A
Loss of Faith
The most disturbing aspect of our
contemporary American constitutional system is the emergence of a significant
number of citizens who are profoundly alienated from politics and government and
feel powerless to affect public policy. Americans know their government does not
govern fairly and that elections are not conducted fairly. The consequent loss
of faith in government leads to diminished respect for the law, which leads to
disobedience of the law, threatening what holds a free society together ––
voluntary obedience to law. This growing magnitude of distrust places our entire
constitutional system at risk.
When political representatives and
appointed officials are faced with decisions of public interest, they first look
to how those decisions will impact their personal self-interest, and then the
special interests of supporters who help finance their campaigns for and
maintain them in office, and then their political party’s competitive advantage.
Human nature, without regard to right or wrong, dictates the primacy of one’s
personal interest. This focus on self-interest rather than on the public
interest is the root cause of government’s unfairness and the illicit conduct of
its elections.
Since the people cannot surmount the
primacy of personal interests, we are forced to look for solutions in the
inanimate structure of government, rather than from the human actors. The design
of our government’s structure is defined in the Constitution. Without demeaning
that great document and the progress it has permitted us to make, it is fair to
say that the original design of government was subject to the same forces of
human nature that cripples modern-day government’s ability to function fairly.
Efforts to get government officialdom to correct the structure of government are
exercises in futility.
The price of breaking the deadlock in
Philadelphia in 1787 that brought about agreement on a Constitution was the
acceptance of undemocratic concessions written into the Constitution to protect
and perpetuate the institution of slavery. Those concessions that purchased our
Constitution still govern us to this day and make reform impossible.
We will never know if such
concessions to ‘states rights’ as the following had to be made to secure a
Constitution.
1.
A slave was valued at three-fifths of a person in determining the number
of representatives a state could send to Congress up to the Civil War.
2.
The Electoral College continues to enshrine the gross inequality of a
citizen’s vote for president (in some cases by a factor as much as four times
that of another voter).
3.
The Senate, even with the improvement of direct elections that had taken
more than a hundred years to bring about, still perpetuates the unfairness of
representation, resulting in gross distortions to the equality of services to
citizens.
4.
The government’s ability to amend the Constitution in Article V continues
to guarantee that a minority of one-fourth of the state legislatures can veto
any amendment put up by a super majority in Congress or demanded by a majority
of public opinion, making significant reform all but impossible.
5.
Article I, Section 4 grants each state full control of the voting
franchise, which continues to institutionalize the venal corruption and
unfairness of elections.
The most destructive concession to
representative government, though not generally viewed as such, is the continued
control of the voting franchise by state and local governments. Throughout our
history, we have never enjoyed a fair voting process under the patchwork of
registration and voting procedures at the local levels of government.
The second most destructive of these
concessions is the undemocratic nature of the Constitution’s Article V amending
process, the historic effect of which has been to excessively empower the
executive and judiciary branches of government. These two branches, representing
two-thirds of our system of Checks and Balances, are the easiest branches to
control by minority elites.
The major constitutional advancement
over the last two hundred years has been the expansion of the voting franchise
to all eligible persons. Gaining the franchise has yet to bring fairness to the
voting process in election after election across the country. This undemocratic
practice is knowingly kept in place by Congress, even after the enactment of the
Help America Vote Act in response to the Florida’s electoral debacle in 2000,
which is only the tip of the iceberg of national electoral abuse. The majority
of the people do not vote because they think their votes do not matter –– that
their votes are insufficient to reform an unfair government.
We do not know if it was necessary to
make the undemocratic concessions in 1787; however, we do know with hindsight
that these constitutional concessions blocked any chance of making any number of
critical evolutionary changes to government. They blocked any chance at a
peaceful, evolutionary settlement of the slavery issue, thereby making the Civil
War inevitable. Will these undemocratic concessions in the Constitution that
continue to perpetuate the unfairness of government practices make the decline
and loss of our American constitutional system inevitable?
Loss of faith in government must be
taken seriously. Potentially, it can destroy the gains Americans have made in
self-government over the last two hundred years. Up to now, geography
dismembered human society into autonomous local, regional and national
communities. Science and technology have now loosened the bonds of those
autonomous communities. Modern, complex demands outpace a government designed
for a simpler time –– 18th century society.
Since undemocratic features in the
Constitution forestall reform, the people must look outside government to
fashion new structures. Our failure to develop institutions to fairly mediate
the people’s influence on public policy condemns our society to an accelerating
decline, where technologically empowered organizations will be better able to
impose their special interests on people amid the complexities of ever growing
social, political and economic problems as we advance into the 21st
century.
The Solution
What better way is there to reverse
citizen alienation of government than to bring citizens into the operation of
governments as lawmakers? This solution will require people to shoulder some
responsibility for governance, an experience the attendant benefits of which
they have been denied by the structure of representative government. Our present
constitutional structure of representative government has in effect held people
in civic adolescence. Taking responsibility for one’s acts is how we mature as
human beings. Certainly, people being able to legislate public policy and
thereby take responsibility for their decisions will not only bring about
greater voter participation but also a major gain in the overall civic maturity
of society.
We can anticipate the success of this
suggestion by looking at the Swiss and U.S. experiences. Bringing the people
into the operation of government as lawmakers has taken Switzerland from being
one of Europe’s poorest nations in 1848 to the wealthiest and most successfully
governed nation in the world today.
In the U.S., twenty-four states
enacted Initiative, Referendum and Recall (IRR) laws in response to the
corruption of representative government. People using the initiative have
produced a legislative record over the last one hundred years as good as or
better than that of representative government. However, these laws left control
of the initiative process in the hands of representative governments, which have
attempted to thwart their effective use by the people ever since. Additionally,
these laws were and still are crippled by not having deliberative legislative
procedures, something commonplace to all legislative bodies. These flaws in
initiative laws, though correctable, left the people’s lawmaking process hostage
to the same corruption of money that existed in the politics of representative
government.
The tempering effect on the excesses
of representative government by initiative laws at the state level foretells the
success we can expect at the federal level and in every government jurisdiction
of the United States. The proposed law –– the National Initiative for Democracy
–– includes uniform legislative procedures for all levels of government and an
agency to implement those procedures independent of representative government.
This same agency will conduct all initiative elections from a central database
with the newest technologies.
The National Initiative herein
suggested has been designed and vetted with scholars and experts over the last
decade. It corrects the shortcomings found in state initiative laws, and it
removes the corrupting influence of money in initiative elections. The
legislative procedures written into the National Initiative are similar to those
found in the Congress today.
The National Initiative is a
legislative package that includes an amendment to the Constitution –– the
Democracy Amendment –– and a federal statute –– the Democracy Act. The Democracy
Amendment: 1) asserts the sovereignty of the People to make laws; 2) outlaws
monies in initiative elections not from natural persons; and 3) legalizes the
self-enactment process of the Philadelphia II election. The Democracy Act sets
up legislative procedures and creates an administrative agency (the Electoral
Trust) to implement those procedures and conduct initiative elections on behalf
of the American People.
The National Initiative’s Enactment
The designing and vetting the
National Initiative is only one part of the equation. It now has to be enacted
into law. It is self-evident that the Congress will not dilute its own powers in
order to empower the people. That being the case, a national election must be
conducted by a non-government entity on behalf of the people. This
unconventional approach to circumvent the government has historic and legal
precedent.
The Founding Fathers faced the same
national disintegration of government under the Articles of Confederation during
the first half of the 1780s. The government was powerless because each of the
thirteen state governments refused to cede their “sovereign state rights.” The
Constitutional Framers overcame this inertia with a plan to take the
ratification process directly to the people under the doctrine of First
Principles (the people just do it –– there is no external authority to the
people). James Madison persuaded the Congress sitting in New York to send the
Constitutional Draft to the various states asking them to convene special state
conventions, with delegates elected by the people to decide on ratification. The
states, thinking ratification unlikely, agreed early on to Madison’s plan. The
self-enacting text of Article VII of the Constitution, triggered by
ratification, created our nation. Article VII relied on a threshold decision of
nine state conventions to ratify the Constitution, thereby making it the law of
the land in those nine states.
Following this precedent of history
and operating under the legality of the self-enacting feature of Article VII,
the National Initiative is now presented to American voters in a national
election conducted by Philadelphia II, a nonprofit corporation incorporated in
1992 in California. This national election began on September 17, 2002 and will
continue until the self-enacting threshold (the necessary number of registered
voters voting for the National Initiative) written into the Democracy Amendment
is met. This threshold is far superior to that of 1787, in that modern
communications technology readily permits people to make their own decisions
rather than rely on the intermediary of elected delegates to conventions. The
National Initiative’s self-enactment threshold is in Section 8 of the Democracy
Amendment:
This Article of Amendment and the accompanying Democracy Act shall be
inoperative unless, in a national election conducted by the nonprofit
corporation Philadelphia II, the Amendment shall have been ratified and the Act
enacted by the affirmative vote of a number of registered voters greater than
half the total number of votes cast in the presidential election occurring
immediately prior to the election's certification by the President of
Philadelphia II to the government of the United States, provided that the number
of affirmative votes exceeds the number of negative votes received by
Philadelphia II at that time. Any voter may change his or her vote at any time
prior to the date of certification.
Our Goals
In order to bring about the enactment
of the National Initiative and thereby create new governing institution –– The
Legislature of the People –– The Democracy Foundation’s goals are to:
1. Raise sufficient funds to
command the resources necessary for an educational campaign to acquaint the
American public with the National Initiative for Democracy and the opportunity
its enactment offers for people to empower themselves as lawmakers in every
government jurisdiction of the United States; and
2. Secure a sufficient number of votes in the Philadelphia II election to meet
the self-enacting threshold established in Section 8 of the Democracy Amendment.
These goals may seem difficult to
attain, and they are. There is no tax base to fund this electoral undertaking
outside government, the cost of which will equal that of a presidential
campaign. An article of faith in this undertaking is the belief that a
sufficient number ordinary people voting for the National Initiative will back
up their votes with modest contributions to finance their own empowerment.
That voters will back up their votes
with modest donations is realistic. First, if only one percent of the more than
50 million affirmative voters required to enact the National Initiative were to
give to the Sustaining Democracy Program an average five dollars per month, the
enactment would be adequately funded and completed in three to five years.
Second, national polls consistently
show that Americans want to be empowered. A statewide poll in Minnesota in the
spring of 2002 showed that citizens wanted to be empowered to make laws by 82%.
The Democracy Foundation’s recent experience in Maine showed that of those who
voted, 80% voted for the National Initiative. The conclusion of these
experiences indicates that if the people can be made aware of the National
Initiative, they will overwhelmingly vote for it.
The technological communication
advancement of the Internet makes possible the necessary communications to
acquaint Americans with the National Initiative and to provide them an
opportunity to vote, thereby enacting the National Initiative without the
participation of government.
We believe that when we reach a
critical mass of people voting for the National Initiative, its enactment will
become the most explosive issue on the American political scene since the
founding of the nation. We do not know how many votes it will take to arrive at
critical mass; it could be one million or five million. However, we feel that by
using the Internet for voting and communicating we can build to a critical mass.
If we are joined by individuals and organizations intent on reform the process
will accelerate appreciably. The enactment of the National Initiative will
reverse the downward spiral in civic and social participation by the people.
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