A New Model That Removes Built In Conflicts
Is there still time to correct a few things about the way we govern ourselves, before we begin setting fires and shooting bullets? Why don’t we try reshuffling this old “house of cards” that the implementers of the Constitution handed us? Please hear this proposal out. The Constitution our people were living with in 1900 was admirable. In any event, this is not about the Constitution. It is about changing the nonsensical legislative districting that the states gave us at the beginning. Those districts are a mess, and need re-doing. The states shot themselves in the foot when they gave us all those duplications of districts. It was they which set up the bullying central system that is taking over the governing of the people of the states. Well, not exactly, because thirty-seven states and 310,000,000 more people have been added to the districting mess since then.
FEDERALISM: THE AVEY PROPOSAL (with minimal editorial comment)
First, states will amend their Constitutions to adopt a single grid of legislative districts of 40,000 (?) per district, thereby voiding all other state districts.
Second, states will amend their Constitutions to provide that the new reps from the new districts shall meet soon after their election, to choose all state-wide Constitutional Officers.
Third, states will amend their Constitutions to enumerate every county and/or city government that is eligible to choose a 6-year term Senator.
Fourth, states will wait out an election cycle so that their new legislative bodies and governing officials can become working teams.
Fifth, by this time, the U.S. Congress will have gotten the message: “The States are coming with qualified reps to take their rightful places in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Amendment XVII is doomed.”
Sixth, Appropriately, Amendment XVII will be repealed, and State Governments will again resume their places in the U.S. Senate.
Seventh, States will begin sending their Houses of Representatives to the Grand U.S. House of Representatives.
And finally Eighth, the states will designate the same electors of their officials to join with all other electors to choose a President and Vice-President. The simplicity of THIS COMPLETED MODEL is unbelievable. Those looking for hope and change need look no further. This is hope and change of the kind one can believe in. It integrates all governing into one harmoniously interacting system of small districts. In small districts voters can vote for the person rather than the party because they can trust the community’s information sources.
The Founders thought the body politic should have three levels of voter sophistication: (1) those choosing officials for two-year terms, (2) those choosing officials for four-year terms, and (3) those choosing officials for six-year terms. The model incorporates this idea.
The problems we have with representative government are not as I see it as an incongruity between voters and representatives per se, but that the incongruity is the result of the style of our elections. “First past the post” voting styles are a much bigger problem than lack of local input into elections, as it is that system itself which establishes the two party system and all its many power relationships.
ReplyDeleteBloating the house of representatives (to some eight thousand, if you had 40,000 person districts) and giving the senate back to state governments might do plenty of good, but would not eliminate the two party system as it is. Even at a local level, the conflict will always be streamlined into two parties with first past the post. Marginalized groups are still marginalized.
Furthermore, shifting power from the federal government to the states does not inherently limit power, it just makes it more local.
Then the question is, as always, can it be done at all?
http://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
"First past the post," I heard (without that label) in my high school History class in 1933. Although its logic may be accurate, where has it taken the body of politics? really, it is still just a point of departure in the thinking of a frustrated electorate.
DeleteProbably the greatest stumbling block to what I am proposing is the admonition that "There's no simple solution to a complex problem" That quote is in a class with "You can't mix religion politics."
The basic elements of the Founders' thinking were totally miss-implemented by those who have ignored their implications for giving their people the more perfect union in one common set of districting.
I have spent the last 15 years, bit by bit, putting ideas into this amalgam, and trying to "channel" into what the Founders would think and now, it is beginning to coalesce into a unified whole whereby one synchronized governing system ties together every element of governing from dog-catcher to top officials. (please see my next blog update)
CKA
Emanating from a single grid of proportional districts.
ReplyDelete