THE DECAYED AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM EXPLAINED BY FUKUYAMA WITH THE COOL NAME

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Ok fellow ploggers, what have we learned so far?   Although it masquerades as a democracy, the United States government does not deliver for American citizens.  The next author I will focus on goes into detail about the way the work of millions of people employed by the United States' civil service, is organized.  Is it organized efficiently so we don't waste money?  Nope.  Is there usually a boss we can point to, to take responsibility when things go wrong?  That's called accountability by the way.  Erm.. nope.  When a problem is urgent does the US political system allow us to move swiftly and decisively?  Not particularly.  Part of the problem is that the American people are supposed to direct government via the election process but the system is too big and complicated for people to understand and cast judgement.  To get your head around it you have read "long and boring" books like the one I will cover here.  And no one wants to do that.  Ah but do not fear!  Mackie is here.  I invite you to gain a deeper understanding of how American politics works, quickly and easily by reading my summary of this fantastic book by the illustrious Francis Fukuyama (with the cool name.)

Stanford Scholar Francis Fukuyama’s 2015 tour de force “Political Order and Political Decay” is a 500 page tome, with what I expect is the tiniest writing allowed.  It is a giant endeavor in documenting how political systems around the world developed into what they are today and how well they work.  The short version is that due to America’s historical trajectory, which will be outlined in more detail below, our political system is overly controlled by special interests.  Secondly it is impeded by veto points and conflicting layers of government, which makes decision-making difficult and reduces accountability.  Finally our system is overly subject to clientilism which is the practice of exchanging public sector favors (mainly welfare or jobs) for votes.  The author goes on to detail why other countries around the world have avoided these problems and how their systems work.  It’s pretty useful and dare I say (for those wonky enough to be delving into these posts) riveting stuff.  I’ve skipped a fair amount of the chapters relating to foreign governments wishing only to focus on that which explains the United States’ political system.

People often ask why I call my blog a plog so let me digress for a second here and explain.  First of all plog obviously sounds like blog and when you smoosh the word politics into the front of the word blog, it turns into the word plog which is a good start.  After that the word plog is the gift that keeps on giving.  It sounds an awful lot like plod, which is what you do when you are reading long books, so I like that.  Finally I am British and we have a really bad habit of enjoying toilet humor.  It's just terrible.  So I quite like the fact that lurking surreptitiously under the word plog is plog's ugly brother plop.  I've just bared my naked soul.

POLITICAL ORDER AND POLITICAL DECAY BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

As is customary the author fleshes out the subject of state formation with a bit of history.

History

A state (a.k.a. a country) is defined as an entity which "[possesses] a monopoly on legitimate coercion.. [which it] exercises.. over a defined territory."  China was the first country to form a state.  In China the state was formed for the same reason European states were formed - prolonged and pervasive military competition.

A critical component of a state is the court system (a.k.a. the judiciary.)  Interestingly, the rule of law was most deeply institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church. In the eleventh century it emerged as the guardian of a Roman law based on the sixth-century Justinian code put in place by Emperor Justinian of Rome.  Monarchs in Europe did not have absolute power because they had to follow this external code of law. The Chinese state never developed a transcendental religion and perhaps because of this, never developed a true rule of law. This led to a centralized absolutist China (meaning the government of China had absolute power over its people.)  Absolutist Russia emerged because the Eastern Church found itself subordinate to the state.

Accountable government first emerged in Europe in England (your plogger is of that ilk!) because of the fact that the estates (the aristocracy) and the monarchy were both as powerful as each other so the estates organized a cohesive parliament and had the power to block the King’s initiatives.  England beheaded King Charles I and formed a republic under Oliver Cromwell from 1688-1689.  When a monarch was reinstated he did so under the condition of "no taxation without representation."  The new monarch William of Orange was accompanied by philosopher John Locke.  Locke introduced the concept of ruling with the consent of the governed and that rights were naturally granted in human beings.  This was a crucial moment in history because the concept of giving the people power over their own government was entirely new.  A century later American colonists would use the same rhetoric as they revolted against the British.  However, both the new political orders of 1689 Britain or of the United States in 1789, ratified via the United States' Constitution, were not modern democracies because voting (and other privileges) were restricted to white male property owners.  Nevertheless Locke’s principle was durable and no one has since argued that government should not be accountable to the people.  

Political decay in America – The American system is wasteful and easily controlled by special interests because politicians are in control of government agencies so they use government resources to achieve political goals.  How did we get here?

Fukuyama says that the states with highest efficiency and least corruption are those that developed under an autonomous system before every person in the population was given the right to vote.  An autonomous state system is in place when government agencies from transportation to defense (a.k.a. the civil service) are not controlled by politicians, but instead have independent methods of hiring leaders and workers for the agency.  This means the agencies can fill leadership roles via a merit-based system where the best candidates can be selected instead of allowing the party in power to assign party members to run the agency.  Examples of such autonomous systems can be found in Germany and Japan.  Those countries that became democratic before the civil service achieved autonomy did not do so well.  Examples include the United States, Italy and Greece.  In these countries the political party in power controls who works at the agencies and can dole out jobs and money in exchange for votes in a practice called clientilism, mentioned earlier.  

Universal male suffrage (which means the right to vote) happened first in the United States in 1870.  It did so before the country had a chance to develop an autonomous state and as a result practically invented the practice of clientilism as political parties used state resources to achieve political power.  It suffered from this for much of the 1800s as the various class tiers were enfranchised (or given the right to vote.)

As an example of a country that formed a democracy before a strong bureaucratic state could take hold the author mentions Greece.  Clientilism is still rampant in Greece today.  Socialist parties handed out public sector jobs to party supporters so indiscriminately that between 1970 and 2009 those jobs increased five fold and the average public wage was one and a half times higher than a private sector one!  When Greece recently led the public debt problems in the Euro zone their debt woes had largely been caused by this.  Today Greece and Italy are notable because although they are modern industrialized societies they haven't succeeded in reforming their public sectors and eliminating political patronage and clientilism. 

Our author cites Britain as an example of a country that created an autonomous civil service before the country's voting franchise was expanded to include more of the population.  In 1855 an independent committee investigated the Crimean war and found there was poor organization of intel, logistics and strategy.  The risk to the lives of soldiers and civilians led to a disgruntled populace and subsequent reform to the military and civil service which meant appointments would be given on the basis of merit rather than patronage.  Patronage is the practice of staffing the government with friends and families of those who rule.  Through the 1860s only one out of eight British citizens could vote.  Mass political parties did not get underway in Britain until the 1870s by which time the civil service was autonomous which meant that parties could not use the mass distribution of government jobs as vote-getting opportunities.

Because of this difference Britain’s system cannot be compared to the American one despite America’s Anglo Protestant roots. The British Westminster system is biased towards rapid decision-making.  There is no federalism (where a system of government has several states which remain independent in internal affairs,) no Supreme Court to invalidate legislation, no separation of powers between the executive and legislature and there is strong party discipline.  The executive is the prime minister or president and their staff or ministers which execute governance.  The legislative branch is Congress or parliament which make the laws.  The judicial branch consists of the courts which enforce the laws.  Governments around the world usually consist of three branches: the executive, legislative and judicial branches.  Although America imported the common law system from Britain in Tudor times it became "stuck in time" and did not centralize as Britain’s did.  Since the Constitution was ratified at a time the Americans were rebelling against the British, this emphasized anti-statism and made Americans shun a strong central state leading to decentralization and an emphasis on checks and balances to put constraints on government power.  America’s physical size and dispersed rural population also led to the fact that it would be governed on a decentralized basis.

America was a pioneer in the idea of mass political parties, which lead to clientilism.  It was patronistic until non-elite president Andrew Jackson was elected in 1829. He started the ball rolling from a patronage system to a clientilistic system.  For example in 1849 president Zachary Taylor replaced 30 percent of all federal officials in his first year in office!  Later Lincoln would complain that he was trapped in a system in which doling out bureaucratic offices was an integral part of building political coalitions.  Politicians needed to recruit precinct captains and ward heelers to succeed.  Ward heelers were people that would commit illegal acts like tearing down an opposition party's posters or paying constituents for their votes.  In return for his services the ward heeler was often given a job, perhaps in the city's civil service, which was controlled by the party.  One of the reasons socialism did not take hold in the United States is that the parties captured poor Americans by offering short-term rewards.

In what ways is the US political system dysfunctional?

As a case study of American state building and dysfunction the creation of the much needed railroad regulation agency is described.  It was set up to be governed by a board of party appointees so it ultimately served party interests.  On top of that it was not given powers to enforce things like rate policies which would instead be enforced by the courts.  During the First World War a problem caused by German interference with European bound American shipments caused goods to start piling up at an American port and the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) could not deal with the problem so President Wilson nationalized the rail system.  3 years later it was returned to private control and the ICC continued to be run by party appointees but this time is was given more regulatory power.  So the problems swung in the other direction and the excessive regulation eventually led to a crisis in 1970s with many railroads entering bankruptcy.  Allowing party power to influence the economy means it will eventually get captured by interest groups at the expense of the general public.  The moral of the story is bureaucratic systems must have autonomy to make decisions that protect the greater good of the people.

All modern societies started off as patrimonial (patronage) states.  Both classical Marxists and contemporary economists agree that democracy emerges when the threats made to the rich are severe enough that the rich make concessions.  The middle classes can make alliances in either direction but are more often bought off by the rich.  Fukuyama believes that when there is a large middle class of over 30% of the population, a stable democracy is much more sustainable.  This stability may have begun to unravel in the developed world because income inequality has increased massively since the 1980s.  This is most notable in the United States where the top 1% of families took home 23.5 % of GDP in 2007 which grew from 9% of GDP in 1970.  

According to administration specialists the overall efficiency of the United States government has been deteriorating steadily for more than a generation.  The number of government workers has been capped at 2.25 mill since the end of World War II and in 2005 it was actually lower at 1.8 mill.  However, the reason for this is that the government is using outside agencies and contractors to give the impression that we have capped the size of government.  The number of outside contractors is currently larger than the number of direct employees!  Also, the United States public service has departed from being an energized merit-based system.  One of the reasons for this is that half of new entrants are veterans and many of them are disabled. Within government there is a sense that a job well done goes unrewarded.  67% of people in public service responded that their organization was not good at disciplining poor performance.   More generally institutions fail to adapt because human nature encourages norm following beyond rationality (cognitive rigidity.) 

On top of the problems caused by government contractors in that they make for a fuzzy line of accountability, another grave problem is that often no one person is really in charge.  “The welter of congressional committees.. produce conflicting mandates.  There are dozens of congressional committees through which all bills must pass before they get a vote on the house or senate floors.  This decentralized system practically invites special interest groups to protect their interests.  Barack Obama’s affordable care act in 2010 turned into.. a monstrosity.. as a result of all the concessions that had to be made to interest groups including doctors, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry.”  My next piece is going to shed more light on the inner workings of lawmaking in Congress. 

In other words there is a patchwork of government branches in the United States that can each issue different orders to the same agency.  The author cites the forest service as an example of a department which has competing mandates.  This area of government was simultaneously captured by the interests of home owners and of environmentalists.  Preposterous economic impracticalities arose and the government ended up spending $1 million on fire protection per $200,000 home!  On top of that the forest service has failed to meet the original mandate of sustainable wood production, an endeavor that should easily turn a profit but instead loses money every year. 

Water always seeks its own level and during the nineteenth century government functions in the United States, which in Europe were performed by an executive branch, started to be performed in a round about way by judges and elected representatives thereby causing Stephen Skowronek to characterize the US as a “state of courts and parties.”  A merit-based bureaucracy arrived in 1880 but the amount of classified civil servants only reached 80% after the new deal in 1930s.  In 1954 we reached a turning point in history.  A lawsuit started by the NAACP – The National Association for the Advancement Of Colored People named Brown  v. Board of Education made segregation illegal.  Because the state was controlled by pro-segregation forces, private groups found they had to use the court system to fight to overturn segregation law.  Since then social movements such as environmental protection, women’s rights, consumer safety and gay marriage have been pursued though the courts.  There is no other liberal democracy that proceeds in this fashion.  “The decay in the quality of democratic government is rooted in the fact that.. the courts and legislature have usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation.. incoherent, unaccountable and inefficient…  The courts.. have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government.”

Another notable change was the explosion of lobbyists from 175 individuals in 1971, to about 12,000 (who spent $3.2 billion) in 2013.  When a congressperson is exposed to a particular viewpoint it is called intellectual capture.  A pervasive and troublesome effect has been that “while nominal tax rates in the US are much higher than in other developed countries, very few American corporations actually pay taxes at that rate because they have negotiated special exemptions and benefits for themselves.” 

Fukuyama presents a graph depicting the number of veto points against the difficulty of decision-making and the graph shows that the US has the most difficulty of all contemporary democracies in making decisions.  His conclusion is that America is a vetocracy in gridlock.

The United States differs from most democratic counterparts in other ways.  Examples of countries that have parliamentary systems are the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, India and South Africa.  In a parliamentary system a lot of laws are drawn up by the executive branch with the help of the civil service, and the civil service is administered by ministers.  That means the people writing up the laws deciding where money is spent are the people responsible for making the money work for the good of the people.  Do you remember I explained before that there are three branches of government: the executive, the legislative and the judicial?  The way to remember it is that instead of having three branches, a parliamentary system seems like it really has two branches because some of the key functions of the executive and legislative branches are merged.  In contrast the United States' Congress writes and passes laws independently from the Whitehouse/President (the executive.)  Congress' overlapping committees produce duplicative and/or conflicting mandates and result in a governance without clear direction which is thus unaccountable.  As an example of the result of this setup the Pentagon is asked to produce 500 reports a year often on duplicate issues consuming huge amounts of time and energy.  Financial sector regulation is shared by 9 regulatory bodies and by State Attorney Generals.  “It was easy for the banking sector to game this system.. in the late 1990s.”

Government agencies are run differently too.  In a parliamentary system once a party is elected it runs the whole governmental system.  In the United States that is not the case.  Instead of straightforwardly delegating power to a single agency head it sometimes goes to a group of commissioners balanced between parties.  This ultimately makes agencies and regulators less accountable.

How can the US system be fixed?

The success of anti-establishment presidential candidates this year demonstrates that the United States has a political system which is considered illegitimate by a lot of its citizens.  Legitimacy is a crucial component to a well functioning system.  A perfect example of this can be seen in the moment when England applied the principle of "no taxation without representation" to their political structure in the 17^th century.  Because of it they were able raise more money than France's coercive system which in turn allowed them to win wars against France.

Fukuyama believes the United States has devolved into a patronage system.  “The nascent American state was captured by democratic politicians and has been repatrimonalized through interest group influence through Congress.”  This has been aided in part by the huge growth in lobbying groups and by a series of Supreme Court decisions which has liberated these groups from constraints on spending money.

The American system was designed to resist tyranny but that has been at the cost of an ability to make decisions.  This crippling effect means Congress will be unable to make very necessary changes to its infrastructure, health, immigration, entitlements, the tax code (to cite but a few examples of highly pressing issues) in the future.  To expand on just one of these problems, an important challenge for democracies around the world is the unsustainability of their welfare-state commitments.  Almost all welfare systems were created when birth rates were higher, life expectancy shorter and economic growth was more dependable.  The failure of America to deal with the sustainability of its welfare state has been due to the polarization of its two parties, their perennial feuding and their race for more funding for themselves and their constituencies. 

America is caught in a bad cycle.  Americans distrust government so Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive... The government under performs which confirms the people’s distrust and so on.  This decentralized system does not represent majority interests and instead gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activists.  “A lot of political actors recognize the system isn’t working very well but have very deep interests in keeping things the way they are.”  Many of these problems could be solved if we moved to a parliamentary system but that is unlikely since Americans love their Constitution.  If change is to be made to the structure of the US political system it is important to note that too little or too much bureaucratic autonomy are both bad.  A careful balance must be struck to find an optimal point.

Conclusion

Most United States citizens only pay attention to politics during a presidential election.  Clearly the responsibility of being a United States citizen does not end at choosing the right president.  A great president can do little to fix fundamental flaws in the design of the United States political system which was framed in a different world.  There are 435 Representatives, 100 Senators and 52 states today.  When the Constitution was institutionalized in 1776 there were only 56 delegates, 13 colonies and under 4 million, mostly disenfranchised and poorly educated citizens.  Today, improved communications have led to heightened governmental transparency and scrutiny which means we can safely cut back on some of the checks and balances that are hampering our ability to make critical changes.  Fukuyama suggests we move to a parliamentary system which has worked effectively across the developed world.  I say we dare to hope for this, or a similarly effective and necessary change.

I am Cecilia Mackie, MPhys and I worked on Wall Street for 10 years where I rose to an executive level.  The owners of a firm I worked at are now in jail.  Because of this experience I have avidly researched corruption based issues over the last few years.  Outside of this plog, I am building a tech platform which will allow people to participate in a community for political change.  

Please go to www.mackiemusic.com to access my social media pages and learn more about my polymathematical world of wonder!

SUPREME COURT SHENANIGANS EXPLAINED BY JAMIN RASKIN

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Yes, I'm plogging along and this time I've stumbled upon a clever attorney called Jamin Raskin who is now my hero.  This man is a champion for minorities, a champion of the people and I’m pretty sure if you met him at a bar one night he’d be an overall great guy.  He was a former Massachusetts’ Assistant Attorney General and editor of The Harvard Law Review, so don’t bet against him in a pub quiz on constitutional law.  

In the United States the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the Constitution, which means if it finds that a law passed by Congress is in breach of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has the power to throw it out.  Until Justice Scalia died earlier this year the Supreme Court enjoyed a conservative majority for 45 years.  In the 15 years before this book was published (2004) it threw out a higher than normal amount of the legislation passed by Congress which included good stuff like the Gun-Free School Zones Act; the Violence Against Women Act and the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act.  It did so while often citing justifications that ranged from shaky to “ok so I just made this up.”

Raskin’s prose boils down some critical ways in which our political system is broken and how to fix it, so that’s got to be worth a read.  As usual I took the “long and boring” out of the book by picking out what I considered the most salient.  All items in italics in this article correspond to a particular lawsuit.  The United States has a “common law” system, which it inherited from Britain.  In a common law system attorneys are allowed to cite any previous ruling (called a precedent) as a basis to the actions of any of their lawsuits.  For this reason anything a judge rules essentially changes the law from that point onward.

Are you excited?  Here goes!

Overruling Democracy by Jamin Raskin

The Political Supreme Court

Raskin starts out by blitzing the intellectual integrity of the Supreme Court, which he claims has "failed to live up to neutrality obligations” and has "seen aggressive judicial activism based on the political [biased] preferences of the justices [a.k.a. judges.]"  These justices have struck down several laws passed by Congress especially those "expanding rights or advancing social and environmental agendas."  In the first two hundred years since the Constitution was first instituted the Supreme Court struck down 127 federal laws.  In the fifteen year period between 1987, (when William Rehnquist took over as chief justice) and 2002 it struck down 33!

Professor William P. Marshall of the University of North Carolina School of Law shows “the conservative justices [of the Supreme Court in the years preceding this book’s publication] have failed to defer to the decisions of elected branches, repeatedly betrayed a doctrine of strict textualism or the [Constitution] framer’s “original intent,” have not even pretended to defer to case precedent, refused to conform to jurisdictional limitations and the court’s power, spontaneously invented new constitutional rights and theories.. and used judicial power to accomplish partisan [biased/political] objectives.” 

In the prose that follows you will learn about the cases in which Raskin claims the Supreme Court has damaged democracy.  In different instances it has propped up the two-party system; granted free speech to corporations; declared that education is not a constitutional right; legalized arrangements that select white leaders and in 2000 it became the first United States court to decide a presidential election.

“Wow!  Really?” – I hear you gasp.  Read on to decide for yourselves my lovelies.

The Supreme Court gives the 2000 election to George W. Bush.

When the Supreme Court gave the election to George Bush in 2000 (which is something the court has never done before) by overruling and thus halting a manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, the reason given by the court was there was no time to decide upon a standard recount procedure.  Since the poorest voters have the worst voting machines and the highest rate of damaged voting cards, ordering a manual recount would certainly have helped Bush’s opponent and the conservative majority of the Supreme Court knew it.

Notably, in their opinion the judges stated, "individuals have no federal constitutional right to vote."  This statement leaves the system open to manipulation.  Old tricks to prevent votes from being recorded correctly surfaced in a later lawsuit that went into what went wrong in Florida.  Poll workers were found to have been illegally insisting that African Americans produce two forms of ID; polling places were mysteriously changed and incompetent poll attendants were hired.  In its opinion the Supreme Court also stated "the state legislature may select the electors itself."  This means the state can decide which president to vote for without the public’s participation.  Based on the Constitution, which was a document created when most people could not vote, this is true.  But that is a technicality in today’s world.  Every citizen of the United States expects to be able to vote (unless disqualified - like a felon) and the United States presents itself as a democracy to the whole world. Universal suffrage, which means one person one vote, is a fundamental feature of democracy.  In other words in their ruling in 2000 the judges of the Supreme Court shamelessly stated that the United States is not a democracy.  Without writing one person one vote into the Constitution millions are disenfranchised (or excluded from the right to vote) every election.  A study by CIT and MIT determined 6 of the 100 million votes went uncounted in the presidential election of 2000!

The vast majority of states have rejected the act of disenfranchising ex-felons for life.  In Florida when Bush won the presidency by under 500 votes, 200,000 ex-felons were not allowed to vote!  Political estrangement for those who have served their time does not permit full rehabilitation.  Our author suggests we enfranchise ex-felons in every state.

125 nations around the world now guarantee all citizens the right to vote following America’s (ersatz) example of democracy whilst the United States does not.  There are only 15 countries left in the world that, like the US, have refused to commit to universal suffrage.  This is an affront to international law and the universal declaration of human rights of 1948 which states “everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country.”

Solution: Raskin proposes an amendment to the Constitution, which grants all citizens the right to vote unless disqualified and the right to run for office on an equal basis.  This would force the government to update old voting machines that make mistakes.

The Electoral College system should be abolished

Bush vs Gore was a "trademark judicial intervention against popular democracy: deeply partisan, racially inflected and.. unmoored from.. legal doctrine.” Al Gore beat Bush by 500,000 votes and lost by 6 electoral votes.  From Wikipedia: “The United States Electoral College is the institution that elects the President and the Vice President every four years.  Citizens of the United States do not directly elect the President or the Vice President, instead they elect representatives called "electors,” who usually pledge to vote for particular Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates [but are not obliged to vote for the people's choice of President or VP.]”  Raskin recommends abolishing the Electoral College because he argues it defies the sovereignty (or power) of the individual.  It is futile to have one person per vote if each person's vote does not count equally. The Electoral College system is part of the Constitution and part of the problem is that the Constitution was not written in a perfectly democratic way.  48 states do a winner-take-all election where a candidate that has a majority of the votes in a state can win all of the electors in the state and the voices of all the people that did not vote for the winner are dismissed.  This reduces a citizen’s incentive to vote.  Because Florida’s election is usually competitive, they saw voting turnout of 70% whilst the national average was 47% in 2000 putting the US behind every major democracy on earth!  You might be also be surprised to hear that the government provides no official count for the vote for the President.  The people are dependent on precinct returns, exit interviews and polling!

Solution: The author recommends direct national majority rule, which would mean every person's vote has equal value.  We also need a national ballot based on a national election with a national system for reporting the tally.  The ballot is the piece of paper with names on it that you complete and submit on election day.  Right now ballots have a different selection of presidential candidates on them depending on your location around the country.

The drawing of voting districts to meet the political desires of elected leaders (a.k.a. gerrymandering) and how this has been used to advance white rule

"After the 2000 census and redistricting process, fewer than 50 out of 435 house seats are truly competitive."  The economist called redistricting a "glorified incumbent-protection racket."  An incumbent is the elected leader who in currently in office.  Redistricting is the process of drawing electoral district boundaries.  For part of our history members of the house were elected on a statewide basis.  "Single-member districts were not made a federal requirement until the 1960s."

The fact that 98% of African Americans were we're off the voter rolls in Mississippi which was two thirds black was part of the injustice that led to the voting rights act of 1965 which abolished suffrage like the literacy test, the character exam and a constitutional law quiz.  In 1982 amendments to that same act meant that redrawing districts to systematically dilute the back vote was illegal.  As a result by 1990 African members of Congress grew from 26 to 39 and Latino members of Congress grew from 13 to 18.

The backlash to this from conservatives was a 1993 suit in North Carolina resulting in a racist ruling stating, "any districts with nonwhite majorities must not have a bizarre perimeter."  The author goes on to illustrate the perimeter of nonwhite majority districts, which were disallowed based on this rule and compares them to white majority districts, which were allowed, to demonstrate both types had an equivalent amount of "bizarreness.”  In the past the court “found it permissible to redistrict with the intent of protecting “incumbents from contests with each other.””  It is a far greater affront to democratic principles to build a congressional district to protect a politician’s career than it is to shape a district to enable a long excluded racial group to have elected representation.

"The solution is to [end] single-member districts and move to the at-large proportional-representation electoral systems used by democracies around the world."  This means if a group has a certain percentage of the total vote within a state they would have a proportional amount of representatives in Congress.


The two-party system, the damage it does to democracy and the “signature gathering obsession.”

“The court upholds laws that discriminate against third parties by keeping their candidates off the ballot, out of debates and off the public’s radar screen."  "The two major parties will join together to design laws to guard their overwhelming market share."  These laws range from ballot access laws, anti fusion laws, debate-access laws and presidential campaign public financing laws.  "This self installing "two party system" is unlawful."  The idea conflicts with the text and ideas behind the Constitution and its "wide-open" values.  The two-party system is neither derived from our history nor is it a constitutional imperative.

The introduction of government prepared ballots happened in the late 1800s.  Many states placed any party that wished to participate on the ballot without condition whilst some required 500 to 1000 voter signatures say 30 days before Election Day.  In Maryland between 1903 and 1938 there were never fewer than 3 parties for statewide offices.  In 1940 in an effort to remove left wing parties like the socialist, labor and communist parties the states began to severely restrict the ability of parties to get on the ballot by asking parties to achieve a certain number of votes in the prior election or to collect often tens of thousands of signatures of registered or previous election voters.  In Maryland these requirements have meant that no party outside the "two-party system" has ever succeeded in meeting the signature requirements for getting on the ballot for statewide office in the six decades since that change was made!

Article 1 of the Constitution spells out three requirements for running for office: that House Members be at least 25 years old and Senators 30, that they be residents of the United States for seven or nine years respectively and that they be inhabitants in the states they represent.  Beyond that the First Amendment granting political free speech means that government must not interfere in elections.  Signature requirements are thus unconstitutional.  Furthermore Raskin states “[The Fourteenth Amendment granting] equal protection bans [government] discrimination against minority groups.”

Signature requirements are "suffocating restrictions" which create a two-party monopoly.  Court rulings on the issue have be nothing but a “cynical power grab.”  The ruling used most commonly has been Jenness v. Fortson, which has been used by 126 lower court cases as a precedent in which third party or independent candidates have lost claims to being placed on the ballot.  The Jenness court claimed Georgia has "an important state interest in requiring ..a modicum of support before (putting) a candidate on the ballot - the interest.. [is] in avoiding confusion, deception and .. frustration..." The court made this claim when Georgia only had one candidate for Governor and for most of the US house and state legislative races between 1944 and 1962!  Therefore as a citizen in Georgia, facing a single person to choose from in an election can only be “confusing” and “frustrating” in as far as there are too FEW names to choose from!  The fact that since 1944 there was sparce competition was the direct result of the restrictive changes of 1943 regarding the collection of signatures and other unconstitutional impedances.  Before 1944 there were never more that 6 candidates on a state-wide ballot and no confusion was ever had or alleged.  In the meantime these states often see primary elections today with upward of eight candidates in the Democratic or Republican primary, which does not seem to this court to be confusing or frustrating.  The hypocrisy is rather transparent.

The author suggests that instead of the "perfectly useless task of collecting signatures” more constructive means of measurement could be implemented like asking candidates to document how much time they have spent campaigning; asking candidates to mobilize personal and volunteer hours for community service or getting them to register 500 people to vote.  Great Britain has never required more than 10 signatures for Members of Commons.

Solution: The "signature gathering obsession" should be addressed by federal courts in order to assess whether this "colossal.. waste of time" and harassment should be allowed.
 
In 1997 Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court shamelessly stated "the Constitution permits the Minnesota legislature to decide that political stability is best served through a healthy two-party system."  Most of the states are involved in enabling the two-party system to keep a firm grip on the political system.  This is precisely when the Supreme Court is needed to uphold the Constitution and a democratic system but instead it has formed "part of the assault on democracy."  The two-party system has been making election devoid of the substantive debate necessary for political consciousness and change.

The Commission on Presidential Debates

Our presidential debates are staged by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD,) which is a private corporation set up in 1987 by lobbyists Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. and Paul Kirk Jr. on an explicitly "bipartisan" (two-party) basis.  Fahrenkopf and Kirk are former Republican and Democratic party chairmen and were, as of the publication of this book, activists in their party networks.  The CPD collects millions from "mega-businesses" like Sprint and Dow Chemical.  The author jokes that bipartisan means corporations can "buy" one party and get the other for free.  These are not real debates since the two sides agree on a host of issues, which would otherwise need to be debated.  In comparison to debates in almost every other democratic nation our author calls these debates "the most constricted and vacuous political discourses on earth."

A discourse between a journalist and Clinton’s campaign manager during the 1996 election made no secret of the fact.  In the transcript the campaign manager said that keeping third-party candidate Perot out of the debate was a “deal” made between the two major party candidates and Clinton’s manager admits that Clinton’s team were not honest in communications with the media about the fact that they wanted Perot excluded from the debate.  When asked why by the journalist the manager said, “because we wanted Perot’s people to vote for us [laughter.]”  Raskin was Perot’s lawyer at the time.  Federal Election Commission general counsel Laurence Noble gave an honest report saying, “there was “reason to believe” that millions of dollars in corporate contributions to the CPD were illegal contributions to the Democratic and Republican campaigns.”  The FEC overrode his analysis and Noble was soon removed from his post, which means that to top it all off the regulator was (and potentially still is) in on this unconscionable scheme!


Although the CPD was saved by the FEC in this case their legitimacy was teetering so in January of 2000 they announced a virtually insurmountable standard requiring a presidential candidate to have the support of 15% of the national electorate.  Never mind that most citizens polled by the Wall Street Journal believed third-party candidates should not have to meet this standard.  Never mind that polls are notoriously inaccurate and third-party candidates are especially disadvantaged by them and never mind that the debates are precisely how a candidate has historically gained in the polls.

In a 1992 case made by a candidate running for a house seat in Arkansas called Ralph P. Forbes the Supreme Court said a candidate's "viability" is a justified reason to preclude an independent candidate from participating in televised debates in a majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy.  This set a precedent which now operates as a pretext to exclude third-party candidates and independents from televised debates.  The author gives a number of specific cases where the Republican or Democratic nominee is less viable than a third party nominee using the same measure but where the major party nominee is nevertheless automatically included. Allowing the government to decide who debates usurps the role of the people since debates decide elections.  The First Amendment and equal protection (the Fourteenth Amendment) specifies the government has no rightful power to selectively favor chosen candidates with free television time.  Furthermore the author shows that the measures they use to judge viability are highly unreliable.  As I said before polling vastly understates first time and independent voters.  As an example we can take Russ Feingold who ran for Senate in Wisconsin in 1992 and in 3 weeks went from scoring 10 percent in a major poll to winning 69 percent of the final vote!

In the same opinion Kennedy said debates may be "faced with the prospect of cacophony."  To demonstrate the contradictions seen in rulings issued by the Supreme Court here is a quote from a 1971 Supreme Court decision on the democratic necessity to include multiple voices: "[the fact that] the air at times seems filled with verbal cacophony is, in this sense not a sign of weakness but of strength."

Solution: The author states that debates should include every presidential candidate that is on the ballot in enough states to make a win possible.

Education for democracy

The Warren Court (a period between 1953 and 1969 when Justice Earl Warren served as Chief Justice) said the process of education is the most important public function of our local governments. A 1973 decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, set a very dangerous precedent by stating "states have no obligation to spend equal amounts of money per capita for students across County.. lines."

Solution: The author suggests a constitutional amendment stating that young people have a right to equal and integrated education."

Libertarianism and “laissez-faire” politics

The author dismantles libertarian tenets as hypocrisy.  Libertarians seek a "laissez-faire [minimal and deregulated] state" that only protects property rights and business contracts.  Thus it is free from restrictions relating to human rights but not free regarding property rights and business contracts.  The euphemistic title “libertarian” refers to a philosophy of selective freedoms that happen to be convenient for corporations, landlords and employers.  Lochner is a famous 1905 Supreme Court ruling, which threw out New York State’s enactment of a maximum 60 hour workweek and was a victory for the employer.  This was since reversed but libertarians seek to revive it as constitutional law.  Laissez-faire politics lives on and manifests itself in outcomes of disastrous and gargantuan proportions such as the collapses of Enron, Worldcom [and the banking crisis of 2008.]  Enron and Arthur Anderson (Enron's auditor) executives gave hard money contributions to 51 out of 56 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and 49 out of 70 members of the House Financial Services Committee to guarantee "deregulation."  Also, top executives at Enron used corporate assets as soft money contributions to both parties with a complete disregard toward shareholder interests.

Solution:  There should be a total ban on corporate soft money and other political contributions to national and state political parties, because democratically chartered corporations should not use shareholders’ money, invested for economic reasons, for political ends.

Legitimizing free speech of corporations

In 1978 the Supreme Court in First National Bank of Boston V. Bellotti threw out a Massachusetts’ law, which until that point, had made it a crime for corporations to make political contributions.  Justice Powell’s supporting argument was so preposterous it entirely contradicted itself.  He said the corporation’s speech might lose protection if it became too effective and he immediately went on to say that notwithstanding, if it were effective its effectiveness would be no reason to suppress it!  At this point there is good reason to question his intellect.  He went on to grant the corporation speech protection on the basis that all speech should be protected, which is simply false.  All speech is not protected.  To cite one example precedents have determined that speech on property that is privately owned and is not in public use is not protected.  No one needs a law degree to see this judge appeared to be struggling to grasp at something akin to a feasible argument, perhaps to serve other needs.  As I have mentioned in my previous articles a corporation is nothing more than an income-producing piece of property.  It is abundantly clear that the original framers of the Constitution did not feel the impulse to write the First Amendment to protect the rights of non-sentient pieces of property that exist for the purpose of turning an economic profit.

Solution: an addition to the voting amendment stating the corporation is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution.

Labor representation

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act (a.k.a. Wagner) guaranteed employees the right to engage in union activity without reprisal.  Since then labor movements have organized 40 percent of people in the private sector at times but this number has since decreased to 15 percent.  Since Wagner the rules have developed in a direction that benefits owners and management.  In 1969 NLRB v. Gisselle Packing Co. made it legal for management to make predictions about a company’s future during a union campaign.  Making threats remained illegal but from a practical standpoint it has proved quite difficult to distinguish between making “predictions” and making “threats” in court. 

Solution: The author argues that “the law should call for strict neutrality of management in a union election.”

The "Wealth Primary" 

For all intents it is impossible to run a political campaign without spending vast sums on TV, radio, campaign literature, staff etc. so the candidates must be in proper favor with moneyed power and service the political agenda of organized wealth. 

Solution: There needs to be a "constitutional imperative" for democratically financed elections, a total public-financing option for candidates.  Nothing of the sort has been passed in federal courts so far but some states have passed public-financing options.  Massachusetts requires $5 to be raised from a set number of people to qualify for public-financing (6000 people for Governor and 200 for a Representative.)  Candidates are given modest sums but the laws provide for escalator matching.  When they are publicly funded the author calls them "clean" elections.  They have been successful.  In Maine there was a 40 percent jump in contested primaries after the adoption of clean elections.  In Arizona there was a 60 percent increase in the number of candidates and a 62 percent increase in contested races after their adoption.  Because states and house districts are so large, publicly funding elections should be aided by taking back control of the public airwaves.

Solution: Raskin suggests that broadcast licenses should not be handed out with out reserving "free time for the programming of political democracy."  This would meaningfully reduce the cost of candidacy. The airwaves are a public trust and selling their use to corporations only to have to buy them back at a much steeper cost is illogical.  If Congress and the FCC cannot be made to do this there is nothing stopping the states from enforcing this for house and senate races.

The original Constitution was "deeply compromised by white supremacy and fear of popular democracy" and should not be considered sacred.

The Author explains that it is important to make changes to the Constitution and quotes President Thomas Jefferson who "detested the "sanctimonious reverence" with which some men looked at the Constitution, and said we should "avail ourselves of our reason and experience to correct the crude essays of our first and inexperienced councils."

The Supreme Court’s right wing

In the Supreme Court there exist two opposed interpretations of the Constitution.  The conservatives read the Constitution to mean state governments have any powers that are not explicitly denied to them whilst liberals view it as a "freedom charter" granting the individual any rights not explicitly denied.  An excellent case in point is taken from conservative Justice Scalia's opinion regarding abortion.  He states that a woman's right to abort her unborn child is not protected by the Constitution because it is not explicitly mentioned within it and because it has been illegal in the past. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that conserving our old ways would mean we would not have abolished slavery and we would still be denying civil, gay and women's rights.  It thus becomes quite a challenge to reconcile the conservative statism of the Supreme Court’s right wing with today's political and social system.

Conclusion

If there is a common thread running through the books I have covered, which are written by scholars on both sides, it is that they are often calling for the public-financing of elections.  By some estimates the amount required would be a meager 1/400^th of the overall budget.  If this nation could fix that problem alone there would undoubtedly be a substantial impact on the workings in Congress.  Campaign financing is the oil that lubricates the machinery, which operates on every decision made by every state, Governor, Congressperson, Senator and by the President of the United States.  Politicians are money hungry because their next election calls for it.  

The people of America are tired of the establishment. So much so they are willing to consider a candidate as imperfect as Trump, with his bigotry and his lack of understanding of key issues, just because he is anti-establishment.  The people are right (I don’t mean about Trump.)  The fact that nine non-elected, lifetime tenure persons comprising the Supreme Court justices can overrule acts passed by an elected Congress without adequate basis or meaningful accountability is madness.  The United Kingdom gets along perfectly well without having a court that can overrule Parliament.  The people of the UK can vote their leaders out, making the leaders directly accountable to the people.  That those same Supreme Court justices can decide a presidential election and that such a ruling should oppose the majority vote is madness.  That the United States political system has had non-constitutional rules imposed on it by the courts which have led to a tightly controlled two-party system and closed debates such that issues are not honestly addressed - is madness.  That elected officials can be so shamelessly bought that situations like Enron and the credit crisis of 2008 result, devastating millions of lives in America and around the world, is also madness.  To many political actors there is every incentive to maintain the status quo and that means the only likely way that things will change is through collective action.  That means you and me, getting up and doing something.  All my love!

I am Cecilia Mackie, MPhys and I worked on Wall Street for 10 years where I rose to an executive level.  The owners of a firm I worked at are now in jail.  Because of this experience I have avidly researched corruption based issues over the last few years.  Outside of this plog, I am building a tech platform which will allow people to participate in a community for political change.  The platform will have a mechanism to allow our community to enact change within the world of American politics.  

Please go to www.mackiemusic.com to access my social media pages and learn more about my polymathematical world of wonder!