Posted on 10/07/2018 7:29:48 PM PDT by vannrox
“No taxation without representation!”
That was a popular phrase during the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War. Colonists thought it was unfair to be taxed and subjected to English rule without consent.
Today Washington DC hands down laws and taxes to every one of the 320 million people living in the United States.
And just like under English rule, we are not represented in the federal government.
Now I know what you’re thinking… we have the right to vote for our leaders.
Our votes send Representatives, Senators, and the President to Washington DC. And they represent our interests in government.
US Representatives are elected by the people, split up into districts.
They go to Washington DC and make up the House of Representatives; one half of Congress.
Congress is the entire legislative branch. They write and pass all the laws in the USA.
When America was brand new, each Representative came from a district of about 40,000 people.
But as the US population grew, the number of Reps in Congress was limited to just 435. That meant the number of citizens each member represented grew as well…
Today, Representatives are elected by districts averaging about 713,000 people.
That means our votes for US Representative are about 6% as potent as they were when America was founded.
(I’m going by total population and not by voting population to keep it simple. But the same lesson applies if you do the math based on voting population.)
Our representation in the House of Representatives has been diluted by a factor of 17.
The US Senate makes up the other half of Congress.
Senators are elected by the entire population of each state, with a simple majority-wins vote.
But it wasn’t supposed to be like that.
Until 1913, Senators were elected by each state legislature.
Every state has its own Congress, mirroring the US system. You vote for state Representatives and state Senators and they run the state government.
It was the folks running your state government that once elected US Senators to send to Washington DC. This gave state governments representation in Washington DC.
So the citizens controlled the US House of Representatives by directly voting for who would represent them from their district.
And state governments controlled the US Senate by the state legislatures voting for who would represent the state in the federal government.
Of course, the people still elected the state Senators and state Reps who then elected US Senators.
But in 1913, the 17th Amendment allowed popular vote in each state to elect US Senators. So it became a state-wide race, just like Governor.
Sounds like this gives the people more voice in the federal government… but it actually gave us way WAY less of a say.
Let’s use Louisiana as an example…
By population size, Lousiana is the median state. Half of the states have a larger population, and half the states have a smaller population. Lousiana is smack dab in the middle.
Louisiana has a total of 105 state Representatives. Each state Rep is elected by a district of about 45,000 people.
39 state Senators are elected by districts of about 120,000 people each.
The entire population of Louisiana is about 4.7 million.
So in a statewide race for US Senator, your vote is just one out of 4,700,000.
Your vote is 105 times more powerful in a state Representative race (1/45,000 vs. 1/4,700,000).
It counts 105x more than your vote for US Senator.
Your vote is 39 times as potent in a state Senate race (1/120,000 vs. 1/4,700,000).
It matters 39x more than your vote for US Senator.
But imagine if the state Reps still chose the US Senator…
He or she has 1 vote out of 105 total Reps.
And your state Senator’s vote accounts for 1 out of 39 total Senators.
Remember, your vote for state Rep and state Senate actually matter… in these small districts you have 105x and 39x more power than in a state-wide race.
So compared to the US Senate race, your vote has a MUCH higher probability of influencing 2 seats out of the 144 member legislature (39 Senators + 105 Reps).
If both your choices get elected, you have chosen 1.4% of the state legislators who will choose your US Senator.
But your vote for US Senate in the state-wide race gives you just .00002% say in who gets elected US Senator.
If both your choices for state Rep and state Senate get elected, you have 70,000 times more control over who gets elected US Senator.
But what if neither of your choices for state Rep and Senate gets elected?
It means you have 0% say in who gets elected US Senator…
Which is statistically equal to your .00002% say you have right now.
So the worst possible scenario in the old system is statistically the same as the only scenario in the current system.
You have a 100% chance of having no voice in the current system.
But when state legislators elected US Senators, you had a much better shot at having some voice in the decision. And when you got that voice, it counted for so much more.
1913 was a bad year…
You could say it was the beginning of a new United States of America… which hardly resembled the old structure.
It was the beginning of taxation without representation… The complete reversal of everything Americans fought for and achieved during the American Revolution.
It began the era of the American Empire. A centralized government, large enough to do whatever it wanted without restraint.
Too large for the people to control through representative democracy.
We still have a chance to be represented in state governments. But secession is a topic for another day…
The Federal Reserve isn't Federal, and it has no reserve. It's an arm of the global banking cartel, and if Trump has his way I suspect it's about to be nationalized, disempowered and eventually dissolved.
I think it is designed to demoralize Conservatives as they fire up while the dems are actually demoralized....
If you are referencing Mitch McConnell, to this observer he’s been doing a G*d damn FANTASTIC JOB on judges and deserves an office building named after him or something.
It is, isn't it? ;p
17th Amendment mouthbreathing again?
Why bother replying to it? It’s like arguing with the same 75 IQ lifeform that the Earth isn’t flat. It’s pointless.
And Happy COLUMBUS Day!
It’s not (((Indigenous Peoples’ Day))) or any other PC-speak garbage.
I think they are over thinking this.
Application of the Tenth Amendment and a Convention of the States is what we need.
He can really move those deck chairs.
You could make an excellent case for Woodrow Wilson being the worst President in American history, James Buchanan and Barack Obama notwithstanding.
Voters have little interest in choosing judges. A small minority of voters could easily elect radical judges and completely shred the Constitution.
Thanks - It will be great when more people see that those early deviations from the original intent of the Constitution are what set us up to become an oligarchy instead of a Constitutional Republic.
I would side with the repeal of the 17th Amendment simply on the grounds that it was created by the Founders to check the power f the Federal government. We desperately need that check. Some background on how well it worked in the past would be helpful.
I'd love that case to be made to the conservatives who keep yapping about how "today's Democrats" have "changed" and that the Democrats "used to be honorable and patriotic" prior to the late 1960s. "This ain't your father's Democratic Party" "I remember the Democrats had pro-America leaders like JFK and Scoop Jackson" Blah blah blah.
If that's the case, why was Wilson so horrible? Shouldn't have he been one of those honorable, patriotic, pro-America first Democrats? If the RAT party was "the conservative party back then" and "the two parties switched sides in the 60s and 70s", should all those "conservative" Democrats thrown him out of their "patriotic" party if he dared promote globalism and marxism?
Wilson was by far the most racist President we ever had.
I agree with you that Wilson was scum. Also, the RAT party overall was HEAVILY socialist and globalist in 1913. But historical facts like that get in the way of their delusional narrative.
Either Wilson and his fellow RATs were socialists and the RAT party has been pushing this stuff for well over a century and HASN'T "changed" OR The RAT Party was overall honorable and patriotic and conservative before JFK was killed, which means that 50 years earlier in 1913 they certainly would have been a bunch of great patriotic leaders and "more conservative than today's Republicans"
You guys can't have it both ways.
I may have disagreed with him on things, but the only Rat I had some respect for is Harry Truman.
As I’ve pointed out many times, the Democrat Party was hijacked by the Socialists in 1896 when they deposed Grover Cleveland’s sensible Bourbons. They still had some center-right people in it, but once the left got hold, it was set in stone for the future. After Cleveland in 1892, only on two occasions after that did the Democrats nominate two non-leftists for President: Judge Alton B. Parker in 1904 who was a moderate, and former Ambassador to the Court of St. James & ex-Solicitor General John W. Davis in 1924 (who, despite serving under Wilson was a center-right figure and declined an offer from President Harding to serve on the Supreme Court - not for any noble reasons, he actually couldn’t afford the pay cut. He was making several hundreds of thousands in the private sector and $15k was too little for him to consider).
The left was so enraged in 1924 that they didn’t get to nominate their man (either NY Gov. Al Smith or Wilson’s son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo) that they went with Socialist WI Sen. (and ultimate RINO) Robert La Follette, Sr., which handily delivered the WH to Coolidge.
So, from 1928 to date, every Dem Presidential candidate has been of the left without fail.
It’s truly a shame we couldn’t have had two parties in the country representing the right-of-center: a Bourbon Democrat Party and the GOP with the Socialist-Communist left abolished or consigned to the dustbin of history. Imagine spirited, patriotic battles as to which could implement a Constitutional Conservative agenda more aggressively. How much further along and better off would this country be today with two such choices competing for our votes ?
He did one good thing with dropping the big ones on Japan, but his failure to tackle the epic-level Soviet and Soviet sympathizer infestation of the federal government (for starters) and not allowing MacArthur to take out Mao in favor of Chiang kicked off all the problems that would plague us in foreign policy to this day. Disastrous incompetence.
Also, if you really cared about issues it was much easier to try to influence people’s votes more locally around you than vast amounts of people’s vote spread out much further away from you.
“He can really move those deck chairs.”
_________________
If by “moving those deck chairs” you mean blocking Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing during the close to one year that he was a SCOTUS nominee, blocking dozens of other Obama nominees to Circuit and District Courts, keeping the Senate in session to prevent Obama from making recess appointments to SCOTUS and lower courts, and shepherding the confirmation of record numbers of judicial nominees during President Trump’s first two years in office, including two SCOTUS nominees, then I wish that every Senate Majority Leader “moved those deck chairs” like Mitch McConnell has done over the past four years. He has been the most effective and consequential Republican Senate Majority Leader since the position was created in the 1920s.
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