Let’s Fix Our Republic!
Let’s Fix Our Republic!
Tim O’Connor – Center for the Preservation of Humanity – 10/14/2022
CNN has a series of opinion pieces titled “America’s Future Starts Now.” This is news to me because I don’t watch CNN and generally avoid their articles. This one caught my eye, however - Opinion: A majority of Americans think US democracy is broken. Here are 12 ideas for repairing it. CNN found 12 ‘experts’ to tell us how democracy can be fixed. CNN claims that democracy needs to be fixed, in part, because of a Quinnipiac poll which claims that 67% of Americans think the United States’ democracy is in danger of collapsing. So let’s meet our ‘experts.’
First up is Bill Bishop, a social psychologist. “What can we do? Mandatory national service. For a year or two, we would join others – a tossed salad of class, race, religion, party and way of life – to work on a problem facing the country. Not talk – do.” No thanks. He bases this on a 1954 study that conflict is reduced when two opposing forces share a common, overriding, goal. 9/11 did the trick. A complete economic meltdown or cleaning up after multiple nuclear detonations occurred across the United States would work too. As long as ‘democracy’ is preserved.
Fayima Ross Groves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, wants to fix democracy by rebuilding trust in institutions. “From overturning access to reproductive rights to upholding state laws that suppress the right to vote, federal courts – in particular, the Supreme Court – keep making decisions that most Americans simply do not support.” Racism isn’t a problem for Groves as she suggests that federal judges should be selected based upon not being white nor male. Groves also notes her interest in identity nominations by supporting Brown’s sickening inclusion on the Supreme Court, “This fall, we’re calling on the Senate to confirm all of Biden’s nominees – not just for the sake of the courts, but for the urgent and long overdue sake of restoring the public’s trust.”
Joe Plenzler, a US Marine who forgot his oath to the Constitution and a board member of Vet the Vote wants to recruit veterans to be poll workers. “The military – including its veterans – is one of the most trusted institutions in our society, and it is our hope that when Americans see their veterans conspicuously serving in their polling stations, it will increase their faith in their electoral system and its outcomes. Additionally, veterans are trained to deescalate moments of tension and may be best suited to address any potential threats at the polls.” I can only ponder what percentage of the veterans Vet the Vote also forgot their oath to the Constitution? Plenzler’s plans sound like a really good way to federalize polling stations to boot. I don’t have a problem with veterans, I have a problem with people that will not follow the Constitution.
According to Kathrine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of Reason:
“To retain whatever faith Americans have in our system of governance, we must arrest and reverse the dangerous tendency to turn everything into fodder for national political point-scoring. That means we must deregulate and devolve power to allow individuals to make their own choices about their love lives, their children’s education, the substances they put in their bodies, how they run their businesses – and many other topics about which Americans have widely varying and deeply held opinions.
“As politics seeps into every single part of life, the stakes of our elections become untenably high. We must unstuff the pinata by reducing the size and scope of the government.”
I agree with most of this. I especially agree that the government needs to get out of all of our lives. What I don’t agree with is the happy-go-lucky, ‘everyone will make the moral decision’ stance Mangu-Ward takes on everything because she is a libertarian. To put all libertarians into a real bind I’d like them to consider the possibilities of allowing 12 year-olds to choose to remove their breasts and testicles and have the final say about whether they choose to continue intimate relationships with 40 year-old MAPS. Should it be viewed as child abuse (yes) or as an individual decision to be made by 12 year-olds (not in a billion years)? I’d be interested to see a libertarian answer these questions. CNN included Mangu-Ward because of the language she used in order to convince a larger audience that democracy can be saved by letting 12 year-olds decide their gender or abortion should be legalized everywhere and it is an individual woman’s choice to decide whether to murder their child.
Larry Diamond, associated with the Hoover Institution, Mosbacher, Freeman Spogili Institute, and Stanford University, wants to end party primaries. He favors ranked choice voting which is also favored by the transhumanist party of the United States. For presidential elections, an amendment to the Constitution would be required. The only thing this does is invites massive amounts of fraud into an already highly fraudulent election system (in some areas).
Debra Cleaver, founder and CEO of Vote America, wants to basically get rid of voter rolls altogether. Specifically, she wants to make voter registration available online and get rid of voter registration deadlines altogether. She advocates this at the federal level. “These simple and practical solutions must be made available to all eligible voters nationwide – both to increase voter participation and to rebuild their trust in our democracy.”
Ken Burns, documentary film producer for PBS, calls for silencing opposition as well as changing people through storytelling. “To paraphrase historian Deborah Lipstadt who appears in my latest project, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the time to save a democracy is before it is lost – and that requires people paying attention, filtering sources of news and beginning a politics of compromise built on conversation and storytelling now.” When the compromises which must be made are giving up our rights to self protection, our right to not have medical interventions against our will, and the barbaric practice of child murder in the womb and infanticide and euthanasia outside of the womb, there is no compromise. The same goes for a huge range of other topics.
Liza Donnelly is a The New Yorker cartoonist. Instead of answering questions which were posed as words and answering in the same manner, Donnelly responded with a two-panel cartoon. In the top there are two opposing group of women with different opinions. In the second panel all of the signs are on the ground and the women are talking to one another. Now, in the Goldilocks world Donnelly lives in, I seriously doubt she has ever attempted to speak to a regular person just trying to make ends meet about the topic of, say, pedophilia being legalized and taught in schools. She should try it. She could make a comic book for the mentally insane by noting the responses she will get from normal everyday people.
Mark Schmitt, Political Reform Program at New America, wants to get Andrew Yang, or someone even worse, elected. He wants to do this by allowing candidates to be endorsed by other parties. While he pretends that this would not create a parliamentary system, it absolutely would. “With more than two political parties, some might represent factions of existing parties, such as non-MAGA Republicans or political moderates, while others might try to put particular issues on the agenda, such as universal basic income or marijuana legalization. They would bargain and form coalitions where they agreed – and differ where they didn’t – creating some of the dynamics of a parliamentary democracy.” He also forgot, apparently, that there are already multiple parties in the US, including the Transhumanist, Social Democrat, Constitutionalist, Green, and Communist for example. Schmitt might as well say ‘let’s make America Britain again.’
Cecile Scoon, president of League of Women Voters in Florida, wants ballot initiatives to be able to be included on ballots. These ballot initiatives would alter the state constitutions in the states where they exist. “Through this process, Floridians have proposed whether to expand enfranchisement by restoring voting rights to persons who complete felony sentences, protect natural resources and ensure fairness in our political districts. These amendments, which all passed, have helped improve the lives of everyday Floridians and protect core facets of our democracy.” All of these initiatives have serious flaws in them as well. She doesn’t mention that because this is the special interest industry’s fantasy. Whatever special interests want to do they can try and get passed over and over and over again. Ballot initiatives, which Scoon calls citizen’s initiatives, do not even represent democracy – instead they represent special interest groups created to get amendments passed by the people which would never get passed by legislators.
Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has decided Constitutional restraints are no longer relevant and hinder democracy.
“It would be an understatement to say that Congress does not do this [productively disagree] today. And it is hard to see any way we could improve the health of our democracy without helping Congress function better. That could mean creating incentives for people more inclined toward legislative bargaining to run for Congress – for instance by experimenting with electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting. And it could mean reforming the work of the institution to make traditional legislative negotiation more appealing to the ambitious men and women who run for Congress – for instance by re-empowering the committees.
“More specifically, committees in both chambers could be given some direct control of floor time, as happens in some state legislatures, so that the work the committees do wouldn’t feel like a dead end. Or Congress could eliminate the boundary between authorizing bills (which create programs) and appropriating bills (which spend money) so that all members, and not just the few who are appropriators, could be involved in meaningful legislating with real-world consequences.”
Finally, Michaela Terenzani, editor in chief of The Slovak Spectator, thinks that we should model the changes we want to see. That’s pretty weird when the ‘wrong’ side models the changes we would like to see we are spit at, punched, assaulted with weapons, slandered in the media, and sometimes murdered. Terenzani is very concerned with the democracy of Slovakia and the loss of guidance in democratic governance the US provided until, apparently, George Floyd died of a drug overdose. She apparently sees creating a nationalized police force as the correct step to fixing democracy. “President Joe Biden has taken positive first steps by signing an executive order advancing accountability in the police force and criminal justice system. Congress should follow with a more comprehensive bill that includes specific training, instruction and incentives for law enforcement facing this issue.” She wasn’t alive for the Checka, the NKVD, but she was most likely for the KGB; she must really be approving of the FBI’s interpretation and deployment of KGB tactics – you know to make America more democratic.
I don’t know where CNN found these experts at. I somewhat agree with the libertarian ideas of getting government out of our business. But even the libertarian missed the main points. The biggest point that the whole article does not mention one single time is that the United States is still NOT a democracy, it never was, and it was never intended to be. It’s a constitutional republic. There are several democratic institutions, such as the House of Representatives and some of the legislators in several states. But even that democracy often comes with a quora or threshold of votes greater than a simple majority needed for a measure to pass the body.
And the second point that these people missed was the text of the Constitution. Appropriations must originate in the House of Representatives. Experts say nope, ditch it. Ranked choice voting should be the way we conduct elections – never mind what the Constitution says. Let’s mandate everyone to do some asinine thing for the country. Let’s not, I’m against mandatory service in the US military (I feel very differently about state militias), so I’m extraordinarily hostile towards ideas like forcing 18 year-olds into a climate corps for two years.
What should be done to save democracy and rebuild trust in our institutions? First and foremost the government needs to stop spying on us, period. Second, we need to stop trying to save democracy at all – as mentioned, the US never has been, never was intended to be, nor should ever end up being a democracy. We need to all admit this, even these so-called experts, as a first step. Say it with me experts, the United States is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic. So, let’s save the republic.
To do that, we need to make the United States a republic again. Several very important and very big changes must happen. Repeal Amendments 16 and 17 immediately. Rip the Federal Reserve’s charter up. Hold constitutional elections for the first time since before 1800. No more federal income tax – the States will have to collect the taxes and remit their due portions of those taxes to the federal government instead. No more direct election of Senators – the State legislators are supposed to send them and would be able to recall them at any time. Senators would have to be very careful about the money they spend at that point because the State is responsible for paying for it – not the labor of US citizens. Getting rid of the FED would also reinforce the idea that we should not be directly taxed by the federal government. Lastly, and this may be the hardest one to swallow, We the People were never supposed to vote for the US President. It’s right there in the Constitution, Article 2, Section 1. After that then maybe we can get the apportionment clause right. California, the most populous state, should have 1,318 members in the House of Representatives, and the least populated, Wyoming, should have 20. That is right there in the Constitution as well, in Article 1, Section 2.
I am very disheartened that the ideas which I presented have about no chance of actually being done. Meanwhile these democracy promoters are getting their way and destroying our country while they destroy what this nation is supposed to be about. It really makes me sick that this is the situation the citizens of the ‘freest nation on earth’ have allowed ourselves to be placed in.
Bless God and God Bless.