On June 13, on electionlawblog.org, Ned Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State, posted a paper forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal titled “Self-Districting: The Ultimate Antidote to Gerrymandering.” In the article, he reminds us that districts do not have to be geography-based. A district can be a subset of a state’s entire population and can be formed by like-minded individuals who can voluntarily organize and form a political district that is not necessarily geographically continuous. A person’s neighbors may be in his political district or be in a different district in a self-districting plan. While this would not affect certain elections (e.g., the single US House race in Wyoming), in elections with many seats to be decided (e.g., US House elections in California or the houses of all state legislatures), individuals in currently unelectable political minorities (e.g., Libertarians and Greens) could band together to elected representatives in single district elections and win seats in legislatures. The self-districting aspect of this plan would do away with state legislatures’ power to draw political district boundaries.
Here is Mr. Foley’s current paper on this topic:
ABOUT 400,000 VOTERS PER USA REP DISTRICT IN PREZ ELECTIONS.
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P-A-T
Ohio should never have abandoned its system of temporally weighted apportionment for the Legislature. Districts rarely changed, but their apportionment would be calculated to the nearest 1/5. A district entitled to 2.4 legislators would be entitled to two members for three two-year sessions within a decade, and three members for two terms, for an average of 2.4.
They might also consider the Thomas Jones proposal for election to the Wayne County Board of Supervisors back in the 60s or 70s.
Was he saying that Richard Nixon was just like Hitler?
I’ve been wanting something this ever since I read The Probability Broach decades ago.
Let’s be real, it’s a fantasy.
An excellent idea!
Realistically not gonna happen
Interesting idea, but it seems like self-selecting districts would deepen political entrenchment. While not perfect (the mentioned gerrymandering) geography-based districts do at least force some homogenization. Perhaps a better idea would be randomly assigned nongeographical districts. That would fix both gerrymandering and incentivize centrist candidates.
Each house part / apt part a part of a new age legis dist ???
Very good luck.
—
Sec. AA. All election laws shall be general and exist by [210] days before the election day.
Sec. BB. (1) The Electors shall elect for [2] year terms at partisan elections:
(A) [101] state senators in the state legislature in [odd] years and
(B) an odd number of members (at least 5) in each local legislative body in [even] years.
(2) As nearly as possible, each legislative election district shall have 2 (rural) to 5 (urban) times the number of Electors in the legislative body area at the last regular election [for governor] divided by the total members in the body, be 1 or more local governments or a part of 1 local government and be contiguous and square.
(3) Each legislative body candidate shall receive a list of all other candidates in all districts grouped by party names by [63] days before the election day.
(4) Each candidate shall rank such all other candidates (using 1 (highest), 2, etc.) and file such list by [5 P.M. 56] days before the election day.
(5) The lists shall be made public the next day.
(6) If a valid list is not filed, then the candidate’s name shall not be on the ballots.
Sec. CC. (1) Each Elector may vote for 1 candidate for each legislative body.
(2) The Ratio shall be the Total Votes for all candidates in all districts divided by the Total Members, dropping any fraction.
Ratio = TV/TM
(3) A candidate who gets the Ratio shall be elected.
(4) The largest surplus more than the Ratio shall be moved to 1 or more candidates in any district who do not have the Ratio and who are highest on the candidate’s rank order list.
(5) Only the votes needed to get the Ratio shall be moved to any 1 candidate.
(6) Repeat steps (4) and (5) until all surplus votes are moved.
(7) If all members are not elected, then the candidate with the least votes shall lose.
(8) Such losing votes shall be moved to 1 or more remaining unelected candidates in any district who are highest on the candidate’s rank order list and subject to (5).
(9) The moving order shall be original votes and then the earliest surplus or other loser votes.
(10) Repeat steps (7-9) until all members are elected.
(11) Example 100 Votes, Elect 5
Ratio = 100/5 = 20
Surplus Moved
C1 25-20 = 5 Surplus
C2 19+1 = 20
C3 14+4 = 18
Final
C1 20 = 20 Elected
C2 20 = 20 Elected
C3 18+2 = 20 Elected
C4 17+3 = 20 Elected
C5 15+5 = 20 Elected
Sum 90+10 = 100
Losers 10 are moved to elected persons.
(12) Each member shall have 1 vote in the legislative body and a YES majority of all members shall be required to enact legislation.
(13) Each legislative body may meet any time in person, by written proxy or electronically and shall appoint its officers provided by law.
Sec. DD. (1) All legislative body candidates and members shall file 1 or more rank order lists of persons to fill any temporary or permanent vacancy of the candidate or member during an election time or term respectively.
(2) The qualified person who is highest on the list shall fill the vacancy.
(3) If (1-2) does not happen, then the other candidates of his/her party (if any), the other members of his/her party (if any) or the legislative body shall fill such vacancy with a qualified person of the same party immediately at its next meeting, as the case may be.
above is a part of P-A-T–
later Condorcet – PR and APPV and RCV done right
Modify a bit for a one house USA Congress – perhaps 101 Senators for 2 year terms.
So long as the duopoly can allocate voters between themselves to their mutual entrenchment in power, all U.S. legislative elections will remain rigged to keep voters enslaved.
Define a fascist police state.
Has anyone considered not having districts at all, and government units small enough for all the voters to be well acquainted personally with each other and each other’s families? Especially if only those men who are qualified to serve in office are also qualified to vote?
I realize that’s not the optimal government unit size for national defense, but if the national defense government unit did nothing else, why should anyone not currently serving in the military vote on anything related to the military? The only difference would be the selection of commander in chief, and it would make more sense for generals and admirals to pick him from among them, would it not?
If all the Reps from a state were elected by at-large, proportional ranked choice voting, then the voters would be creating virtual districts with their own votes.
Are states really small enough as units of government that’s not alienated from the governed?
“Are states really small enough as units of government that’s not alienated from the governed?”
IMO, larger states should be divided into smaller states. At a minimum, states that have more than 5% of the total population should be divided. Currently, there are 4 such states: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. I would divide CA and TX into 4 states each, and Fl and NY into 3 states each.
Also, i would consider dividing some other larger states that have a sharp metro-rural divide: Two such states are Pennsylvania and Illinois: I would cut off Metro Philadelphia, and Metro Chicago, and form two new states.
You’re still thinking way too big. If the counties of Texas were of equal population, you might approach a manageable size, if my rough guess as to the number of voters under my voter criteria is anything on the order of magnitude like correct. I see a voting head of family representing about 1000 people roughly, including his serfs and servants and their families as well as elderly relatives, perhaps adopted children, and so on.
Then perhaps a hundred such units making up a government with election by heads of families. That’s close enough to human scale to make sense and have individual accountability outside of formal government by strangers. Once you get above that it’s strangers, bureaucrats, legal priesthoods, law enforcement by strangers who are separate sets of strangers from lawmakers, judges, lawyers, etc, warehousing criminals, bleeding taxpayers you don’t even see face to face, and everything wrong with government today.
“You’re still thinking way too big”
I’m thinking in terms of what would be realistic under the current Constitution. IMO, states with greater than 5% of the total population should be split up. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t want any state to be smaller than 1,000 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island. Not that RI has any special right to retain its status as the smallest state; just simply anything smaller than that seems unrealistic to me, which I why I wouldn’t consider statehood for DC, unless it was combined with counties from MD and/or VA.
Anyway, government of the size that you’re considering can exist on the county or municipal level within states.
Why does it need to exist at any higher levels than that, other than national defense? I realize your constitution is important to Americans, but it has been largely abandoned in practice. It’s not impossible to replace constitutions, but maybe what you really need is complete separation of states for non defense purposes, and then dissolution of states in favor of county and borough governance, with that governance being greatly simplified and matters outside of crimes of malfeasance and punishment thereof taken out of the hands of government at any level.
It would also be highly beneficial if voters, lawmakers, judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers, corrections officers, military personnel, bureaucrats, etc, were not such separated classes, with many having little or no personal experience with the practical challenges faced by the others. If laws were simple and common sense and changed rarely, and if voters had military and law enforcement background and continued neighborhood watch/militia/civil defense/law enforcement auxiliary/reserves service and training, and if it was part of normal education for young future voters, I think you would start to approach a much more rational system of government and politics. If I am wrong, why am I wrong?
“Why does it need to exist at any higher levels than that, other than national defense? I realize your constitution is important to Americans, but it has been largely abandoned in practice. It’s not impossible to replace constitutions,”
For America, the current Constitution is virtually irreplaceable. Not that it’s sacred: it’s just that no one is seriously thinking outside of it. So any reform, even of the most radical sort, must take place within the context of the current Constitution.
I can’t cite the USSR as much of a positive example of anything, but perhaps in this respect it can provide a useful guidemap of sorts. We had a union, and a constitution which was largely ignored, except as to some formalities. The union was dissolved, for the most part without much bloodshed, which was fairly unusual for change of government on that scale in our bloody history. The constitution ceased to apply to anything.
Americans could start with that approach to your federal government, and after that to the state government. I’m not sure we are as well positioned, but perhaps we’d benefit from a similar scaling down. For example, the Donbass conflict would still likely be happening, but without the threat to turn into another world war, if Russia, Ukraine, USA, EU/NATO and its constituent nations were otherwise devolved to local governments at least as small as the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, or better yet even smaller.
For its part, I think Moscow Region would be far better off without the glut of polyglot, multiethnic, polyreligious, multicultural population replacement, economic immigrants from every corner of Russia, multinational corporations, and immoral oligarchs with no ties to Russian blood and soil or Russian Orthodox faith. Communism was obviously an economic and social disaster, but a much more locally focused form of free market capitalism seems preferable, along with much more locally focused government. People would have far greater say in local matters with people and families they grew up with all their lives, share cultural and religious ties and history with, laws that are widely known and understood, punishment for breaking laws being swift, sure, and severe, etc.
Once government, business, and other leadership gets too complex and to remote, people stop mattering and start becoming meaninglessness cogs. They become far easier to divide, conquer, pigeonhole, bleed, control, bamboozle, alienate, disempower, and stifle. Accountability becomes ever less certain or easy to determine, much less enforce. Leaders can point fingers and even if a culprit and solution were easy to identify people would lack enough say to do much about it. By alienating people from neighbors, extended families, religious, cultural, language, ethnic, business, community, and other local ties, they are rendered increasingly dependent on overly large institutions which they have little or no practical say in, and where leaders of all sorts suffer from a lack of familiarity with their far flung organizations and problems with getting accurate information for decision making.
Somehow, this process needs to be reversed. Devolvement to more locally focused government and less complicated laws, and taking more things out of the hands of government, seem like good places to start. If not, why not? What would be better?
REMINDER- MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDER SYSTEMS IN. —–
USA REGIME – H. REPS, SENATE, EC
ALL 99 HOUSES IN 50 STATE LEGIS
MANY LOCAL GOVTS – ESP LARGER COUNTIES / CITIES
1/2 OR LESS VOTES X 1/2 G AREAS = 1/4 OR LESS CONTROL = OLIGARCHIES – FEDS/STATES/LOCALS
MUCH. MUCH, MUCH WORSE EXTREMIST MINORITY RULE MATH IN CAUCUSES, PRIMARIES AND CONVENTIONS
BRAIN DEAD MEDIA – FIXATION ON TOP MONSTERS AND THEIR CONTROL FREAK MACHINATIONS
—- ESP LAWLESS PREZ TYRANT STUFF – UNDECLARED WARS / EXEC LEGIS ORDERS / EXEC FOREIGN *AGREEMENTS*.
USA CONST IS FATAL – NO ELECTION OF INDEPENDENT USA MARSHALLS / DAS / JUDGES — ALL JUST APPOINTED PREZ/SENATE HACKS.
—-
P-A-T
Human scale is important. Complexity of laws, lack of accountability, lack of stability and local control create greater opportunities for problems to spin out of control. Counterpoint, anyone?
And by anyone, I don’t mean anyone who has trouble locating the caps lock, or in distinguishing between an elected American President who served a term in office and never started any wars or invaded any countries, and then turned over power to an opponent with merely some entirely legal protest against a very crooked election process on the one hand, and a dictator with an 8 digit body count, dozens of nations invaded, and his own country left a divided and conquered wreck in his wake on the other.
Obviously, people that oblivious to the most rudimentary level of discernment imaginable are not who I’m asking anything whatsoever, except perhaps if they might be so kind as to find their spaceship and depart for their home world, the sooner the better.
The Constitution of the USSR was just a tool of the Communist Party to justify its power. When it collapsed, no one missed it except authoritarians like Putin.
The Constitution of the US has always had a profound power in the political and cultural life of Americans. There is just no comparison with just about any other constitution that has ever existed.
@Max,
Haven’t modern means of transportation, communication, and commerce destroyed the possibility of government at the scale you envision?
p.s. wasn’t serfdom in Russia abolished in 1861? How would you go about re-establishing it in 2023?
@AZ,
Do you have the cite for your Wayne County litigation?
It seems like a dead letter to me. At least, if you read the original design and arguments, and compare with the present reality.
I don’t think Putin misses the USSR in the way you think. He doesn’t miss official atheism or widespread poverty and lack of many types of higher quality goods, for example. He misses us being a superpower. If you consider the history of Russia being invaded by various Mongol, Napoleonic, Hitlerian and other invaders, can you blame him? The cultural and economic colonialism after the Soviet Union fell was something we all felt, and you probably never have. We don’t see atlanticist liberal democracy solving problems we face with crime, gangs, population replacement, Islamic fascism and terrorism, western economic, social, and perhaps future military conquest, and other persistent problems. Furthermore, we don’t see the west solving its own problems that way, or saving Christian and European civilization. In many ways, it’s once again up to us.
Every marauding group of huns, Goths, vandals etc which invaded Europe crossed Russia first. Many terminated here, or would have perhaps overrun Europe. We were vassals of Viking raiders and Mongol mohametans. We stopped Napoleon and Hitler; the western fronts were an afterthought. We have been attacked from all directions as far back as history extends, and further.
We have a tradition of strong leadership, and also of weak leaders who brought the country to ruin and foreign control. For most of his time in office, I opposed President Putin. I’ve changed my mind. I think he is preventing much worse from taking his place, whether that be giving in to foreign control, terrorism, invasion, population replacement, crime, drugs, rampant immorality and social distortion, or perhaps extreme nationalist totalitarian views far more stringent than his, overly incautious in their appetite for rapid territory expansion and domestic control.
It might surprise you that much of the domestic criticism of Putin is that he is far too liberal, and that not all of it is necessarily without merit. I made such arguments myself in the past, but now tend to think he strikes a good balance between two extremes.
Given all these challenges, and the burden of balancing atop a potentially very explosive powderkeg with multiple complex tripwires continually requiring defusement, I think I can understand Putin longing for the relative stability and predictable social controls of the late Soviet period. But I don’t believe he’s a communist. We have many such cretins, and he doesn’t resemble them to me in his speeches or personal history of working with entrepreneurial groups. I also don’t think he’s very authoritarian, either. He may seem that way to you, but if he really was, I think it would be easy for him to move much faster in such a direction, and he would find a lot of support in doing so. Instead, he steers a rather cautious middle path between potential disasters which could easily trigger a vicious cycle of overreaction to each other.
My reading of the American political scene is that much of the unwisely enfranchised and replacement populations, and others taught to hate their own kind through widespread opinion manipulation, hold your constitution, anything emanating from the slave owning patriarchal American founders, and indeed any lingering legacy of European and Christian civilization, in utter and complete contempt. Many don’t hesitate to say so, but even more go along tacitly. Meanwhile, the supposedly conservative opposition fights an almost exclusively rear guard battle, with the only real question being the pace of “progressive” march to slaughterhouses, gulags, death camps, killing fields, soylent green environmental b.s., camp of the saints, and other Luciferian dystopia ,
Even the traditionalist, nationalist conservative opposition largely ignores the greater context of the social, cultural, religious, local control, and human scale context of the constitution in its origins, or the debates over what was being attempted to be accomplished compared with subsequent results. If they took a serious look at all that, it seems to me they would see it hasn’t restrained government as intended, has been continuously amended and reinterpreted for the worse, and now attempts to govern a population and territory far too large for the task, with massive reliance on various levels of government overreach that are deeply dug in and not at all obvious as to how to untangle and extricate without killing the host.
Changing all this from a scale of hundreds of millions of people spanning thousands of miles in any direction is foolhardy. If they wish to ever be really effective, American traditionalists should reexamine their veneration for formal allegiance to a constitution that has long ceased effectively restraining much of anything, and which their leftist opposition has no similar regard for, other than as the occasional tool for enforcing their will by reference to its misinterpreted history of jurisprudence.
Effective change to a massively overgrown and overcomplex government and system of laws is unlikely to work from the top down. If it’s going to work, it needs to be a movement for local control as much as a movement for smaller government and for greater reverence for tradition, property, family, God, and defense against criminals and foreign invasion.
Why do constituencies for legislative bodies have to be equal population?
Isn’t William Brennan’s legacy as an enabler of decades of gerrymandering litigation?
Foley’s paper is an interesting thought experiment if it is meant to facilitate discussion and brain-storming. But it has at least three problems as an actual proposal. First, no federal judge in the country would decide that the word “district” in the 1967 federal statute mandating SMDs means anything other than geographically contiguous and non-overlapping plots of land. (In fact, it’s hard for me to understand why Foley — a law professor who specializes in election law — doesn’t even mention the legal question of what the word “district” means in the statute.) Second, at least some of the voters who get randomly assigned to a “non-partisan” district are going to sue, arguing that the assignment cannot constitutionally be left to chance. The courts could spend decades on that one. Finally, the scheme has the potential to be an administrative nightmare for election officials, at least in states with in-person voting. In states where everyone gets a ballot in the mail, ballots can be printed and mailed in such a way that each voter gets the right ballot for her combination of state-level pseudo-districts and local offices. Expensive, but possible. Trying to accomplish this at precinct polling places would be … well, let’s just say it would be a challenge.
Open party list is a lot easier to explain, easier to implement and easier to administer. And — at least arguably — it gets a more proportional result. As long as we’re daydreaming, why not daydream about changing the federal statute instead of concocting such an awkward end-run around it?
Jim Riley,
No, I don’t think they have. Modern communication, for example, makes it easier for many people to work from home or near home for a wider variety of tasks. Soon, 3D printing, AI, and robotics will evolve to the point of obviating much of the need or perceived need for long distance commerce, population movement, or even trade. Modern communication makes it easy to have local news, information, entertainment etc content creation. It also makes it easy (and rather necessary) to create many local, organizational, employer, parental and other such content filters.
The existence of modern transportation methods is great, but it doesn’t have to mean they have to be constantly used to the extent that they have been.
In general, many of the downsides of technology evolving – there are of course upsides as well – can be addressed by a combination of small, local government; laws that are simple to remember and understand and difficult to change; financial incentives to buy, sell, manufacture, grow, source parts and components, educate, employ, house, etc locally; relative lack of legal support for operating at larger scales; greater reliance on nongovernmental means as laid out above; attendant social and nongovernmental costs to moving or even trading across greater geographical and cultural spans; more intact social, cultural, and traditional cohesion. These things tend to go together.
I’ll grant that 19th and 20th century technology made greater globalization both more tempting and more easily feasible. I think emerging 21st century technology will make it equally feasible and tempting to relocalize.
The history of Russian serfdom is a bit more complex than a simple date of abolition. It evolved from something more like sharecropping to something more like slavery, with serfs sold far distances and across international lines to far flung parts of the world. It’s abolition was poorly carried out and paved the way for communist revolution. By serfdom, I mean something more akin to sharecropping or medieval protection of serfs and villeins by noble lords and knight’s.
My study of world history and human nature is that it tends to be a very normal and natural form of social and economic organization. Debt, laziness, petty criminality, low intelligence, illiteracy or semiliteracy, longing for security more than freedom, lack of serious ambition, and to a large extent genetic factors and upbringing alike naturally combine to soon bring large quantities of people, primarily descended from other such people, to fall into a mutually beneficial relationship of this sort with landlords and employers.
Contrary to enlightenment delusion, most people who are best suited to be serfs are not fundamentally dissatisfied with the arrangement, not made happier or better off because it’s abolished, and not prone to replace it with something better. Liberals go way too far in the idea that everyone shares their goals or is suited to carry them out, or that humanity is fundamentally egalitarian, with only the chains of heredity, tradition, and faith to keep it from achieving greater potential. In reality, while there is some truth in such complaints against historically stifling oppression against any social mobility, in reality the so called enlightenment, progressive or liberal attitude and rapid social changes have caused much more harm, and much more dramatic harm, than good.
The balance between those rapid overreaches and the problems they attempted to address needs to be recalibrated, with some caution to proceed slowly enough to try to strike the right balance over the course of several generations.
Egalitarianism and progress are not entirely without merit. The idea that they are universally positive, or should always proceed in one direction, is wrong headed, very dangerous, and demonstrated to be wrong. The idea that massive changes should take place easily, rapidly, all at once, top down on massive scales, or based on intellect and theory alone without grounding in tradition and long term careful measurements of effects over several generations, has led us into far greater trouble in the last century or two or three than in many thousands of years of admittedly very blood soaked and repressive human history. Modernity all too often managed to only make things worse, and dramatically so. It’s not entirely without justification or upsides, but has clearly gone way too far and way too fast, and retrenchment to at least the primary social organization of the early 18th century European people’s, combined with emerging 21st century technology as lined out above, is both necessary and badly overdue.
Note to any resident idiots with difficulty distinguishing Trump from Hitler or themselves from the Almighty: nothing here is in any way meant to claim or imply that your so called dark ages were in any way perfect, or that anything I propose will lead to any utopia or end of all human problems. It’s likely that nothing would. I hope I’m directionally correct, and for intelligent conversation as to what extent I’m right, to what extent wrong, and why.
I have no top down solutions for every local area, no exact formula for every little thing, no serious hope that everything I propose could be implemented in my lifetime even if all of it is exactly right, and don’t think such attitudes are good as a matter of general principle. I think local traditions and cultural variety matter. I don’t necessarily have all the right answers, but would like to get as close as I can. I think people who are completely sure they are right about everything, especially if they want to rapidly transform everything in unprecedented ways at massive scale and double down if they get criticism or things go less well than they expect, are very dangerous, and I have no desire to join their ranks.
Sorry if that was too long to read. I hope you do so anyway. Admittedly, I don’t always conform to modern and American tendencies towards attention deficit disorder, although I’m well aware of them in my target audience. I would like to do better in this regard, but often fall short on that account.
Actually, it occurs to me that the most concise answer to Jim Riley’s direct question is removal of legal prohibition of sharecropping, company town, and feudal types of arrangement with people tied to land and employment is sufficient. People would find their natural place soon enough through criminality, debt, and believe it or not, voluntary choice vis a vis rationally assessed social, economic, and safety alternatives.
Max, where do you stand on reviving the crusades? Burning witches at the stake? Throwing Jews down the well? Do you miss the pogroms? Would you say rats and lack of hygiene or foreign travel and trade were more responsible for bubonic plague? Was it intentional Chinese or Islamic biowarfare? So many questions, so little time!
Crusades: yes, I think an Orthodox crusade to retake the Holy Land for Jesus and the Russian Orthodox Church should in due time take place. I don’t believe that time has yet come, as there are other priorities that come beforehand. A new flare up in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, along with our former Caucusus and Central Asian republics, might present the apt opportunity. Even more so, if Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc also get caught up in the Mohammetan chimping, and perhaps especially so if the Palestinians in Israel and occupied areas and the ultraorthodox and ultra nationalist settler Jews get caught up as well.
Burning witches: at this time, I consider it a victory when they’re not given the same level of government support as the Russian Orthodox Church, or fail to win an election for United States President, as in 2016.
Jews and Pogroms: it’s a complex history, and not as one sided as anyone would like to think. The program of local control I line out above and elsewhere would address the heart of the problem, in my opinion. Mass resettlement of millions of people with many generations of European residency of ancestors, and questionable descent from biblical Israelites thousands of years ago, in areas already inhabited by more recent arrivals, at the behest of foreign occupiers from a different continent, is bound to cause issues, shall we say. The roundup and planned or attempted extermination of millions of Jews, including assimilated Christians and those of partial Jewish descent, after invading most of Europe and parts of northern Africa, is also bound to cause more problems than it can solve, especially when one tries to replicate Napoleon’s fatal folly. In general, anything that large scale and top down is unlikely to have positive outcomes.
Perhaps no solution can ever be perfect. As on the other questions, local control, keeping government minimal, and other related ideas outlined above and elsewhere are more likely to lead to relatively positive outcomes than anything else I’ve been able to come up with. If anyone has a better suggestion, please explain your rationale. To be fair, I should add that now that Israel has been a nation for several generations, forced resettlement of millions of Israeli Jews back to Europe, to America, to Birobijan, Uganda, or anywhere else, especially if done by anyone other than the surrounding Arab nations and exiled Palestinians without substantial help from outside the region, would be equally like to cause more problems than it is to solve. So would any attempt by outsiders to dictate any resolution.
Perhaps the policies I outlined would encourage American Jews to move to Israel voluntarily in much greater numbers. If so, my best guess is that both Americans and Israel would be better off, and their disagreements with Palestinians and Arab neighbors will be resolved eventually, whether peacefully or not. If an orthodox crusade imposes peace between them, I’ll pray for our Christian soldiers and their safe return home to their families.
Rats and lack of hygiene certainly contributed to bubonic plague. So did travel and trade. Likewise, poor hygiene and excessive unnecessary mobility both contribute to the spread of modern contagious diseases. I’ve seen no case made that China, Islamists etc intentionally sent bubonic plague to Europe, or would know how to do so. Evidence of actual, planned, and attempted or contemplated biowarfare in the modern era is much more easy to come by.
An Article V convention could legally dissolve the United States and terminate the federal constitution. Most US states have state constitutions inspired or based on the U.S. constitution or similar principles. Maybe all of them, although I admittedly never researched them all. If decentralization ever went past that, local charters could copy the best parts.
Everyone from Trump and the CSA to leftist NY Times Op Ed writers has at various times fantasized about suspending, terminating, or replacing the Constitution. Most liberals prefer to merely neuter it by way of convoluted “living, breathing constitution” self serving claptrap. It’s basically dressed up excuses for rewriting it on the fly in effect without all the intentionally built in difficulty and delay of formal amendment. Why bother amending or even terminating a constitution when you can just appoint judges who can just discover penumbras written in magic invisible ink which just so happen to say what they wished it says, not what it actually says or what the people who write it say it says?
Article V calls, generally falling well short of termination, are fairly common across various segments of political opinions. Any number of states and regions have secession movements.
So, it’s not entirely true that the Constitution is irreplaceable or that very few Americans think outside of it (much less none at all). There are many actual and attempted ways to bypass it in any number of ways. When it comes to original intent or plain text, those attempts have in fact largely succeeded. Secession, dissolution of the union , or “national divorce” have been seriously discussed many times by different political factions, although only once seriously attempted.
Globalization and abuse of treaty powers, abuse of war powers, national emergencies, executive orders and decrees, and judicial activism are some of the many ways constitutional limits on government power are routinely evaded and bypassed. Dissolution of the union isn’t necessarily too far fetched, although it would probably take a major crisis or perhaps several to make it anything like imminent.
JR-
SCOTUS — ON RIGHT TRACK IN 1963 GA ONE PERSON-ONE VOTE CASE –
Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368 (1963).
BUT — THEN — CENSUS POPULATION – AREA CONLAW TRAIN / PLANE / CAR / TRUCK WRECK OPINIONS IN 1964 AND LATER GERRYMANDER CASES.
VOTERS VOTE — N-O-T CENSUS POPULATIONS [ESP. COUNTING ILLEGAL FOREIGN INVADERS] IN ARBITRARY AREAS.
—
THUS BOTH GERRYMANDER MATH 1964 AND UNEQUAL BALLOT ACCESS SINCE 1968 HAVE PRODUCED THE CIVIL WAR II TIME BOMB MESS IN 2023-2024.
P-A-T
1777 ART CONFED (REQUIRING ALL STATES TO AGREE TO AMDTS} WAS IGNORED IN 1787-1789.
AFTER THE ART VII 9 + 2 STATES SET UP CURRENT USA REGIME- TO START 4 MAR 1789
THE FINAL 2 (NC AND RI) APPROVED 1787 USA CONST.
OLDE 1775-1789 RECORDS TO USA SOS OFFICE.
That’s Looney tunes. Some things in the 1960s did cause major problems to this day, but they had nothing to do with ballot access voting systems:
Forced integration
Easy birth control and divorce
Terrible immigration law changes
1968 gun control law
States legalizing baby murder
Legalized sodomy
Normalization of narcotics
Massive expansion of welfare state
Women’s liberation
Ending school prayer
Coddling criminals
Tolerating race rioters and hustlers
Disregard for law and order
Etc
It’s not too late to fix those horrible errors. It’s not even too late to reexamine the so called enlightenment. The light at the end of that tunnel turned out to be an oncoming train. At the very least, recalibrate and find a balance between the best of the old and the new, and then put systems in place to keep future changes from being too rapid or too large scale.
ALSO ESP–
PLURALITY / EXTREMIST WINNERS IN PRIMARIES AND GENERAL ELECTIONS –
HAVE PRODUCED ALL/MOST OF THE STUFF COMPLAINED ABOUT BY RWP
—
JR-
USA CT APP IN ABOUT 1986 RULED IN A SEPARATE CASE THAT EARLIER WAYNE CO CASE WAS OBSOLETE/DEAD.
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NOW–
P-A-T
There’s no evidence to show a different election system would have produced substantially different results. They may have been even worse.
@AZ,
I am seeking the style of your case. I’ve read it before. It seems to be motivated by the same desire to have a non-governmental design of voting areas as the Foley proposal.
If someone has real world evidence that a different election system produces better results, please post your evidence. Not theory but facts. Are there enough examples to prove that’s why the results were better? How do we measure better? And go.