ago conceived of just such a compromise between political extremes in Article 1 of the constitution when they proposed one representative for every 30,000 of population. Today we have one for every 708,000 on average because Congress arrogated power to itself in the 1920s by limiting representation to the then-current number apportioned, or 435. If you want to know where elitism started in our politics, look there.

By all rights we should have over 10,000 representatives today, a more interesting country indeed.

 

Gov. Romney Repeats the Myth of First Amendment Priority

Quoted here:

"We must have a President who is willing to protect America's first right, our right to worship God," he added.

The First Amendment was originally the Third Amendment. If religious liberty had really held priority in the founders' minds, this would not have been the case.

So what did pre-occupy their minds? The issue of adequate representation.

No one today can argue that we have it.

Instead of 10,267 US Representatives We Had 12,592 Lobbyists in 2011

If we followed the US Constitution our House of Representatives would have 10,267 elected representatives today.

Republicans and Democrats put the kibosh on that in 1929 to concentrate power in themselves, which is why today we have only 435 elected to the House. They don't much give a damn what we think about anything, and the approval rating of Congress is now so low it's almost within the margin of polling error.

Instead of the founders' idea of adequate representation we had 12,592 active lobbyists in 2011, spending over $3 billion to influence the 435 petty tyrants. Isn't it odd how closely the natural lobbying market today approximates what the authors of the constitution deemed to be a suitable level of representation?

Does anyone really think Occupy Wall Street, The Tea Party, The Heritage Foundation, The National Association of Realtors, The American Bankers' Association or any of the other myriad interest groups would exist in their current form if Congress were more representative of the individual American? Congressmen must sit in their offices and laugh at all the wasted, disorganized and therefore impotent effort spent influencing their votes.

When a representative's constituency is only 30,000 strong instead of 700,000, however, the prospects of his reelection are more sensitive to a narrower range of interests: Yours. Blow it with a few thousand of us and out he would go.

No wonder they got rid of the idea when they could.

Isn't it time to right this wrong?

In Order For Third Parties To Rise, They Have To Have Representation

Third party candidacies for president fail in this country, as do those for representative or senator, because the two parties have a lock on the political process. The lock concentrates power and money in their hands, to the exclusion of the other interests which no longer have representation.

How did the two parties lock it?

Or to put it another way, how did Americans lose representation to the Republicans and Democrats?

The Republicans deliberately ignored the constitution's re-apportionment requirements after the 1920 Census, some say out of fear of competition from representatives of the massive number of then-new immigrants, and eventually prevailed in fixing representation at the arbitrary number of 435 in the US House through legislative fiat. There's absolutely nothing sacred about the number 435. It's just a number we reached when population required that number of congressmen after the 1910 Census.

Normally, the constitution's requirements have to be overcome by amendment, not legislation. But that's what we have, legislative fiat, because both parties found it in their best interests to concentrate power in themselves. The last thing they wanted to do was diffuse power to additional new players as the constitution requires. Since the constitution doesn't specify the upper limit of representation, only the minimum number and minimum proportion (Article 1, Section 1), a problem of first importance in the founding era but never resolved, they got away with it. But they shouldn't have. We're all the poorer for it.

Republicans in particular wear its stain. Today its Tea Party claims to wear the badge of constitutional originalism, but that badge is covering a huge blot of hypocrisy.

If Americans actually had the government the constitution requires but the Republicans of the '20s prevented, we'd have a US House today with 10,000 representatives, not 435.

There would most likely be a number of odd duck political parties represented in that sea of representation, like Greens, Communists, Fascists, Socialists and Constitutionalists. And probably a Gay Party from Saugaytuck, Michigan. But there might also be a rather substantial number of Conservatives and Independents. Considering that "conservative" is today's most identifiable political self-description, you can bet Republican golfers everywhere certainly don't want the competition.

But consider, for example, New York State. It has a Conservative Party, whose most famous public face is perhaps the radio host Sean Hannity. Another famous conservative from New York was the brother of William F. Buckley, Jr. US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a Socialist, from a state with next to no gun laws! Why not have more of their ilk as the people desire in the US House? Lots more.

Once there, the give and take of politics on a grander scale would most probably change the dynamics of the current politics of not-a-dime's-worth-of-difference between Republicans and Democrats. New actors would arise and give voice to ideas which in the past have had to settle for one congressman's endorsement here, or one there, only to be squelched by the Republicrat party apparatchiks.

More importantly, Republicans and Democrats would have to make alliances and share power in exchange for support. This would increase representation of ideas which today see the light of day in legislation only infrequently. And more importantly still, candidates for national office would have to forge alliances with such representatives too, which means third party candidates for president would actually begin to have some credibility with legislative support, without which a tax reformer like a Herman Cain, Ron Paul or Steve Forbes goes nowhere.

Think about it America!

Stop settling for representation without representation!

"One Representative For Every Thirty Thousand!"

How About 10,000 US Representatives Instead of 435?

Many people, rightly in my opinion, point to the decline of religious faith, traditional morality and constitutional respect for both as a leading cause of our current discontents. In making this argument, however, some fall prey to an ahistorical understanding of the priority of the 1st Amendment, and miss an important remedy which animated the founding generation just as much did the principle of religious freedom.

The latest example of the myth of the priority of our 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is repeated by none other than John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America, for The Baltimore Sun (link), whose other observations I otherwise find wholly unobjectionable:

[T]he right to religious freedom — the first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights — was of great importance to the framers of our Constitution.

Mr. Garvey operates under the common misapprehension that the 1st Amendment is somehow first because of James Madison's statements in various places about the priority of religious liberty as an unalienable right whose basis is in the creator. Accordingly Garvey quotes Madison, "This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society," as if this proves why The Bill of Rights starts the way it does and that we should therefore insist more urgently that 1st Amendment considerations somehow take the lead in our civil deliberations over contentious issues, especially as affecting institutions of The Church. It is to some extent an appeal to the authority of what has primacy, which one might expect of a Roman Catholic.

If Madison could hear this, however, he would no doubt laugh, because he himself authored what was the original first amendment, and it had nothing to do with freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc.

Mr. Garvey's ignorance of the historical situation is not unusual, inasmuch as most of us, if we are familiar at all with even the basic facts of history, are children of the federalists who prevailed at the founding and wrote the constitution. We do not remember the arguments of their opponents, the anti-federalists, nor the issues which animated them, probably because we were never taught them.

The short version of a part of this very complicated history is that there was a list of at least twelve amendments proposed in 1789, and what we call our 1st Amendment was actually third in that list, which, with numbers four through twelve, was ultimately ratified while the two preceding were not. These go largely unremarked today, which is a pity because they reveal that if anything animated the minds of the founders as a matter of first importance, it was the idea of adequate representation. And it was this which was a chief pre-occupation of the anti-federalists, who viewed the constitution as a federalist conception of a defective republicanism which co-opted and undermined local constituencies and state governments. To the men of the anti-federalist camp, the more the representation, the less the chance of despotism.

As an historical phenomenon, representation's importance in the founding era formed a unity with taxation, as in "no taxation without representation."

This is why the first article of the constitution concerns itself with establishing the legislative authority, which the founders considered the predominating power in the new government, and its power to tax, both of which were to be apportioned to the states by population. Hence the census. But the constitution failed to delimit the maximum size of legislative representation, only that the number of representatives should not exceed one for every 30,000, and thus amendments were proposed.

The original amendments 1 and 2 read as follows:

Article I:

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Article II:

No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Because Article I was not ratified, the deficiency of the original constitution's provisions for representation, though hotly debated at the time, was never successfully remedied. The deficiency is that the constitution does not specify the "maximum district size", in the words of thirty-thousand.org (link), which happens to be a veritable cornucopia of scholarship on this problem. Its author points out that our US House of Representatives, if it followed the constitution's original intent, would now consist of 10,000 representatives instead of just 435, a number fixed by the Congress in 1929:

Because this part of the Constitution is still “defective”, Congress can choose to grant its constituents virtually any number of Representatives it deems appropriate. In fact, Congress can choose both the number of Representatives and the algorithm by which they are allocated among the states. In contrast, the role of the Census Bureau is limited to conducting the decennial census and applying, to that result, the apportionment algorithm specified by Congress in order to calculate the allocation of House memberships. 

No one alive today who takes politics seriously can say with a straight face that he feels adequately represented by any politician of any party. Gallup would not report polls indicating the extreme low esteem for Congress that it does were it otherwise. Congressmen are remote and aloof, unresponsive even to their erstwhile supporters. Senators are even worse, to say nothing of the president. This was precisely the future predicted by the anti-federalists.

It might come as something of a surprise, perhaps, to thirty-thousand.org, that the anti-federalists were none too happy even with the constitution's idea that "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand." Some of them could not imagine that one man could adequately represent so many people even as that.

Madison's attempt to set the representation progressively, stopping at one per fifty thousand, indicates something of his federalist sympathies, as well the limits of his imagination as to the potential growth of the American population.

In either eventuality, it must be said, Americans today would be better represented with more representatives than the few we currently have, whose nearly impenetrable incumbency makes them a veritable hereditary aristocracy of power and indeed tyranny over the lives of the Americans the founders intended them to represent.

What we have today is representation without representation, which is why Mr. Garvey rightly feels The Church to be under attack. Too much power is concentrated in too few hands, which is just the way the opponents of all that is good, true and beautiful like it.

The last thing they want is a US House of Representatives populated with 2300 Catholics.