Posted on 12/13/2014 11:05:04 AM PST by SleeperCatcher
The 17th amendment has created a “winner take all” mentality in the nation’s capital, and the resulting bitterness that grips partisan Washington today is one direct result of its passage. “Interest groups understand that to impose one’s will on 300,000,000 Americans, one must influence one president, the selection of 5 supreme court justices, 51 (or 60) senators, and 218 representatives, a total of 275 individuals who live primarily in physical isolation, far away from those they govern,” says the Campaign to Restore Federalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at absoluterights.com ...
Forgot to ping you to #39 (I think).
My idea for “redistricting reform” is to have you, Auh2orepublican, draw all congressional and state legislative lines, subject to the approval of a 3 person panel consisting of myself, Fieldmarshaldj, and Galactic Overlord in chief.
As if that doesn't happen since the repeal of the 17th.
Not a very convincing argument.
The practical effect of the 17th Amendment was to relocate the locus of corruption from the state legislatures to K Street.
The Woodrow Wilson years were an unmitigated disaster.
The federal government should definitely not be involved in drawing districts
So, you want to repeal the First Amendment as well as the Seventeenth, eh? That's downright psychotic.
Nebraska has nonparisan state leg elections, all it does it make it easier for democrats to win by hiding their leftist affiliation.
Neither should state politicians, IMO. They should be drawn by a computer with the criteria being to make them as compact and equal in population as possible. Then legislatures actually WOULD represent the state as a whole, rather than the interests of one particular segment of the state.
Heh. Under such reform, the controversies would be over things like whether TN should have a 7R-2D or an 8R-1D congressional map. : )
Gosh, you mean the DemonRats weren't "the conservative party back then"? A bunch of useful idiots on our side have "informed" me that "prior to the 1960s", the Democrats were "honorable and patriotic", and that they were the right-wing party in America, where the GOP were "the liberals back then", until both parties magically decided to "switch sides" around 1965 or so.
So you're saying the Wilson administration doesn't fit into this fantasy. Hmmm.
Only if Au2orepublican and/or Galactic Overlord in chief knows something about programing computers.
Or that chess computer, "Deep Blue", could do it. Since blue is the true and rightful color of the GOP I'm sure it would checkmate democrat chances for victory.
Seriously though, as long as we have this edge in state governments, traditional partisan redistricting is our best bet nationally. We could maybe try your computer thing here in IL though. Fairness is an illusion, socialist scum must be defeated using any means necessary.
Speaking of which, Nevada needs to re-re-district, forthwith.
It is sily to believe that districts “drawn by a computer” would be “fairer” or “more representative,” or whatever the rallying cry is now. Geographic proximity does not guarantee better representation, and randomness does not guarantee fairness. Besides, there always will be a lot of arbitrariness in redistricting even if a computer draws the maps; one has to start drawing the first district at some geographic point, and whichever one is chosen will yield very different maps than any of the infinite alternatives.
The Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that provides that U.S. Representatives are elected pursuant to rules set by the state legislatures. Unlike with the election of U.S. Senators by state legislatures, where self-dealing, cronyism and literal vote-buying yielded such a U.S. Senate so alien to the people it was supposed to be representing that 2/3 of each house and the state legislatures in 3/4 of the states saw fit to adopt a constitutional amendment to establish direct election of U.S. Senators (and thank God for that, or we wouldn’t have Senators Cruz, Lee, Ron Johnson, Toomey, Ernst, etc.), there is no good reason to amend the U.S. Constitution and take the power to draw congressional districts away from the state legislatures.
Computers are a tool for human beings to use to make decisions, but yo think that computers can make decisions for us is, frankly, a step backwards in our development as a free people.
HAL: “Dave ?”
Tommy Chong: “Dave’s not here, man.”
Would you say that today's federal corruption is of a centralized unitary kind, where the old corruption was unique to the peculiarities of each state? Or were all the states just variations of a theme where corruption was concerned?
Would it be easier to deal with state by state corruption instead of the federal corruption where they all banded together to protect each other?
-PJ
Before repealing anything, the easiest path to federalism under the Constitution is for states to RE-ASSERT the 10th Amendment.
This takes nothing but will and leadership at the state level, perhaps coordinated between conservative governors.
Pick an issue, pick a dozen - there are thousands to choose from - where the federal government departs from specifically enumerated powers in the Constitution, and refuse to recognize federal authority over those issues. Then move on to the next dozen.....
Make THEM pass an amendment to allow the government to have these powers, if they wish for it to have certain powers in compliance with the 10th Amendment.
Patriots need to get state lawmakers up to speed on how the corrupt feds have been for decades stealing state revenues in the form of constitutionally indefensible federal taxes.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
You are speaking my language. Most folks earning a living, are doing it within the borders of a state where the business climate, and the state infrastructure are in support of those jobs, employers and employees alike. Meaning, the state has an interest in the money earned, which unfortunately goes direct to Washington DC without stopping at the state level to have extracted what the state needs for it’s support.
That would essentially cut off the unlimited money supply that Washington uses to blackmail the states into compliance with whatever scam is the scam of the day, be it Medicare, medicaid, Social Security, the ever increasing extension of the debt limit, the states need to control the purse strings.
one of the reasons the 17th amendment passed in the first instance is that there were a number of scandals in which people essentially bought Senate seats by bribing legislators. Second, there is a risk (also present before the 17th amendment passed initially) that state elections would become little more than proxies for the Senate election.
I believe the corruption argument was a progressive idea that too many states bought into without sufficient evidence or research into the long term consequences. The best example I can put forward would be like the US reacting to the so called war on women, by killing off the Republican’s instead of the party that started the war. Look at how fast the seventeenth went from idea to ratification, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
The second issue I do not see as a problem as long as the Senator’s are doing their job of representing the State instead of glorified Representatives of the people. The House of Representatives does that job just fine. Prior to the ratification of the seventeenth, the states could do what they wanted with it’s senators ie not send one or two, or recall them for failure on the job, or whatever.
It also needs to be recognized that the original move for the seventeenth failed to change the elected term to correspond to the Constitution. Representatives of the people serve a two year term not a six year term. Representatives of the State, serve a six year term, and that in my opinion makes the entire seventeenth unconstitutional.
Bingo!!!!!!!!
...and Bingo again!!!!!!!!
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