Replies

Godspeed to all state forces who look to take back what was theirs and what is rightfully theirs. This is, I hope, the second Civil War. The phase that undoes the great damages the unclosed wounds of the reconstruction period caused. While I am a stalwart Unionist of the Civil War, I know from my earliest years that the South did have some major just cause in regards to states' rights. We all need re-discover and re-institute the proper structure of Federalism, and the proper structure of our "democracy" in America.

For we were never a true pure Democracy, and our Founders established governments that stayed clear of pure democracy.

What is our true natural form, G-d help us get back to it -- it is: A Republic, meaning one law binds all, and no special classes under the law.

A Representative Republic, meaning that delegated agency is vested in representative agents, who serve for fixed times.

A Chartered Representative Republic, meaning that those representative agents are bound by oath, law and custom to perform only the duties permitted and authorized to them in a written charter, and established rules within the bounds of that charter, where those rules are a matter of formally agreed upon regulation and established common law.

A Chartered Representative Hierarchical Republic, meaning that we have multiple levels of representatives. The Founders had it right, their model has been almost ruined by removing the keystone of hierarchy, for only that keystone prevents despotic dictatorial tyranny.

The first level of the hierarchy in the Founder's model was the household. Not the individual, but the household! That is, only those who owned land, were freemen, and over 21 could cast a vote. That means each vote representative household, not one person. They made a mistake by not allowing women to vote for a whole household, but that was their only mistake. Who could vote was determined by each state, the inference of "household" is based on the my recollection of how typical colonies/states of the founding era allowed the franchise.

The second level of the hierarchy was 30,000 citizens (excluding the disenfranchised, Indians, and counting full-slaves as 3/5th), normally and by custom aligned with county or established municipal boundaries. Each of these districts elected a representative to the US House. These representatives were far closer to the group on whose behalf they were agents than today.

The average size of a congressional district based on the Census 2000 apportionment population will be 646,952 , more than triple the average district size of 193,167 based on the 1900 census apportionment.

The average size of a household in the Founder's US is possible to determine because in those days the censuses were not so politicized nor were so many inhabitants desiring to remain unknown to authority. I saw a source for NY State that placed the household size at between 4.5 and 7.1 persons over the hundred years prior of independence. (http://books.google.com/books?id=oHnNKCxbOD0C&pg=PA120) Of course the US household size today is much smaller, the US census reports 2.6 in 2000.

In the US at the founding each Representative represented about 5200 households, 30,000 citizens. Today with the fixed 435 districts each represents over 600,000 citizens or over 23,000 households each.

That's simply too many households for a representative to be acting as the agent of -- and the ideal of agency is diluted over too many, and the representation is corrupted.

What is the fix? There are some to be considered but any should keep to the founder's ideal or representing a true cohesive entity and not some mob too big to ascribe anything but the coarsest or most faddish of common motives and desires.

Look to the founders' ideal of the Senate. Each Senator represents a cohesive and established entity -- a State!