It's Democrats Who Overwhelmingly Hate The Electoral College

The reason Democrats hate the Electoral College is that the Electoral College gives too much power to small population states, which sometimes vote in such a way as to prevent winners of the national popular vote in presidential contests from being elected.

Nevermind that that's how the founders intended it, in order to keep minorities from being dictated to by majorities. It is suitably hypocritical of the Democrats to want to oppress minorities, seeing how they have taken minorities for granted for decades, always promising them the moon but never delivering them so much as a sandwich let alone a sub so fast they'll freak.

TheHill.com has a story here on the subject of the Electoral College, referencing the National Popular Vote (NPV) campaign which proposes to make an end-run around the Electoral College provision of the constitution. You know, kind of like seceding from the Union was an end run, because that's what the NPV amounts to. The normal process of amending election procedures involves a constitutional amendment, but the Democrats have hatched a plan, the NPV, which amounts to an affront and challenge to the existing system, agreed to only amongst the states participating without benefit of legitimacy conferred by constitutional amendment. The legitimacy consists entirely in the agreement of the states. As such the NPV represents an insurrection against the rest of the states who do not participate. 

Mostly Democrats favor doing away with the Electoral College, which is in keeping with what animates the Democrats, namely democracy, especially direct democracy. Despite all its problems and blemishes, it is the Republican Party which stands for constitutional arrangements as they exist, notably Sen. Mitch McConnell of the US Senate, the Republican minority leader in the Senate. His support for the Electoral College covers a multitude of sins, and I do mean a multitude.

The Republicans would sound more convincing in their support for the Electoral College, however, if they were to support also repeal of Amendment 17, ratified in 1913.

The reason is that it would show that the Republicans are serious about constitutional principles of representation.

The original constitution envisaged bodies of electors who were different in identity in order to separate the powers of government to prevent tyranny, it is true, but also to spread representation effectively not just to the individuals who make up the nation but also to the governmental institutions which the constitution created as creatures of the people.

The electors originally were three.

The people who elected their US Representatives. These number 435 but should today number 10,267. The process of representation growing with population was halted in the 1920s. Arguably this concentration of power in fewer hands was a response to arrogation of democratic power by the Senate in 1913.

The states originally elected their US Senators, "chosen by the Legislature[s] thereof". Elected as they are now, popularly because of the 17th Amendment, they do nothing but make a redundancy of the US House of Representatives. And not just a redundancy but a trump. The Senate possesses much more power because they are not answerable to the people but every sixth year instead of every second. If anyone is responsible for gridlock in our times, it is this new imperious US Senate since 1913, not the political parties who duke it out in the House. The US Senate literally lords it over the US House as a kind of Super House. They only occasionally answer to the same people as the US House when they should be answering to, and representing, the states. The latter now possess next to no voice at the federal level except through the court system, where they must sue to be heard. A fine kettle of fish, that.

The Electoral College is now the last bastion of representation left to the states as states, and Democrats seem bent on taking it. The Electoral College is composed of persons appointed by the states in number equal to the number of Representatives and Senators, and they elect the president. The electors cast their votes now more or less everywhere based on which candidate wins the popular vote in the presidential election in each state. It is a winner take all system which blends popular sovereignty with states' rights. But the NPV would nullify this, casting the votes of the electors not for whomever wins the state, but for whomever wins the country.

As sketched above, the history of these developments is a history of lost representation. A US House member should represent 30,000 people max, but today supposedly speaks for over 700,000 on average in each district. State legislatures no longer have a voice in the halls of Congress because Senators are popularly elected just like the House. And if the Democrats get their way, smaller states will also lose their voice in electing the president because no matter what the citizens of Wyoming, New Hampshire and Montana want, the citizens of California, Florida and New York who are more numerous will dictate otherwise.

And Democrats are about nothing if not dictation. 

The Congress Fails To Represent The People, Say 90 Percent Of Americans

Congressional approval in August is down to 10 percent, according to Gallup, here, tying the all-time low.

No wonder. How could one person effectively speak for an average constituency of over 700,000 Americans? Do you know your Congressman? Does he know you?

It wasn't meant to be this way.

The fiercest disagreements over the Constitution's ratification were over whether a Congressman would be able to speak for 30,000 Americans, or 15,000 as the anti-federalists wanted. The advocates of 30,000 won, but the line in the Constitution was inartfully written, looking backward to that debate more than forward to the consequence:

"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand . . .."

And so census followed census, and the Congress grew in size as the population did, decade upon decade, following the principle of one per thirty thousand.

Americans today don't realize how the Congress of the United States offended against this arrangement not until the 1920s. It was a naked power grab, fixing the number of representatives at the then current 435.

The Constitution had said nothing, they eagerly pointed out in those days, about one for more than thirty thousand, only that, say, one for 15,000 was too many. The scientific inspectors of language didn't care about the intent and the custom, only about the new opportunity. Dispensing with the census, however, which was the basis for apportioning representation, was a bridge too far.

But the example had consequences. Not long after FDR in his admiration of foreign dictators overturned another custom laid down in the founding era by the father of the country, George Washington, by running for a third term. There was nothing to prevent it. If one branch of government could grasp for more power, so could another. The imperial designs of the presidency have been with us ever since. 

The best way to fix the Congress isn't to elect a new one of a different political party. It's to dilute the power it has concentrated into its few hands by flooding the place with the roughly 10,267 representatives the constitution calls for. This should be done by constitutional amendment, after the same manner in which the 22nd explicitly enshrined Washington's example into law in 1951, restricting the president to two terms.

The Constitution isn't perfect. If it were it wouldn't be amendable. Strict constructionism is fine as far as it goes, until it runs up against the need for explicit construction.

We used to complain to the British that we had taxation without representation.

Now we have representation without representation.

It's time we changed that.

Backward, countrymen, to the future!

Threat From "Regionalism" Mirrors Why Your Rep. Doesn't Know Your Name

If you haven't yet heard of it, the threat from "regionalism" is the attempt to overturn the dominant organizing principle of physical space in America today: the suburbs and the governments formed to serve them. In my most recent local primary election, the Republican candidate favoring the regionalist philosophy not so narrowly won against a challenger who ran opposing it. 

Americans overwhelmingly live in the suburbs not in the least because they like it. There they have four walls of their very own, some green grass to enjoy and a little peace and quiet away from the bustle of life and the crime associated with large cities. Love of country-like living also happens to be an important inheritance from our English past, from which we get the ideal of the country gentleman, the garden and the hunt. Our estates are often less impressive and the ideal not so self-conscious, but few of us can imagine a better way to live.

The war against this way of life has taken many forms in recent times, the war against the SUV and now against the gasoline engine itself being prominent examples. What better way to deprive us of our dream than to compromise our access to and enjoyment of it? Another is to force us back into trains, where TSA VIPR units will soon be frisking us as frequently as they do now at airports. Yet another is to take away the tax deduction for mortgage interest, to make home ownership in the suburbs itself less appealing economically. So many forces are arrayed against the way of life of millions of normal Americans that one might be forgiven for thinking it is all some vast conspiracy.

Lately the war against our preferred way of life has taken shape in the drive toward "regionalism", a dreary subject to most Americans which is really a sleeper threatening to deprive citizens of representation and extend a trend which has been at work since at least the 1920s. At that time in America the US House of Representatives, chiefly controlled by Republicans, voted to circumvent the constitution and fix the number of representatives at the then current number of 435, when on the constitution's principle we should have by now at least 10,267 members in the US House. That's the reason your congressman doesn't know your name, and why you probably don't know his.

Today Democrats and Republicans in various places are uniting to extend this trend by forming alliances on behalf of "tax sharing" districts and "amalgamated" governments at the local level in the name of squeezing "efficiencies" out of larger scaled units. In fact the real motivation often turns out to be finding new sources of revenue to pay the exorbitant salaries, pensions and health care benefits of unionized government employees who have been promised the moon by big cities but which can no longer afford it, if they ever could.

There is a new book on the subject by Stanley Kurtz, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, and an important article here by Wendell Cox, REGIONALISM: SPREADING THE FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY, a short and helpful introduction to the subject, from which this excerpt:

"[S]pecial interests have more power in larger jurisdictions, not least because they are needed to finance the election campaigns of elected officials, who always want to win the next election. They are also far more able to attend meetings – sending paid representatives – than local groups. This is particularly true the larger the metropolitan area covered, since meeting[s] are usually held in the core of urban area[s] not in areas further on the periphery. This [gives] greater influence to organized and well-funded special interests – such as big real estate developers, environmental groups, public employee unions – and drains the influence of the local grassroots. The result is that voters have less influence and that they can lose financial control of larger local governments. The only economies of scale in larger local government benefit lobbyists and special interests, not taxpayers or residents."

Global Fascism: Casually Described, Matter of Factly Accepted

Today's must-reading comes from The Wall Street Journal, where a libertarian correctly describes the current state of affairs as a global fascist order, but uncritically accepts it as a fact which explains things rather than as a disease to be cured:

The Greek tragedy began with a fiscal crisis—brought on by the government spending more money than it took in—that became a banking crisis. In Spain, there is a fiscal crisis that exacerbates a banking crisis.

Fiscal and banking crises are often linked because in modern economics the state and banking are joined together. Banks purchase government debt, supporting the state, and governments guarantee the liabilities of banks. When one party is weakened, so is the other. ...

The banks, not fiscal deficits, will be the undoing of the euro.

The author believes federal union as in the US should have come first in Europe before the common currency, in order to equalize structural differences in labor markets among other things, for example taxes and spending.

Yes, it should have, the more securely to anchor the foundations of fascism. Somehow ancient memories kept that from happening in Europe, and Spaniards and Greeks still think of themselves as such and not as Europeans who answer to Brussels and the European Central Bank.

But unlike Europe federal union in the US has allowed the partnership between government and banks to run the show unfettered, the more ominously so since 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act, a measure which concentrated power in the hands of the few and took it away from the many.  The bankers were put first in line for Federal Reserve Notes. Citizens last. Like sheep they turned in their gold.

Augmented by the growth of the imperial presidency which got its impetus first under Wilson and then under FDR, the Congress claimed its role in the new cabal in the 1920s by stopping the natural and constitutionally prescribed growth of representation, enhancing nothing but its own importance. Trading on insider information, election to the US House or Senate has become a path to wealth and power, if not fame.

These all act in concert to protect their gig, not yours, not America's.

In its fecklessness and greed, however, the government by turns has lost control of the money creation process, most notably since 1971, and has ceded it to the banking interest and cannot get it back. Our national debt may now surpass our $15 trillion GDP and gold may be $1,600 the ounce, but it takes a banker to really screw things up and create an over the counter market in derivatives with a notional value in excess of $600 trillion. 

The banks won't be the undoing only of the Euro.     

Read the entire column here.

Mandatory Arbitration: Big Business' Latest Weapon Against The People

And they don't hoodwink you into it, either. You sign up for it.

Susan Antilla has all the details for Bloomberg, here:

The McMahon decision was damaging enough for the impact it had on individual brokerage customers, who tell their stories about fraud, misrepresentation and churning behind closed doors where the public -- including reporters -- isn’t welcome. ...

“It means that all sorts of scams against individuals, however large, are very unlikely to come to the attention of the media and the public,” says F. Paul Bland Jr., a senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Public Justice in Washington.

Wall Street may have been first to catch on to the benefits of mandatory arbitration, but Bland worries that the closed-door trials are spreading to industries from retailing to homebuilding. “The silence and secrecy that surrounds arbitration is extremely harmful to the country,” he says.

These days, employers -- Manpower Inc. and Nordstrom Inc. among them -- require new hires to give up their rights to court before a fresh-faced recruit can check in for orientation. And consumers can forget about opening a Netflix account, signing a mobile-phone contract, or putting a loved one into most big-name nursing homes unless they are willing to give up their rights to go to court. Buying a Starbucks gift card? You are agreeing to mandatory arbitration of any fraud or misrepresentation by the company. ...

In April 2011, the court dealt a new blow to consumers and employees in a case known as AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. AT&T had pitched a deal to woo new mobile-phone customers by offering free phones, but it turned out the freebie came with a $30.22 bill for “taxes.” Vincent and Liza Concepcion tried to bring a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the other consumers who took AT&T’s deal. But the court said that when the couple signed the customer agreement, they gave up their right not only to sue, but also to a class action even in arbitration.

In the year since the Concepcion decision, lower courts have trashed dozens of cases in which consumers or employees were trying to sue as a group. The National Labor Relations Board pushed back against the impact the Concepcion decision might have on employment class actions, ruling in January that it’s a violation of federal labor law to make workers give up the right to pursue group claims. That decision probably will be challenged in court.

About 25 percent of U.S. employees are covered by mandatory-arbitration clauses, says Alexander J.S. Colvin, an associate professor of labor relations and conflict resolution at Cornell University. He figures the number will grow as a result of the Concepcion case.

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.

 

The Opposite of Transparency: Obama Regime Claims GSEs Exempt from FOIA

From an editorial on the subject here:

Judicial Watch sought those documents because the FHFA claimed in a separate lawsuit against the 17 firms that losses on securities were caused by material misrepresentations the firms made to Fannie and Freddie. Finance industry experts claim Fannie and Freddie officials were more than sufficiently knowledgeable about the mortgage industry to realize the risks involved in such securities. By putting all Fannie and Freddie documents about such transactions beyond the reach of FOIA requesters like Judicial Watch, the Obama administration is making it difficult, if not impossible, for independent evaluators to determine who bears responsibilities for the losses [$150 billion and climbing] now being covered by taxpayers.

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?

Senate is Broken: Congress in 2011 Passed 80 Bills, Fewest Since 1947

Considering what gets passed, why is this a bad thing?

The Washington Times reports here:

The Times‘ analysis suggested that the Senate is an increasingly broken chamber. All five of the worst performances on record were in the past decade. Four of those were when Democrats were in control and Republicans were in the minority.

In the House, the record was decidedly mixed. Of the worst five years, two were in the 1950s, two were in the 1980s and one was in the past decade.

Maybe the Senate is such a mess because it views itself as a more powerful version of the House, with which it is in constant competition as an institution and over which it lords itself at every opportunity, the Senate healthcare bill of 2010, now known as ObamaCare, being the most recent prime example. Had more Democrats in the House opposed this bill in March 2010, fewer of them had lost their seats in the historic Republican sweep in November.

Arguably the Senate is more powerful, for two reasons.

One, because of popular election of Senators, which puts them in direct competition in the same electoral sphere as representatives, contrary to the original intention of the constitution. And two, the fact that the tenure of a Senator is three times longer than a representative's. The lowly two-year man is ever on guard of losing the next election, while a Senator watches him come and go, mindful of the inattention of the voters over so long a period as half a decade.

The Senators' interests should primarily be to protect the interests of the States they represent, especially the States' independence from the federal government. But they are not. Instead they seek at every turn to usurp the representative function of the members of the House, where bills should originate. Is it any wonder the States have no representation in Washington, the legislatures of which must rely on leagues of Attorneys General to file suits in federal courts to protect themselves from encroachments of federal power?

The remedy for all that starts with a much bigger House, which means repealing The Reapportionment Act of 1929.

With the will of the people once adequately represented for a change, Senators might eventually be persuaded to meddle less at pain of repeal of the 17th Amendment. Already the most expensive races in the country, the dilution of the cost of running for office at the representative level with 10,267 districts instead of 435 might occasion an unwelcome shift of focus back upon the excess and corruption evident in running for the Senate, the mean expenditure for which in 2008 was nearly $6 million, six times what it currently costs the typical representative to run.

Representatives will not need to spend $1 million buying TV and radio ads to reach 30,000 constituents instead of 700,000 now, but Senators will still have to in order to reach the millions of their constituents. They will stand out in those media in a way which they haven't been accustomed to in the past and the spotlight will be on them as never before.

And as we all know, sunlight is a marvelous disinfectant.

Anybody But Romney, But Who?

Jeffrey Lord successfully locates Romney squarely in the progressive wing of the Republican Party for The American Spectator here, but doesn't really explain how the supposedly dying wing of the party keeps getting its people nominated for president.

Not only that, Republican progressives dominate in the Senate, which can only mean one thing: Republican progressives owe their electoral success not to Republicans but more broadly to Democrats and independents who interfere in their primaries and occasionally vote for them in the general. The relatively small size and influence of the Tea Party in the US House underscores this point, despite its role in giving the House back to the GOP in 2010. Narrower constituencies elect representatives.  

The way forward is for the Tea Party to narrow them further still.

Which is another way of saying the Tea Party needs to work for greater representation for the individual American's interests. What better way than by insisting on the originalist interpretation of the very idea of representation? The Tea Party should be demanding an end to a fixed House delegation of 435 members, a Republican fast-one pulled on the country back in the 1920s at the height of the progressives' influence. The Tea Party should call for expanding the House to its original constitutional proportions of one representative to every 30,000 of population.

I can think of no quicker, more sane and just way to wrest control of government away from the political parties as presently configured and return it to the people where it belongs.

We need 10,267 members in the US House.

And surely you know what that means? Instead of dividing 538 or so electoral votes to win the presidency, he or she would be fighting for a majority of 10,367 electoral votes. The growing and wildly disproportionate and unconstitutional electoral influence of the Senate since the 20s would thus be ended at a stroke because their 100 electoral votes would be up against 10,267 others, not just 438.

And so would be ended the Senate's ability and power to cram down our throats odious nostrums like Obamacare, gays in the military, START and any number of other progressive, enlightened ideas rejected by the vast majority of Americans. 

"Vote For Me and I'll Set You Free" Went The Song on Don and Roma This Morning

On wlsam.com.

Nothing epitomizes better what's wrong with America than that: "Vote for me and I'll set you free!"

People want a savior it seems, especially of the presidential sort. If Christianity has had just one baneful influence on the American psyche, this obsession with presidential politics is it. No wonder the executive is imperial. That's just the way the slaves of God want it.

A more original, more free and noble America would save itself. It would demand broader, deeper and better representation, and would not wring its hands over our corrupt plutocracy.

Instead it would wring their necks.

The truth dies another death as the mobs cry "Give us Barrabbas!" 

Why Do We March? Why Do We Protest? Why Do We Hate Congress?

Surely the answer is because we believe that our government does not represent us.

And it doesn't. In fact, the current Speaker of the House doesn't even believe that it should, and never has believed it. He went on the record early in the current legislative session saying that the president should set the Congress' agenda, as here:

“While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people’s House, we must remember it is the president who sets the agenda for our government.”

Rep. Boehner is seriously mistaken if he thinks the Tea Party would agree with that. It's the president's agenda which created the Tea Party, and the Tea Party doesn't like the president's agenda one bit.

Whether from the right with the Tea Party or the left with Occupy Wall Street, there is massive discontent in the American people with government.

That is why Gallup can report in December here that Congress has the lowest approval rating ever, since the polling organization began tracking the issue in 1974:

From a broad, long-term perspective, Congress has never been popular. The average annual congressional job approval rating since 1974 is 34%. Still, this year's 17% annual average is by one point the lowest yearly average Gallup has recorded.

The actual number approving of Congress has also reached a record low: 11 percent.

Instead of trying to make the Congress we have more responsive to us, why don't we just get a new one, a bigger and a better one than the one we've got?

Say, with tail fins.

Your congressman and my congressman now represent on average 707,999 people other than you or me. Which is to say, each and every voice he or she hears is next to meaningless. Once elected, your congressman treats you more like a serf than an equal because he doesn't need you to get re-elected. He needs money to do that, big money for television and other forms of advertising to get his name out there. He needs movers and shakers, not you.

If your congressman represented only 30,000 people instead of 708,000, however, do you think that he would need less money to get elected, work harder for your vote, and have an incentive to vote in Congress the way you want him to instead of the way he does? I do. And so did the authors of the constitution.

Since 1929 America has not had a Congress of the size required under Article 1, Section 1. The Congress voted to fix the size by law at the 435 level, by-passing the constitutional requirement to expand the size of the House as population grows. The consequences for the American people have been negative ever since.

This was a neat little trick designed for the benefit of only one group, the Congress. As a consequence money, influence and power have been concentrated in their few hands instead of distributed and divided broadly in order to contain it as the founders intended.

It is no wonder that Congress has become the rich, corrupt, arrogant and vile body it is today.

The best way to repair this situation, however, is not to "throw all the bums out," or work to hand control to a different political party than the one that has it now, or throw out the electoral college, or amend the constitution in some way.

No, the best way is simply to follow it. What we need to do is dilute the power the Congress presently has as the constitution requires: with a population of 308 million Americans, we should have 10,267 members in the US House, not 435.

If you want to give business as usual the boot, just hand Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner the task of trying to herd 10,000 cats for a vote on the debt ceiling, or the Patriot Act, or any other measure.

Just the thought of it should appall them.

And make no mistake about it: this sounds like a revolutionary act, but it's anything but. The real revolution occurred when Congress voted to usurp your right to the founders' vision of adequate representation.

To restore matters to the status quo ante is only counter-revolutionary.

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!"

Representation Without Representation: Our Unaccountable $6 Billion Congress

According to stories here, here and here, in addition to the 535 elected members of the US Congress, there are about 10,000 staffers under various classifications who are hired by these office holders to assist them.

The average staff budget is said to be $1.5 million, which is in addition to the $174,000 annual salary of the elected representatives and senators themselves.

While the latter costs the taxpayers upwards of $93 million annually, the former is upwards of $800 million annually.

In other words, we willingly spend close to $1 billion in tax dollars every year for congressional representation which is pretty much universally despised.

And about five times as much to elect it. A CBS News/New York Times poll in October found just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, but someone, somewhere, is pretty happy investing $5 billion to elect the right people. And "the right people" end up with net worths ten times that of their constituents.

Maybe it's time to change this.

How about following the constitution for a change?

Article 1, Section 1 of the constitution stipulates that representation "shall not exceed one for every 30,000." By that reasoning we should have a US House today with 10,000 representatives. Instead we have 435, thanks to the Republicans in the 1920s who simply refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census and fixed the number of representatives at the then current levels in 1929 through legislation.

The constitution wasn't amended. It was ignored. And today Republicans would claim the mantle of originalism. I'll believe it when I see it.

The great fear of the anti-federalists, who opposed the language of the constitution, was that no one man could conceivably represent adequately or honestly the interests of 30,000 citizens. They wanted the ratio to be smaller than that. Much smaller. Say on the order of one representative for every 15,000 of their fellows. That would imply today a US House of 20,000.

Instead what have we got?

Representation of one for 700,000 in a district, and climbing. Which is why you are so disgusted with your rich, arrogant and corrupt representative. He represents the guy who pays him the money he needs to advertise on radio and television so that you at least recognize his name and picture every two years and believe some stupid lie he tells about how he represents your interests even though he doesn't even know you exist. The last thing he wants is the real competition and anonymity of being just one of 20,000.

Imagine if your representative represented only 15,000 people. Chances are he would have to work pretty hard to get elected because no special interest is going to fork over millions just for his lousy vote.

He might even ring your doorbell.

What would it cost?

Even if you paid them all the same salary as we do today, half the anti-federalists' number, 10,100 representatives and senators, would cost us $1.76 billion. Their legislation might actually improve if we eliminated all their staff positions and made the elected do the actual work for a change. Throw in some campaign finance reform which stipulates contributions originate within the new districts, and repeal of the 17th Amendment, and you have a nice little package a decent presidential candidate could win on easily.

So far, however, none of them have enough imagination to see that 91 percent of the country is already ripe for the ideas.

If only they had some.

Congressional Approval Remains in the Tank!

Gallup has congressional job approval stuck at 13 and under 20 since May.

Representation without representation.

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.

The Feeble-Minded, Libertarian Crank, Rep. Justin Amash Can't Encourage "In God We Trust"

The text of the bill he voted against reads as follows:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress reaffirms ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the United States and supports and encourages the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.

There is nothing binding in this resolution whatsoever.

It does not require the motto be displayed, anywhere. It merely supports the motto and encourages its display where and when it happens. A wise man, even an atheist, would regard this as a mere trifle, a sop to the parochial interest of an unenlightened but harmless population, a one-off costing nothing to a politician with any sense.

But Amash still couldn't stomach it. Prudence is not a subject of the law schools, which know with Socrates that virtue cannot be taught, but especially to the ilk it attracts.

That said, it is sheer misrepresentation for Amash to say, “There is no need to push for the phrase to be on all federal, state, and local buildings.”

The bill pushes nothing, unless you're an over-sensitive freak, an un-American ideologue like Justin Amash.

George Washington, on the other hand, not only found it unobjectionable but recommended for the mere American politician to cherish and respect religion and morality:

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports.—In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.—The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.—A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.—Let it simply be asked where is security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.—Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure.—reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.—

I have seen no evidence that Justin Amash cherishes or respects religion and morality as a politician, nor that he understands their priority over him as a Christian legislator and American, which he claims to be.

Rather is it evident that his loyalties are to a narrowly conceived creed of a different kind.

The do-gooder's work is never done.

Libertarians Are Nuts: Transparent, Principled Representation Is Easily Stopped

Usually by a pair of tits or testicles, or ambition, greed or personal animus.

"Transparent, principled representation—supported by grassroots networks and promoted through social media—is becoming an unstoppable force," says a Republican libertarian would-be star in a fundraising letter.

That's pretty transparent all by itself. Dangle hope, and raise money. Reminds me of a certain prominent Democrat's recent campaign, which is bumping up against the unstoppable force of failure and its discontents.

Like all good ideologies, the libertarian one assumes people are essentially good and will do the right thing more often than not, if the politician but sets a good example and gives everyone all the information. A child of his age is this one, worshipping at the altar of Education, which the more one has, the better one is.

Why, one wonders why the founders bothered separating the powers of government at all, seeing how history teaches us how good men are.

"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

-- James Madison, Federalist No. 51

At least my libertarian has declined to run for the Senate. For now.

Having gone from daddy's business to one term in the state House and one term in the federal House, that would be just too obvious.

Besides, it takes millions to run for the Senate, and right now, the coffers are looking a little light for another House run in a redrawn district which will be more Democrat than before.

Which explains statements like this: "I always vote for the side that increases our personal and economic freedoms—regardless of party."

Tracking left, where the votes are, where he belongs.