FROM SCRATCH

In science, technology, and business, if an experiment fails or does not deliver the expected results, it gets scratched and the process starts all over again. American republican democracy, created once the revolutionary war was won, was very much an experiment. It had not been tried anywhere in the world, with the exception, maybe, of ancient Athens, five hundred years before Christ. Democracy is a concept, a way of doing business in the political arena. It stands in contrast with autocracy. An autocracy governs from the top down, a democracy governs from the bottom up. In an autocracy the rules are set for the people by an unelected authority, in a democracy the people elect the authority to set the rules for them. All of this is theory. How well or poorly a democracy functions depends on the structure chosen for the implementation and preservation of the democracy. The base of the structure supporting democracy for the United States of America is the Constitution, which was approved by a Constitutional Convention in 1787 and took effect in 1788 when the State of New Hampshire ratified it. It has since been amended 27 times, the last time in 1992. The most important amendments of the Constitution pertain to the insertion of a ‘bill of rights’ in 1791 and the election of Senators by direct popular vote rather than appointment by State legislatures in 1913. The structure of the institutions supporting democracy in the United States of America has not changed since then.

Reverence for the Constitution is justifiably high. In the judicial branch it manifests itself in the ‘originalist’ legal theory advocated by the Federalist Society. Originalists believe that the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law. The originalist legal theory puts the ideas of our founding fathers on a pedestal even though some of them have since been proven misguided or untenable in today’s world. It ignores the insights and changed realities developed over time during the two and a half centuries that have passed.

The indisputable fact that our political system is proving itself to be incapable of addressing, by legislative action, the most pressing policy issues of our time like the national debt, preservation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration, tax reform, climate change, voting rights, gun control, police reform, and -in a broader sense- the untenable inequality, provides a clear signal that democracy in the United States of America is not delivering the expected results and that the great American experiment is failing. It is time to jettison any originalist approach to the codification of the structure of our democracy and review it with an eye on current conditions and the exigencies of the future. In this, we need to recognize that the Constitution, while the foundation of our political system, is only part of the structure of our democracy that is further formed by executive, congressional, and judicial action (precedents, traditions, rules and regulations) and the fact that in the US we are dealing with a two-party system with parties of roughly equal size and strength.

The question is: “If we had to do it all over again, what changes in the political system would have to be considered to enhance our democracy with an eye on producing results required for this day and age.”

There is a lot we want to preserve, because it has been serving us well; there is a lot we are better off without; and there is a lot we should put in place to improve our political system and in Benjamin Franklin’s words “keep our republic”.

What we should preserve:

·        The three co-equal branches of government.

·        The bi-cameral federal legislature.

·        Term limited Presidency.

·        The Bill of Rights, but with updated and expanded language to cover contemporary norms.

·        National election of the President, members of the House of Representatives, and Senators.

What we should get rid of:

·        The Electoral College.

·        The filibuster rule in the Senate.

·        Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court Justices.

·        The lid on the number of members of the House of Representatives.

·        The two-party system.

What we should put in place:

·        Term limits for members of Congress.

·        Limits on campaign contributions.

·        Prohibition of gerrymandering.

·        Ranked voting for Congressional seats.

·        Uniform federal rules for voting access.

·        A Constitutional requirement to balance the federal budget.

·        A Constitutional requirement for Congress to articulate a national strategy.

In my book “NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First-Generation Immigrant in search of American Exceptionalism”, I argue that it is time for the voters to exercise the people power to scratch the political structure that has evolved over time and bring it ‘up to code’ for the exigencies of modern times. To those who would argue that this would be too much heavy lifting, I say that this nation has dealt with tougher challenges, when it had to. Remember what Nelson Mandela said: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”