Whether people know it or not, the United States Constitution is not being threatened by foreign entities (at least not directly at the present time) and not by home-grown vigilante, terrorist, or militant group.
The Constitution is being threatened by apathy.
Few people have read it. Fewer still possess a rudimentary understanding of it. This is the biggest threat to the Constitution. It is the biggest threat to the republic it established.
"OUR DEMOCRACY"
The term "Our democracy" is all everyone seems to reference and care about when it comes to the mess we are currently coping with related to the last presidential election and Russia's meddling in it. To say, "Our democracy is being threatened" is dangerously inaccurate. What is being threatened is not democracy. What is being threatened is our republic via the democratic process we in the the U.S. have been using to elect our leaders.
"AND TO THE REPUBLIC..."
"Our" democratic process is being used to destroy the Republic - to undermine the very Constitution that defines democracy's use. Like so many ideologies that have been subjected to a type of fundamentalist redefinition, democracy is being treated concretely as an entity on par with the Constitution and the Republic. Democracy is not the Constitution nor is it the Republic. It is a tool of the Constitution and the Republic - a tool that can be used to undermine both if we are not careful. As Winston Church said, ""No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise." Yet we talk about it as if it is.
The best defense against democracy becoming a tool by which to threaten our Republic is the Constitution itself. Democracy, as noted in my past posts lends itself to demolition and devolution into oligarchy and tyranny by the masses if not defined, filtered, and structured which is what the Constitution is set up to do.
THE MASH AND SLUDGE OF PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
As mentioned in my last post, the weakest filter of the mash and sludge of the democratic process defined in the Constitution is the election of the President and Vice President. To review what I have written about it click here.
I am under no delusion that anything I will say here will be readily accepted, much less cause people to take to the streets and demand its implementation - a thought that simply horrifies me. What I hope to do here is offer an idea or provoke other ideas as to how the Constitution, itself, can remedy the extreme polarization that infected our politics and has allowed presidential elections to run amuck in recent years.
It is time to return the Constitution and mine it for the seeds of wisdom that our forefathers planted in it. When it came to defining the process of electing the President and the Vice President, it established the role of elector, but left those roles undefined. Over the years, these electors have been identified as the Electoral College, but that is not a term found in the Constitution nor does such an entity exist. In fact, the elector's role does not involve anything coming close to collegiality and working together to select those most suitable to hold these executive offices.
Being that a state's electors match the number of the senators and representative sent to Washington D.C., and given that most states have taken a mandatory winner-takes-all approach to awarding electoral votes being cast advantage or disadvantage certain segments of each state's voting population. The result is that a 51% to 49% popular vote in a state will award all the electoral votes to the nominee with 51%. In such a scenario, nearly half the voters' vote in that state are discounted.
Was their choice wrong? Was the majority's vote right?
This is why electoral votes mindlessly ends up electing a president that has in fact lost the overall nation's popular vote which grates against the "common sense" of most voters. Is that what the framers of the Constitution had in mind?
Perhaps, but I'm not an originalist when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. What interests me is the structure it presents in shaping government. I don't believe the framers had all the answers and I don't believe they could foresee the outcomes of what they started to construct and I don't think they were naive to believe that democracy by itself would lead to perfect and all-wise decisions.
What they possessed was a faith in Providence; that acting with integrity gave good reason to hope that the foundations they laid would take shape through trial and error to form a perfect union. They knew that what they conceived was not perfect, but rather a process aimed at perfecting what they started.
As such, it seems that the possibility of electing a rogue president; a president who answers to no one, says what he wants and does what he wants with impunity has been waiting to happen for a long time and now the time has come when it is happening as I write. The last election ended with such results and has left many asking, "How did we elect such a president? Who do we blame?" I have asked the same questions over and over again which prompted me to take a closer look at the Constitution and there I found an answer. By no means is this a clear and obvious answer, but it makes sense to me, at least.
First, I would like to suggest that blaming someone is a waste of time. Blaming people, engaging in conspiracy theories, and demonizing ideologies one doesn't agree with only serves to keep us in the "swamp" of misinformation, falsehoods, sleight of hand, and the political drama that the current administration has enlarged and likes wallowing in. Addressing the problems that the current administration poses to our republic lies squarely within the realm of Congress' constitutional duties. The question is whether there is a enough collective will by its members to address the issues that are arising with integrity.
PART OF THE PROBLEM
The problem is that the constitutional system has been weakened and democracy is part of the reason why. The system has become too unbalanced, the legislative pendulum has been swinging too far left and too far right for too long. Congressional leaders appear stuck in preserving their seats in congress and have succumbed to obstructionism, listening to the money interests (needed for reelection) instead of defining and refining the ideas that come to them through the constitutional pipeline and being vigilant in the defense of the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Congress as a whole has resorted to playing partisan parlor games; threatening to shut down the government, and threatening to fight everything they don't like to enhance their image and manipulate the political power grid, the will of the people.
How is this done?
Through information. Democracy runs on information. This is why the Bill of Rights, protects freedom of thought (religion) and a free press. If the will of the people is to be filtered through a constitutional distillery, the people must do their own distillation of the information they receive. The press must do it's job, report with integrity so that people can distill and process accurate information. It's not perfect. The press and news media are themselves awash in a sea information and misinformation. True democracy is always a case of distillation and discernment.
ELECTING ROGUES
Dealing with an administration gone rogue makes it clear that how we choose our President and Vice President must change.
Why? One only has to backtrack to see how the current administration came into power to understand the need to do so. Russian meddling exposed a weakness in the Constitution's process of electing the President and Vice President. It was able to manipulate the information targeting key populations whose state's were pivotal in garnering enough electoral votes to put the current administration in office. They did this by spreading misinformation to a vast number of voters via the internet creating enough bad mash to distill a misinformed result.
Many are probably tempted to say that if we went to a strictly popular vote the likelihood of a foreign or domestic entity to do the same would be lessened. The fact is, if it can be done on the scale it was done theoretically proves it could be done on a national scale, just as easily. What is even more at risk is the computerized voting system that can be hacked into. The popular vote is at even greater risk of being hacked and manipulated by a hostile entity.
There are some simple solutions that will seem antiquated to most. The saying, "Haste makes waste," has proven never truer than in a presidential election. While we in the U.S. have the longest election season in the world, we hurry up to tally all the votes making the election results among the speediest in the world. Major televised news networks are prone to give their predictions as to the outcome before the full count is tallied. It's as if we can't wait to move the news cycle post election. We can do this because everything is computerized - voting and counting ballots in most states. This computerized approach is vulnerable to being hacked, which could throw an election into chaos.
WHAT IF?
What if we, in the U.S. resorted to going off the internet grid and slow things up when it comes to elections; retreating to the paper ballot that is hand counted?
That still leaves the misinformation problem, which could result in trying to filter what is said on the internet, which raises First Amendment concerns. Part of the misinformation problem being linked to the internet is in part a result of having such a long election season.
What if we would reverse the democratic process by constitutionally shortening the election season to three months, for example?
In this scenario the popular vote would occur in all the state's on the same date, the second Tuesday in June; meaning no political ads, no candidate debates, no door to door campaigning before March 1st. The political parties would then have to hold their conventions before June 30th and submit their nominees to a constitutionally defined and real entity which we call the Electoral College.
Such an approach would require clarifying the role of electors as vetting agents to determine which political nominees are best qualified to take these positions. This would be a Herculean effort involving constitutional rewrites for all fifty states and amending the U.S.Constitution - no small task. The impetus for such an undertaking would require a collective congressional sense of urgency and a groundswell of voter approval to push such a move. It would define and refine the presidency and would result in immediate campaign reform.
Would it result in less partisanship, misinformation, and meddling?
Yes, but it would not eliminate it.
It would narrow the process, distill it towards the essential message each party wanted to give. Most essential is that after the people chose their candidates there would be the gruelling confirmation process and the actual choice of who would be the best persons to serve the nation. Would the electors be immune from partisanship and meddling?
No, but they would be less likely to fall for meddling and certainly open to liability if caught being unethical, and if they could not agree or come to a split decision, the Constitution actually has a process in place addressing such a scenario.
Popularity and populism would be curtailed.
Electors would and should be keen observers of how potential candidates run their campaigns. Are they truthful? Did they conduct themselves honorably? How did they respond to the people? Were their party's platform realistic with regard to what their nominee could actually accomplish under the Constitution if chosen? Most important, would the nominee be the President of all the people, not just the party that nominated her or him.
If the President demonstrated extreme partisanship during the first term, the President would not likely see the next; in that they would not only face a troubled public, but would face an Electoral College that could remove a current President from consideration of another term.
It would also temper how Congress would interact with the executive branch. Obstructionism for the sake of obstructionism would likely have less political appeal on a president who, after being selected President by the College is more likely to be seen as above the fray of ordinary congressional politics.
Of course, a President could be removed as a party's nominee during the next election cycle,which would almost make a President a one term president unless the President was popular enough to win a second term as an independent which would serve as a check on party politics
The tone of presidential elections would undoubtedly change dramatically and so would much about being a President change. Obviously, in this short post one cannot think, much less address all the possibilities and contingencies such a change in the distillation process would bring about. It may seem impossible that such changes could happen, but if not mentioned it would be impossible. My purpose in writing a post is not to say what is popular, but to say what is on my mind. Otherwise, there would be no reason for me to take the time to write.
Until next time, stay faithful.
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