Representative Government: the Unsolved Puzzle

The United States is a representative government.  The United Nations is a representative government.  Russia is a representative government. And so is China and maybe a hundred other nations are representative governments.

In the United States, you and I and every other voter, each have five reps who claim to be representing us, personally. Not a single one of them actually do represent us. Rather, they are reps of some political party with which we voters are compelled to establish a relationship. If we want to participate in the governments of our state and nation, we fall in line and do as we are told.

Is this the governing system that the Founders thought they were establishing? Has the world of nations fallen in line with the Founders’ ideas of how people can set up their own representative systems? Or is every nation simply mocking the failed system that the U.S. flaunts as being authentic? What would we have to do to make ours authentic? Better yet, what have we done to destroy authenticity?

Whatever authenticity we had at the beginning was based on the Congressional District that had no more than 40,000 people. How did the Founders come up with 40,000? Good question. Would 20,000 have been better? Who knows?  When the optimum number is finally determined, the nation can have an authentic representative system. They will shop around their manageable local district and choose a rep without any assistance from a political party.

The representative system lost whatever authenticity it had as its corrupt reps expanded their districts by a factor of seventeen times and sometimes distorted their boundaries ridiculously.  Nor were the states any help as they created all the extra, unneeded districts. One standardized set of districts can run the entire federal system of fifty-one governments.

The world’s phony representative systems need to get rid of their partisanship. The way to get rid of partisanship is to reduce the size of each district to the point that local voters can competently use the neighborhood gossiping system to locate their reps. If free and fair elections are held, those reps will be locally derived and authentic.  That is the key to having governments of the people, by the people, and for the people. If County Election Departments were empowered by their State Governments to set up and supervise a system of such districts throughout the nation, the voters would happily abandon their divisive partisan elections system. They would happily tell their five impotent reps where to go.

The Basic Constitutional Issues That Scholars Refuse To Discuss: Part 2

There is a down side to the hope and optimism for better governing as explained above. We have now lived exactly one hundred years under two of the most destructive Constitutional Amendments that could have been conceived. They are numbers Sixteen and Seventeen.  Sixteen paves the way for bleeding the free enterprise system to death by income taxing. Seventeen totally changed the job descriptions of senators, and raises questions about senators’ value in the system.

Alone, those two amendments have spun America into a downward spiral that is about to crash us.  They were designed to do what they are doing. They were passed by lying and deception. Their supporters want to destroy what the Founders tried to build, and establish their own power base by force. They are constantly on watch for opportunities to  shut down the American Way.

You can blame Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson and all their ilk for these two destructive amendments. They must be rescinded.  The partisanship cancer must be removed from the body politic. Home districting will empower local voters to take charge of their own destiny. Otherwise, Western Civilization is needlessly doomed.

A Belly Full of Laws. Will We Ever Get Enough? Who Knows All of Them?

There is a law of diminishing returns, like how much chicken can a person eat? So government by the people has seen lawmakers grinding out laws for two and a quarter centuries.  Are laws like fried chicken?  Must we keep them coming? 

What is the purpose of representative government?  Better yet, what is the purpose of a representative?  Suppose there is another way of looking at a representative.  Suppose he/she just hangs out in the home district, and hardly goes anywhere else.  What would that job be like?

The Constitution says (suggests?) that a district’s population should be no less than 30,000.  Congressmen have corruptly expanded it from hardly more than 30,000 to 700,000, and have made it literally useless to the people.  Suppose we go back to 30,000, thereby creating reps who can honestly say what every community is thinking. For a nation of over 300,000,000, that’s over 10,000 reps.

Provide each of those 10,000 reps with modern communications devices, and they can “assemble” in whatever groupings they wish within a matter of minutes. They can transport themselves electronically to their State’s or Nation’s House of Representatives while sitting at their home office.

We have become a nation operated by poll takers.  These 10,000 reps are the most reliably informed political body that could be found for poll takers.

Poll takers ask the reps.  The reps ask the poll takers. Twitter and Facebook get involved.  They can discover the sense of 10,000 communities in a matter of hours. It is a most sensitive system for discovering the will of the people.  Every two years, a refreshed base of reps keeps the system accurate.

Imagine a John Boehner lording over his House in contrast to the above!  Or magine a Harry Reid lording over his Senate in contrast to the above! The above would replace their system with qualified State reps who could sit at both places, as well as elect the U.S. Senators. Today’s electorate is bewildered. There is no way for it to participate as a single body politic until it gets its Home Districts.  

The Governmental Units Keeping Western Civilizations Alive

Partisanship is killing Western Civilization.  It launches a person’s rational way of thinking into a mode of irrational thinking.  Common sense goes out the window.  Partisanship happens under the pretense of self-governing, as a people are asked to make unreasonable choices about candidates they know nothing about.

When a people of a local community are asked to elect one of their own to take charge of a local office, the process is a no brainer.  But when those same people are asked to elect someone to a state-wide office, they don’t have a clue about those candidates’ local community reputations. It is emotionally traumatic to even be asked to make a ballot choice under those circumstances. Exacerbating that situation further, the two parties organize mud-slinging campaigns. Such “elections” are tantamount to barbarism. 

The contrast between local vs. state/federal elections is like day and night.  Local elections are intelligently conducted. The others are nasty ordeals. That is why it is said that all elections are local.  Because people deal intelligently with local issues, and irrationally with cleverly contrived state/national issues. That is why the county system stands out as the last great hope of Western Civilization.  It is the highest form of a civilized self-governing system.  Politicized representative systems are nothing more than make-believe self-governing.  

Did the Founders think about this problem? Yes.  Did the Founders have a solution for it? Yes. Would their solution have solved our problem? Emphatically yes! There is no need at all for us to go through the election ordeals that we go through. The Constitution is a far greater instrument of government than anybody has given it credit for. It was supposed to unite the people as one body politic, as well as unite the states as one federation. 

It has failed in both respects. The states treat their people as two bodies politic, thereby creating two legislative bodies with a legal system to arbitrate between the two. It is total nonsense. What the Constitution was saying to the States in 1789 was, “Let’s become one body politic of equalized Congressional Districts. This will give everybody a home district with a rep handling all affairs of State.

Reps will operate the governments of the States in which they reside; then operate the foreign policy work of the States jointly at the nation’s capitol. This will destabilize state legislatures until a satisfactory size of common districting can be worked out. The U.S. House of Representatives will take whatever number of reps that the states finally decide to send. Meanwhile, states must expeditiously set up standardized home districts.”

Those hypothetical instructions went out in 1789. We are now a nation of one hundred times as many people, and the same unfulfilled instructions still apply. The nation ignores the Founders’ convictions about local districting and the Electoral College.  The local district has been consolidated into one that is seventeen times larger. The Electoral College lies damned and essentially unused. Each of us have five useless reps instead of the Founders’ ONE useful rep.

Everybody can find one person to blame for this mess. That person is your local state representative who swore to uphold the above described constitution.  But they have no vision of what must be done to turn the Constitution’s failures into successes. Ironically, state reps would become the movers and shakers of the entire system, if only they had the vision to act. 

The Founders’ Constitutional method of keeping all elections local and civilized and out of the hands of partisans, is the Electoral College. It is the natural enemy of partisans, so naturally the partisans hate it. The Electoral College does in a civilized manner, the same thing that partisans do in a barbaric manner.

The people properly elect the ones going to the Electoral College. At that gathering of electors, the secret balloting system prevails. Roberts Rules of Order prevails. The electors set their own agenda regarding campaigning and public access. Such colleges should be electing the executive officers of all fifty-one governments of the federation.  Every elector will work closely with the people of the district, if the elector wants reelection.  The college’s secret voting will be repeated until the winning candidate gets a majority.

Historians cannot let us forget one of the first Presidential elections, when the runner-up was named Vice President. The two contenders were worst enemies. Experience should bring adaptations for a better performance next time. Unfortunately, experience brought shyster politicians who subverted the college’s function.

Western Civilization would be alive and well in this country if: (1) We lived in a single grid of local districts, and (2) We were allowing Electoral Colleges to operate as intended.  Since we are doing neither, it is dying.