Under our particular republican form of government, sovereignty is supposed to be vested in the people, individually, and exercised by them, directly.
We currently live in an awkward tension in which ignorant and malicious government, with the support of majorities of the population, clamor to regulate the unregulateable, yet those not inclined to take heed simply decline to take heed and bury their heads in the normalcy bias that they have been indoctrinated with..
As envisioned by our Founders, government has so few delegated tasks that it is meant to be inconsequential who is elected, as the latitude they have to effect our lives is meant to be minimal.
Government has only a small number of well-defined tasks. Statute may read differently, but we, many if us, live our lives flouting those statutes because the state fears losing in court, and they won’t risk their confidence scam over one case here and one case there, but they quickly add up.
After all we are a “Representative Republic” are we not? Doesn’t the Constitution begin with the words “We the people of the United States”? We are a nation of law and the legislators who write the law and the administrators who run the country are elected.
Well, sort of. Yes, some of them are elected. They are called “Representatives,” and they allegedly represent the people of their geographic House districts, (and that’s in single-member districts on a plurality basis, a most notoriously non-apportioned basis.)
That’s it.
None of our other federal elected officials are elected by the people to represent the people. The Senate doesn’t represent the people; they represent their state’s government, and although they are now (ever since the 17th A in 1913) directly elected, that was never originally meant to be the case.
So the House is one of the two houses of Congress elected by the people to represent the people, sort of, by geographic district, and on the basis of plurality within the district’s.
Now look at the Executive Branch: both elected officials are elected by the states, who send electors chosen by any means they see fit. Some use winner-take-all state popular vote elections. Others use district popular vote apportionment.
Some states have entered into a compact that would defer their electors to the nationwide popular vote, which is unconstitutional, as the power to select electors is delegated to the states, individually, and is not delegable. The states could, of course, select any other manner of selecting electors, like gubernatorial appointment, state legislative appointment, or appointment by the US Congressmen whose number they represent.
All other Executive Branch officials are appointed.
The Judicial Branch is entirely appointed. Period.
So 1/2 of 1/3 (which is 1/6, if my 4th grade, non-common-core arithmetic is correct) of the federal government is “sort of popularly elected” to represent the people.
In reality, elections, (and therefore those elected), are controlled by the “leaders” of political parties. How so?
-States Send Delegates to the Electoral College that Represent Parties, Not People.
When envisioning the electoral college, the goal of the Founding Fathers was to send electors who were “free from any sinister bias” to select the next president. Today, however, electors are chosen because of their service, dedication, and loyalty to their political party. Most states have a ‘winner takes all’ electoral system, which presupposes that the electors cast their vote for president not “in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America,” but because they are bound by their party to vote in unison and loyalty to that party’s nominee.
–Campaign Finance Laws Give Political Parties Special Exemptions Even in Nonpartisan Races
Political parties, through the legislatures they control, have written campaign finance laws to give their parties special advantages that no one else gets.
So how hard is it for someone to funnel money through a political party to simply skirt the individual donation limits?
In local elections, this imbalance makes it nearly impossible for those without major political party affiliations to compete, even in supposedly nonpartisan elections.
–Parties Draw District Lines to Insulate Themselves from Competition
Gerrymandering is the act of selectively drawing district boundaries so that voters of the opposing party are crammed into a small number of districts, allowing the party in power to win virtually every other district with impunity. An effective gerrymander will trap one party in a small number of safe districts, after which the other party spreads its voters out over the rest of the state. A tell-tale sign of a gerrymander is a district with mind-boggling shaped boundaries.
Often, both parties work together to draw districts so that as many elections as possible are made “safe” for the political parties in power. This is why approximately 90% of elections today are ‘decided’ in the primary.
Statistically, gerrymandering helped ensure that around 94% of House elections in 2014 were noncompetitive, meaning that only 6% of general elections even mattered. This means, if you couldn’t vote in the major party’s primary, you never really had a voice in the election at all.
Arizona’s legislature, for example, filed a lawsuit against its citizen redistricting commission, arguing Arizona’s voters didn’t have the power to take away the drawing of districts from the legislators in power. A recent ruling by the Supreme Court has resulted in the negating of the independent commissions in Arizona and five other states. (A case of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?”)
–Taxpayers Fund Primary Elections that Benefit Private Parties
Believe it or not, when the closed primary system was originally enacted, it offered a publicly-administered alternative to the smoke-filled room selection process by party bosses.
Closed primaries serve a private purpose: to select candidates that represent the members of a political party. And, each year, fewer and fewer voters identify with either major political party. And each year, fewer and fewer voters participate in the primary elections as a result. And finally, although only party members are allowed to participate in closed primaries, taxpayers foot the bill for these elections.
–The Media presents Issues Not Based on Merit, But on the Two Major-Party Positions, usually slanting the coverage toward their preferred bias.
The media has divided our political discussions into a two-sided debate between the red team and the blue team unequally divided into separate echo chambers for each team.
-Political Parties Are Directly Involved in Administering Elections
Imagine if the umpire at a baseball game was actually on one of the two teams!
– Political Parties Appoint the Judiciary and Control Judicial Elections
Although there are various methods of appointing judges, they are all centered around the political parties’ power. Seven states have partisan judicial nominations. Many other states leave their judges to the mercy of political-party influence: partisan elections are used in twenty states for local trial court judges, nine states also elect judges for courts of appeal, and seven states elect judges for state supreme courts.
Even the most powerful judicial body in the United States, the Supreme Court, along with all other federal judges, are appointed by the President and approved by Congress. This has made the Supreme Court so motivated by partisan influence that the justices are routinely categorized as “liberal” or “conservative.”
For the presidential election, the two major parties control the debate process (and in turn the public discourse). This is because the Commission for Presidential Debates is controlled exclusively by Republicans and Democrats who have made it nearly impossible for third parties or independent candidates to participate.
Private political parties have managed to influence nearly every aspect of our public election process. As a result, both major parties have managed to insulate themselves from meaningful competition.
In his farewell address George Washington addressed the idea of political parties:
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
–Mark Twain
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(c) 2018