"What you fail to understand is the simple fact We have a republic, not a democracy so we cannot vote to confiscate the profits arising from curtailing energy production they will pay the required tax on their good fortune DD will be pleased there will be no "windfall tax" on his find of a priceless gem hap"
What you fail to understand is that even though you say you support the constitution in fact you support a perversion of it. In fact your representatives could vote to fairly tax windfall profits to give back to the people some of the excess profit scammed from them by overly greedy individuals.
Highly related: The damage from electoral college enabling minority rule for both the executive and judicial branches simultaneously has gone beyond critical mass, to the point that the SCOTUS rules against the wishes of 2/3 or more of the citizens on a regular basis. Coupled with the corrupt minority leader in the senate, we are losing our moorings. If the rule of law is totally abandoned for the ruling class, as it seems to be, it means to me that the system will probably not be readily repaired by conventional constitutional means. If we just lie down and take it, our form of government will go further to the cliff of failure. Not just one thing anymore will get us back on track, although Garland has a few months left perhaps in which to restore some guardrails. I am not very happy with having to accept disgust as a way to think about our system. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169267075
Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.
[...]
Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.
The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.
When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14 .. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed14.asp ”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves.
At the time of the founding, a narrow vision of the people prevailed. Black people were largely excluded from the terms of citizenship, and slavery was a reality, even when frowned upon, that existed alongside an insistence on self-government. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some exceptions. America could not be considered a truly popular government until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which commanded equal citizenship for Black Americans. Yet this triumph was rooted in the founding generation’s insistence on what we would come to call democracy.
[...]
Yet while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. The states, with unequal populations, got equal representation in the Senate. The Electoral College also gave the states weight as states in selecting the president. But the centrality of states, a concession to political reality, was balanced by the House of Representatives, where the principle of representation by population prevailed, and which would make up the overwhelming number of electoral votes when selecting a president.
But none of this justified minority rule, which was at odds with the “republican principle.” Madison’s design remained one of popular government precisely because it would require the building of political majorities over time. As Madison argued in “Federalist No. 63 .. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed63.asp ,” “The cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.”
[The SCOTUS decision on abortion clearly is not consistent with that Founder desire. ]
Alexander Hamilton, one of Madison’s co-authors of The Federalist Papers, echoed this argument. Hamilton made the case .. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-0162 .. for popular government and even called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”
The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.
Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted .. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99sep/9909linc1staddress.htm , “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.” Indeed, Lincoln offered a definition of popular government that can guide our understanding of a democracy—or a republic—today: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”
The greatest shortcoming of the American experiment was its limited vision of the people, which excluded Black people, women, and others from meaningful citizenship, diminishing popular government’s cause. According to Lincoln, extending meaningful citizenship so that “all should have an equal chance” was the basis on which the country could be “saved.” The expansion of we the people was behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens of the country and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men. Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to 18. Progress has been slow—and sometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/dont-let-supreme-court-choose-its-own-electorate/616808/ —and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago. At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail.
[... to end ...]
As Adam Serwer recently wrote in these pages .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/dont-let-supreme-court-choose-its-own-electorate/616808/ , “Shelby County ushered in a new era of experimentation among Republican politicians in restricting the electorate, often along racial lines.” Republicans are eager to shrink the electorate. Ostensibly seeking to prevent voting fraud, which studies have continually shown is a nonexistent problem, Republicans support efforts to make voting more difficult—especially for minorities, who do not tend to vote Republican. The Republican governor of Texas, in the midst of a pandemic when more people are voting by mail, limited the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one per county. Loving, with a population of 169, has one drop-off location; Harris, with a population of 4.7 million (majority nonwhite), also has one drop-off location. States controlled by Republicans, such as Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, have also closed polling places, making voters in predominantly minority communities stand in line for hours to cast their ballot.
Who counts as a full and equal citizen—as part of we the people—has shrunk in the Republican vision. Arguing against statehood for the District of Columbia, which has 200,000 more people than the state of Wyoming, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas said Wyoming is entitled to representation because it is “a well-rounded working-class state.” It is also overwhelmingly white. In contrast, D.C. is 50 percent nonwhite.
High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it. Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic. We should see this as a constitutional failure demanding constitutional reform.
This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.
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