A Political Fantasy For A Sunny Spring Morning

     [As I’m rather tired today, have a bit of whimsy that I posted at the old Eternity Road site on October 8, 2011. The ideas in it still tickle me – FWP]

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     As one who writes frequently on political topics, I am of course given to the occasional bout of daydreaming, as in: If Fran Porretto were given the privilege of completely rewriting the American political system, how would it look?

     Most such daydreams should not be published at a family-friendly website, as they involve far too much rope and far too many lampposts. But now and then, an idea spools itself out that might...just...work...

     Much of our current trouble stems from the severe diminution of the sense of responsibility, at every level of our political structure. It's gotten worse as Washington has sucked all power and authority upward, out of the states and lesser political units, thus increasing the distance between the supposedly sovereign citizen and those who make the laws and dispose of his tax money. Representative governance, where the representatives and executives are chosen by popular vote, cannot be completely shorn of that tendency. However, it can be mitigated by reinforcing those aspects of the system that conserve responsibility and removing or weakening those aspects that reduce responsibility.

FWP's New Order Of The Ages:

     Start from the Constitution of the United States, as it stands, but with the following revisions:

     Have the Electoral College choose the president and vice-president directly, without reference to anyone's nominees. That process gave us six genuinely great chief executives in a row. It would also put a stake through the heart of the political parties, which have deserved to die for a long time now.

     Have each state legislature choose the state's Electoral College delegates, without regard to any popular vote or other criterion but the legislators' own judgment. That puts the state legislators on the spot, directly responsible for the quality of the men who assume the powers of the presidency, and gives those who choose the legislators themselves increased incentive to choose them wisely and watch them closely.

     Along with this reversion of power to the state legislatures, let's have them elect our federal legislators as well. Perhaps Congress could serve as the Electoral College; I can't see why it wouldn't, since the power to determine the president in the event of a deadlocked election rests with Congress anyway.

     But who should elect the states' legislators? Why, the counties' legislatures, of course! ("Boroughs" in Alaska; "parishes" in Louisiana.) Each county should send assemblymen to its state's assembly in proportion to the county's population, plus one state senator per county. As with the choice of electors, there should be no dependency on a popular vote or other expression of "popular sentiment."

     As for who should elect the county legislators, at this point we're close enough to the citizenry that popular elections become thinkable. America is a land of 3143 counties, which works out to about 100,000 persons per county on average. Of those 100,000, perhaps 30,000 will be qualified to vote; we'll get to the qualifications in a moment. The combinatorics of a population of that size suggest that a voter will be no more than three or four "handshakes" from direct acquaintance with a candidate. Thus, voters can be reasonably expected to learn enough about those who seek seats in the county legislature to make informed choices among them, and to be responsible for the consequences. If we blow it, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

     Now, the qualifications for voting for the county legislature:

1. Each voter shall be 21 years of age or older;
2. He shall have performed a minimum of two years' active service in the county police, or the state militia, or any branch of the nation's armed forces;
3. He shall reside in and own real property within the county;
4. He must not be currently incarcerated for a felony or misdemeanor.

     (Though I doubt there are any, feminist harridans in the audience should read all uses of "he" as "he or she." I have too much regard for the English language to pollute my prose with the "politically correct" but grammatically execrable forms they prefer.)

     Qualification #1 ensures a minimum degree of maturity. Qualification #2 ensures that the voter has demonstrated his concern for the commonweal by direct service to its defenses. Qualification #3 gives the voter an enduring stake in how the county is governed. Qualification #4 prevents those who have an interest in violating the law from having any opportunity to suborn it. And (hopefully) needless to say, no one shall be permitted to stand for election to the county legislature who is not also qualified to vote for it.

     But of course, along with these entirely sensible restrictions on the power of the franchise, there must be correlated restrictions on the power of the legislatures, to wit:

1. All occupants of public offices, without exception, shall be subject to recall. A majority vote of the lower house of the legislature responsible for the election of an official shall constitute a nonprejudicial removal of that official from his office. (Nonprejudicial means he may contend for that office in the future, if he chooses to do so.) In the case of county legislators, a majority vote of the county's enfranchised residents shall constitute a recall of the county legislator at issue.
2. No legislature may impose taxes on any political unit except the ones directly below it. Thus, Congress may tax the state governments, and no one else; the state governments may tax the county governments, and no one else; and the county governments may directly tax the citizenry.
3. Laws, Acts, and Bills of Appropriation shall be proposed in the lower house of a legislature only. The upper house may ratify them or vote them down, but it shall possess no power to amend them.
4. Either house of a legislature, by a two-thirds majority, may repeal any Law, Act, or Bill of Appropriation previously passed by that legislature, with no requirement for concurrence by the other house.
5. No legislature shall be permitted to delegate lawmaking or regulatory power to any other body, whether elected or appointed; all laws and regulations binding on anyone shall be debated and voted on by the appropriate legislature in open session, in all their particulars.
6. There shall be harsh statutory penalties, written explicitly into the Constitution of the United States and the subsidiary charters of the states and counties, for legislators and executives who propose, vote, or act to violate the explicit terms of the Constitution or any subsidiary charter to which they have sworn fidelity.
7. A Bill of Particulars, filed by a member of the legislature responsible for the election of an official, if approved by a majority vote of the lower house of that legislature, shall impeach the official so accused and compel him to stand trial before the upper house of that legislature. A two-thirds majority of the upper house shall be sufficient for removal from office; a three-fourths majority shall be required for the imposition of the relevant criminal penalties. No person removed from office under this procedure shall henceforth be eligible for any office of public trust, at any level.

     Now you're looking at real federalism. Let's have some opinions!

Subsidiarity, Where Art Thou?

     If you’re a Catholic, you...well, you might be familiar with this tenet of Catholic thought:

     Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.

     From the definition, it’s clear that federalism – the American Constitutional principle that defines a small number of limited powers for the federal government and leaves all other legitimate authorities to the states – is a form of the subsidiarity principle. Many politicians, Left and Right, have either forgotten that principle or have dismissed it as an impediment to their agendas.

     Which brings me to the following ads:

     You may have seen one or both of those ads before this. They’re impressive statements by an impressive young woman. If the rest of her politicking is as powerful as those ads, she could well be in Congress on January 3. I’d love to see her there.

     But note that those ads highlight the city of Baltimore – admittedly, a city reduced to ruin – and what Klacik would like to do about it. Her focus is on the local problems of a particular city.

     Are Baltimore’s problems real? Yes. Are they serious? Yes. Do they demand immediate attention? Yes. But from whom? From what body of legislators and executives?

     Are Baltimore’s problems properly the concern of the federal government of the United States?

     Baltimore has a city government, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that government collect taxes, fund a police department, and administer a municipal garbage collection program? What are the officials of that government doing about Baltimore’s many problems?

     Under the principle of subsidiarity, the local affairs of the city of Baltimore should be handled by its local authorities: the city government. Under the principle of federalism, no government higher up than the state government of Maryland has any legitimate authority over Baltimore and what happens there. Except in cases of invasion or insurrection, the Constitution delegates no authority to Congress or the president to intervene in the local affairs of cities. Didn’t we hear all about that when the talk started about sending federal troops to Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis?

     But Kim Klacik is running for Congress.

     People really ought to be thinking about this.

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     Kim Klacik is an articulate, courageous, conservative young woman. As I said in the above segment, I’d love to see her in Congress. But the clash between her campaign’s focus and her political aspiration highlights an open wound in the American political system: the loss of the demarcations of legitimate authority established by the Constitution. That wound has festered for far too long.

     Local problems are best understood by the people and authorities of that locale. There is no valid argument that outsiders should thrust their preferences into the matter. Similarly, local problems must be assumed to be the product of local action. Americans from other parts of the country didn’t flock to Baltimore to commit thousands of felony crimes, nor to bury it in garbage. Why, then, are the problems of beleaguered cities such as Baltimore a proper concern for the federal government?

     So many concerns best left to state or local authorities have been federalized, whether by overt or covert action, that few persons even ask such questions today. Consider unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, and educational funding. Consider “revenue sharing.” Consider the handling of tottering corporations, which reflexively appeal to federal authorities for “bailouts.” Do the chief executives of such corporations even consider going to a local or state body before approaching a federal Cabinet department?

     What we call federalization, the Founding Fathers called usurpation: the federal government’s seizure of authorities and powers not Constitutionally delegated to it. The result is what James Madison termed consolidated government: a state of affairs in which the state and local governments are reduced to ciphers before the power of the federal Leviathan. Everything becomes a matter for federal decision making, which means that no matter where you are or what your particular local concerns may be, decisions about what will be done to you and / or for you will be dominated by persons far away.

     The lure is the prospect of having your problems solved for you by others, at others’ expense. The price is the loss of local and state autonomy, which were once fundamental to American governance. They made it possible, as Clarence Carson wrote in The American Tradition, for people to agree to disagree about many things and still share a nation.

     I could go on, but I have other work to do today, and anyway the point should be well enough established by now. Gentle Readers, please submit your thoughts in the comments.

Seduction Into Slavery

     North Carolina was recently in the news for a law the New York Times says “eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people.” I hope some Gentle Reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but “gay and transgender people” in North Carolina still can’t be legally assaulted, stolen from, defrauded, raped, killed, or involuntarily tattooed, can they? All such actions remain forbidden by North Carolina’s penal code. So what “protections” do North Carolina’s homosexuals and transgendered persons lack?

     Perhaps that doesn’t much matter, as I’m fairly certain that smart homosexuals and transgendereds will observe the ancient guideline for the preservation of social peace: “Don’t go where you’re not wanted.” That guideline would seem to apply to sex-segregated facilities just as to all other modes of human interaction. As for the less-than-smart individuals in those categories, there’s the Niven / Pournelle categorization: “Think of it as evolution in action.” Either way, reasonably wise individuals will behave with reasonable wisdom; the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity.

     One of the great stupidities au courant today is that if “we” want to mold human behavior in some desirable way, all “we” need to do is pass a law about it. The late, great Milton Friedman had something to say about that:

     The view that if there is a problem, if there is something wrong, the way to deal with it is to pass a law, set up a governmental agency (staffed, of course, by the intellectuals urging this solution), and use the police power of the state to correct it is, as Mr. Simon demonstrates so well, superficially appealing view. It is simple, as well as simpleminded, and appeals to our natural impulse to take personal credit for the good things that happen and blame a “devil” for the bad things. [From the Preface to William E. Simon’s A Time For Truth]

     (Being a snarky sort, I’d have sneer-quoted the words “problem” and “intellectuals” in the above. Being a scholar, Dr. Friedman refrained. Whether he was tempted to do so is unrecorded.)

     But police power isn’t the only instrument at hand. What North Carolina must face is the consequence of having been seduced by federal money:

     The Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new law on gay and transgender rights makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing, officials said Friday.

     Cutting off any federal money — or even simply threatening to do so — would put major new pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law, which eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people and restricted which bathrooms transgender people can use. A loss of federal money could send the state into a budget crisis and jeopardize services that are central to daily life.

     Although experts said such a drastic step was unlikely, at least immediately, the administration’s review puts North Carolina on notice that the new law could have financial consequences. Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina had assured residents that the law would not jeopardize federal money for education.

     Federal funds are offered to state governments for a host of reasons. All such funding is wrong on principle. Funds collected by the federal government through taxation are Constitutionally applicable only to activities legitimate under one of the enumerated powers of Congress. The structure of Article I, Section 8 makes that quite clear. Of course, the Constitution is of only historical interest these days, but I thought it might make an interesting sidelight to the issue at hand.

     Federal funding of state-level activities is a reliable technique for coercing state governments into compliance with federal wishes. At this time, the federal powers-that-be are propitiating every activist group within the Left’s coalition. Thus, homosexuals and transgendereds are receiving political obeisance.

     The withdrawal-of-funding club has been applied to other socially divisive subjects as well. A couple of states have come under fire for legislatively protecting the right of individuals not to be coerced into participating, directly or indirectly, in phenomena that offend their religious beliefs, such as same-sex “marriages.” Such “marriages” have been a subject of controversy that has enveloped merchants with no possible connection to it – not even a hypothetical one. States that have attempted to protect those merchants’ religious freedom have been threatened with the loss of federal funds, just as has North Carolina.

     The key here is that governments grow addicted to their sources of revenue. If a state government’s revenue stream includes a sizable contribution from Washington, it takes very little time for the state to think of that contribution as vitally necessary, regardless of the ostensible reason for the award. Money is infinitely fungible; funds awarded to the state for “flim” make it easier to find funding for “flam.” However, after a year or two, those involved with “flim” will howl at the very thought of losing the subsidy. It will become a “right.”

     Two-hundred-plus years of political devolution, emphatically including the devolution of political language, have rendered states and localities incapable of declining funds from a higher level of government. Do their legislators and executives foresee the consequences? Unknown. What’s quite plain is that the funds are always accepted and put to some use that will later be termed a “necessity” and a “right.”

     Federalism was supposed to make this sort of thing impossible as well as unthinkable. So much for federalism. The Constitution, as noted above, forbids it. So much for the Constitution.

     Since 1933, seduction by the wallet serves federal power better than any other technique. Yet not one candidate for the presidency has had a word to say about this devious contravention of the federal idea. Perhaps they would protest that no one has asked them. So much for the trade of journalism.

Quickies: Crisis-Unwasted Dept.

     Rahm Emanuel laid down the maxim “You never let a crisis go to waste,” and come Hell or high water, Barack Hussein Obama will abide by it:

     During a joint press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister Tuesday, Barack Obama used a question about Baltimore to further his views on federalizing local police forces without calling it federalization.

     The Obama task force on policing is in Baltimore along with the attorney from the Civil Rights Division to push his agenda, he told the assembled....

     Barack Obama said there were “too many instances of what appears to be…uh…police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. And it comes up what seems like once a week now, or every couple a weeks.”

     He got his digs in at the Republican Congress but that’s an aside.

     The federal police proposals from his task force will make a difference, he claimed Tuesday.

     He has invented yet another crisis, using advisors like Al Sharpton, to put the federal government’s hand in police work....

     Barack Obama claimed today that the problem is he can’t federalize the police. Implementation of his plan would do exactly what he says he can’t do.

     “We’re going to be working systematically with every jurisdiction around the country to implement solutions we know work,” he said today. “We can’t just leave this to the police,” Barack Obama added ominously.

     Rep. Elijah Cummings called for a police czar who would undoubtedly federalize policing.

     Al Sharpton, a racist agitator and White House adviser, will be in Baltimore to teach the community how to march “peacefully”, which is merely a more covert style of aggression and force.

     A couple weeks ago, Sharpton called for the federalization of police. “There must be national policy and national law on policing,” the race terrorist said. “We’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.”

     Remember Obama orating during his 2008 campaign that we need a domestic security force that’s “just as strong, just as well armed, as our military” -- ? Given the steady militarization of police forces country-wide, I think we can guess where he hopes to get it.

Quickies: Federal Educational Coercion

     The indefatigable Sara Noble writes about the heavy hand of Washington descending upon New York public schools:

There are 124 public school districts on Long Island, and out of 101 reporting in, 64,785 of 148,564 children in grades 3-8 opted out of the state English Language Arts test.

     That’s 43.6% of the students so far on Long Island alone.

     Federal officials are looking to discredited test-or-punish schemes as a solution instead of listening to parents and educators. For more details, click here.

     The federal government is mulling over different responses to districts with large numbers of students opting out. Withholding funds is high on the list, regardless of how much it hurts the children or if it is even a legitimate use of government power.

     Another threat being bandied about is forcefully nationalizing the testing.

     With federal money inevitably come federal controls. The money quickly becomes “indispensable” to the states and districts that accept it. The thought of losing it is enough to frighten them out of their undies. Thus, even though Washington has no Constitutitonal role in education whatsoever, by “benevolently” disbursing “educational funding” to the states, it’s become able to bend state education departments and their officials to federal dictates.

     Federal funding that transgresses the bounds on federal power, as enumerated in Article I, Section 8, is itself a violation of the Constitution. But don’t expect shortsighted, perennially money-hungry state educrats to understand that. They’re simply not that smart.

Federalism And The Money Club

One of the segments of Michael Emerling’s excellent The Essence of Political Persuasion tape/CD series focuses on stories and metaphors. There’s a brilliant phrase in his treatment of welfare as a metaphor for drug addiction that I’ll never forget: “When a man has got you by the wallet,” as Emerling says, you pretty much have to do as he tells you.

As with men, so also with states.

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Have a gander at the Obama Administration’s latest attempt to destroy what remains of federalism:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it tougher for governors to deny man-made climate change. Starting next year, the agency will approve disaster-preparedness funds only for states whose governors approve hazard-mitigation plans that address climate change.

This may put several Republican governors who maintain that the Earth isn't warming due to human activities, or prefer to take no action, in a political bind. Their position may block their states' access to hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA funds. In the last five years, the agency has awarded an average $1 billion a year in grants to states and territories for taking steps to mitigate the effects of disasters.

"If a state has a climate denier governor that doesn't want to accept a plan, that would risk mitigation work not getting done because of politics," said Becky Hammer, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council's water program. "The governor would be increasing the risk to citizens in that state" because of his climate beliefs.

The policy doesn't affect federal money for relief after a hurricane, flood, or other disaster. Specifically, beginning in March 2016, states seeking preparedness money will have to assess how climate change threatens their communities. Governors will have to sign off on hazard-mitigation plans. While some states, including New York, have already started incorporating climate risks in their plans, most haven't because FEMA's 2008 guidelines didn't require it.

Now, the amounts involved are relatively small compared to the typical state’s budget. That’s unlikely to make the threat ineffective, for a simple reason: state governments, including those whose budgets balance, prefigure federal monies into their budgets. The states’ budgets wouldn’t balance without the Washington bucks. The federal money arrives preallocated – pre-spent. It’s been that way since Nixon introduced “revenue sharing” in 1972.

So the governors and legislators of those states, having unwisely allowed Washington to “get them by the wallet,” face a tough choice: kneel before Leviathan’s decrees, reduce expenditures in some area, or try to squeeze more revenue out of their citizens. When the state government is Republican-controlled, as so many of them are today, that’s a highly unpalatable menu to choose from.

You might think, state taxation being far less than federal taxation, that citizens might shrug off a “tiny” increase in the state sales or income tax. That never proves to be the case. State governments have wholly changed hands over as small an increase in a sales tax as a half-cent on the dollar. Taxation is currently the number-one reason for personal and corporate relocations, and the politicians know it.

The disbursement of Treasury monies to the states, under whatever rationale, constitutes a club whose backswing no state government wants to get hit by.

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The entire point of federalism – the reservation of all unenumerated powers to the states and the people by the explicit terms of the Tenth Amendment – is that our unum contains quite a lot of pluribus. Quoth Robert Tracinski:

Let’s be two Americas.

That’s what everybody’s always complaining about, right? We can’t have “Two Americas.” But what if it’s not such a bad thing? What if this was actually designed into the original American system and is the way things were supposed to be? And maybe it would lead, not to more conflict between the two Americas, but less.

I know this may raise a bit of a visceral reaction. We’re supposed to be e pluribus unum—from many, one. It’s the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, for crying out loud.

But the Founders who chose that motto in the first place still believed very strongly in the pluribus. In fact, they gave the unum very little to do, concerning itself with national defense, international trade, and resolving a few high-level legal disputes. Most government was left to the pluribus, to the states, to run as they saw fit.

Back then, of course, government was unbelievably small by today’s standards. And that’s part of the reason we ended up messing up this original federal system: the self-declared “progressives” hatched so many enormous ambitions for what the government was supposed to do that only the federal government could concentrate the massive sums of money and power required.

That last paragraph is a bit more generous to the “progressives” than is warranted. Scratch a “progressive” – doesn’t matter which one – and you’ll find a steel-fisted fascist who’s resolved to go to the limits of human ambition and power to make you do as he demands. The word itself should be the giveaway, for if “progress” is not universalized – if there are persons or communities that, for whatever reason, don’t partake of “progress,” then true “progress” is not being made. After all, there are already persons who’ve “progressed” – the “progressives” themselves, right? – so if there’s to be true “progress,” it must perforce embrace everyone, including any benighted types who fail to appreciate its glories.

“Progressivism” is the antithesis of federalism.

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As far as I know, no state has resisted the lure of federal money. I believe the first steps in that regard came with the federal highway system, an Eisenhower Administration project, but the scheme really took off with Nixon’s “revenue sharing” program.

The beast has many tentacles today. Washington has so many money clubs to swing that a state government wholly peopled by libertarians would find it hard to avoid them all. Some of those clubs even take aim at private institutions, such as private colleges and universities. Federal regulation of collegiate curricula and campus life is justified by the expenditure of federal money on college campuses...even when the money arrives as a federally administered loan, not to the institution but to the student.

The game has been in progress for decades. FEMA’s gambit, done in service to the warmistas, is merely the latest of its kind. Watch the state governments, especially those now in Republican hands. The sincerity of the officeholders those states’ voters elected will be tested by this throw, perhaps rather severely. The outcome will provide useful data points for those who continue to believe that political engagement in the cause of freedom is still worthwhile.