An Open letter to Jim DeMint

To: President Jim DeMint at the Heritage Foundation

From: Cloyce K. Avey, member of Heritatge Foundation

Jim, you and Heritage Foundation have produced an excellent book that everybody should read.

But, in all seriousness I must ask you, “What’s the point?” You are laying a guilt trip on the electorate, a guilt trip that the electorate does not deserve and should not be laid on them.

Everything in your book points to local communities (their districts) as the ones who should be choosing their fates in the federal system. You literally hold out a dish of wonderful food for them to see and smell and drool over. But it is just beyond their grasp---and there is absolutely nothing they are able to do about it. Until the States put their people in charge, there is absolutely nothing the people can do but bitterly throw up their hands in frustration.

For two and a quarter centuries, they have been forced into a Jekyl/Hyde schizophrenia by their States’ double districting with all their plethora of pecking orders. The people instinctively know that if they were properly organized, they could do much better. Their States are utterly clueless about districting inferences from their Founders. Those who wrote and signed the Constitution had brilliant instincts. Those who implemented the Constitution were just plain stupid in that they did not properly organize their people into the more perfect union. Nor did they have the vision to plan for it at a more suitable time. Equally disgusting, is today’s constitutional scholarship which is as bad as that of the original implementers.

The brilliant instincts of the Founders continue to shout to state governments, “District your people into locally managed, equal-sized districts; then allow the resulting single set of reps to operate the entire federal governing system of states and their national government.” We must dig ourselves out of the existing districting mess, and go back to the original district of 40,000 persons, distributed nationwide.

The Founders were elitists who trusted the grassroots only to elect reps to rule over them---not to participate further except via their reps. They cleverly devised a sophisticated voting system of three levels: (1) Those who elect persons to two-year terms; (2) Those who elect persons to four-year terms (the executives); and (3 Those who elect persons to six-year terms (the senators).

By implication, the states should have mirrored that system. The people’s reps would serve at both places in their designated “houses of reps.” And county and/or city governments would choose their state senators. The reps would collegiately elect all executives.

Instead of state and national conventions to elevate party members into offices, why not turn that job over to the individual districts and allow their reps to gather together and finish the elections?

Your “Falling In Love With America All Over Again” refuses to follow through with the above decisive action to implement its ideas.

If you cannot see the people’s desperate need for reorganization. If you are not in sympathy with that need. What is the purpose of the book? Please see my letter in the April issue of The American Spectator (p.6) on this subject.