In May/June issue of Mother Jones, Ari Berman opines that the Founders created a system that is now tearing the country apart. His main issue is that the United States is not a true democracy and was never designed to be one.
The Senate: Throughout the article, Berman repeatedly comes back to the fact that the Senate is not an equally representative body. That Wyoming with half a million people should have just as much say in the senate as California with nearly 40 million people is unacceptable. However, this is exactly why the Senate exists. If the Founders had wanted true democracy, there is no need for a bicameral legislature. Before the Senate was crippled by the ill-considered 17th Amendment, it was intended to represent the state governments. As Berman notes, it was the state legislature that appointed Senators and could recall them on a moment's notice. This provided a check for the states to prevent the central government from imposing rules, regulations, and taxes that exceeded its authority. As I noted in an earlier post, Obamacare could not have passed but for the repeal of the 17th Amendment. Many other laws and taxes exist because the state governments no longer have a check on the Federal government. Repealing the 17th Amendment would do wonders for shrinking the central government to a more reasonable size.
The Electoral College: Berman holds that the electoral college has allowed the candidate who did not win the popular vote to become president. This has happened twice in fairly recent times (Bush 2000, Trump 2016). Like many who opine against the electoral college, he misunderstands what it represents. The Presidential election isn't one gigantic popularity vote, it is 50 separate weighted races. California is vastly more important than Wyoming, but Wyoming isn't relegated to irrelevancy as Berman proposes to do. A popular vote system would allow the populous states to oppress the more rural states. In a pure popular vote system, Iowa and New Hampshire would be ignored while California, Texas, Florida, and New York would be flooded with presidential ads. In a previous post, I gamed out a worst case scenario where the popular vote winner only wins 2 states. The electoral college guards against this, among other disasters.
The Supreme Court: Because the court is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, it is not a representative branch. Well, of course not. It is meant to represent the law, not the people. Justice is supposed to wear a blindfold, but the writer is complaining that the court isn't representative enough. It should not matter who the plaintiff is or who the defendant is, it should only matter what the law says. If the law is unjust, that is a matter for the legislature to fix. The writer complains that 'originalism' is an effort to protect white power. Ugh. If we are going to let judges change the rules on the fly, why bother with a legislature. It is because some courts ditched original intent that the 14th Amendment (written in 1868) approved gay marriage. Berman wants an activist court that implements 'democratic' policies. That's the legislature's job.
What the Founders intended was that the States had sovereignty in most things but the Federal government would handle foreign affairs and any squabbles between the States. It was meant to be a limited government that did just a limited set of things. In fact, James Madison was even kind enough to list those things in the Constitution as enumerated powers. If the government was limited to the actual enumerated powers, 70% of the current government would vanish overnight. That is how out of hand things have become.
Berman accuses the Constitution of having been designed to protect white power, but then notes that most whites were initially barred from voting on account of the property requirement. So, it wasn't to protect white power but propertied interests. The writer has sought to make the founding document racist with the way he describes it. Of course, that it upheld slavery and had the 3/5ths rule demonstrates racism but those were both expunged during and after the Civil War. With the overtly racist parts already removed more than a century and a half ago, Berman needed to insert his white power nonsense to keep the race hustle alive.
What Berman wants is something more along the lines of a parliament. In a parliamentary system, the executive and the legislative are mixed together. The whole system is up for grabs and rapid change based on current trends is possible. By contrast, the Constitution was designed to retard change and require sustained super majorities to alter the law. It took decades for the Prohibition Movement to get the 18th Amendment passed, but marijuana was made illegal by the Controlled Substance Act of 1970. Does the Constitution say anything about marijuana? No. Why didn't it require an amendment to prohibit? Because we had dumped the enumerated powers by 1970. The government isn't limited anymore, which is the way Mother Jones prefers it.
Democracy sounds good but it is a terrible form of government. Inevitably, the citizens discover they can vote themselves money from the treasury and the system goes bust. The US hasn't yet gone full democracy but the voting ourselves money has gone a long way: Social Security and Medicare are the big ones. Rather than move further down the democracy path, maybe we should retreat back to the safe harbor of a Representative Republic. That is the system the Founders designed.
We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. - Alexander Hamilton
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. - John Adams
Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. - James Madison
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. - Alexander Tytler
Democracy is the road to socialism. - Karl Marx
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