The Consent of the Governed

The Electoral Process

Among the larger problems the Framers of the Constitution left to later generations was the electoral process and how to get representative government. The electoral process, along with the aftermath of slavery, are the two greatest impediments to achieving free and unencumbered democracy in America. We now know from our 20 years of divided Federal Government that the Founding Fathers erred when they opted for the electoral college instead of the Congressional election of the President. The two proposals they considered were the election of the President by the Congress and the direct election of the President by the people.

The direct election of the president by the people would have been a complete disaster. The chances for demagoguery are so great in presidential elections that by now we would have had a king, an emperor, a dictator, or maybe all of the above. With 200 years of hindsight it is obvious that the election of the president by the Congress would have been the better choice. The reasons are simple: (1) In every case there would be a ruling party; (2) the ruling party could be held accountable for its actions at the next election, since it could not hide behind the separation of powers to say that the other guy did or did not do it. The rascals could be cleaned out biennially.

The electoral college was the compromise and, in the last 20 years, it has resulted in divided government that weakens instead of strengthens our democratic process.

Don't confuse divided government with a government of checks and balances. The checks and balances in our government consist of our having a House of Representatives as well as a Senate and an independent Judiciary. What we don't have is a president who has the assurance of a ruling majority in the Congress, at least in the House which, ideally, should elect him from its numbers. The House represents the people; the Senate, even though its members are elected in popular elections, represents its respective states.

Twice in our history the election of president has gone to the House of Representatives. The first was in 1801 in the election of Thomas Jefferson; the second was in 1825 in the election of John Quincy Adams. In the infamous election of 1876 when the Southern electors made a deal with Hayes to end the occupation of the South, the dispute was taken to a special committee of the Congress which then skewed the vote to Hayes when, in fact, Tilden had won the election.

Aside from the election of the president, the other major electoral problem for the United States is the fair representation of the people. In a republic such as ours the people and their elected representatives hold the supreme power. The trick is to get the elected representatives to represent the people. Because we do not have a simple republic but a compound republic (the states are subordinate but sovereign republics), the electoral process has been subject to the whims of the constituent states as the Constitution leaves to the states the conduct of the electoral process. This has resulted in the disenfranchisement of large parts of the electorate, the misapportionment of electoral districts, and the control of state legislatures and the Congress by rural cliques.

Jeffersonian democracy came to an end in the United States when the Supreme Court case, Reynolds vs Sims (1964), established the rule of one-person(man)-one-vote. Jefferson thought the government should be run by farmers and rural people since they were the most responsible citizens. People in cities were second class citizens. Until Reynolds vs Sims, the rural people, not always farmers, did control state legislatures, and consequently the state, as well as the federal electoral process. The fact that rural people were not all that honest and reliable is attested in the lengths to which they have gone to maintain their control over government in most undemocratic ways, such as the county unit system in Georgia.

Well, we have one-person-one-vote but the electoral process is still not providing government that is representative of the people. The citizens-sovereign are still not being represented or, at best, only haphazardly. The problem now is that public office has become a commodity freely bought and sold in the market place. We do not really have a republic except nominally on paper, as there is no other way to describe it. We have a livestock sale where the people's representatives are bought and sold to the bidding of the purchaser, usually PACS. PAC-financed elections are a disease of the republic.

The supreme example of buying an election is the candidacy of Ross Perot: I am not faulting Ross Perot. He is doing nothing contrary to law. That's the problem. According to the press, Perot is prepared to spend $100 million of his own dollars to further his ambition to be president. According to leaks from his staff, the number may be $300 million. Ross Perot may be the equivalent of the Second Coming, but what does he have to do with life in a republic? In what way are the people choosing him? With the money he has available he is a serious challenger in the presidential race. Remove the money and what remains is Ross Perot. Not everyone with $100-million is a Ross Perot, but Ross Perot, regardless of his intelligence, without the $100 million is just another guy.

Back in the 1950's Adlai Stevenson brought attention to this problem in an article called "What it Costs to Run," published in Atlantic Magazine. His example was quaint but to the point. In three years of office a Chicago alderman would receive a total salary of $9,000 ($3000 per year). Yet, on average, a candidate for the alderman position spent $30,000 to get elected. In the modern world it may cost six to eight million dollars (25 million in a contested race) to get elected Senator for a job that pays something over $100,000 a year for six years.

In a supreme irony of the legislative process, the Congress decided to do something about the excesses and abuses of the electoral campaign system and passed the Federal Campaign Reform Act. The act called for the public financing of campaigns for the presidency, and seats in the House and the Senate. At the last minute in the legislative proces, the Congress excused its members from the requirements of the bill, as they frequently do. They restricted the public financing to the president, and authorized the creation of PACs—political action committees! The result of this calumny is the blatant sale of public office to the PACS and monied people of the nation. In politics today, "Money talks and BS walks." There is no lower level to which campaign politics can descend, since it is not conceivable to think of further excesses that can be perpetrated in the political system nor more harm that can be inflicted on the body politic. The political system in the United States stinks so badly that large numbers of people have given up the electoral process as hopelessly and perhaps terminally flawed.

The excesses, of course, come from the expenditure of vast amounts of money in the national media to appeal to mobocracy, to define opponents in inflammatory, racial, and derogatory terms, obscuring even the modestly important issues in the campaign. Appeals to mobocracy permit a complete evasion of responsibility for accountable government.

The following are three quotations that speak to the issue of mobocracy.

• "The people are a many headed beast."

• "The people resemble a beast..."

• "Your people, sir, is a great beast."

The first is from Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 65-8 BC; the second, from Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527; and the last is attributed to Alexander Hamilton, 1755-1804. Spanning almost 1900 years, the sentiments are the same, to wit, people in the aggregate are ruled by emotion.

Mobocracy is probably a hangover from evolution related to the fact that, in nature, without language or tools humans were prey in the predator-prey relationship. While humans developed language, a notion of the future, and a sense of power to control the world, they have not outgrown their prey biochemistry. Humans are paranoid. They can be intimidated and induced to fear and anxiety. They are afraid of small dogs.

How do we know this? Remember when candidate George Bush was down 17 points in the polls to Michael Dukakis n 1988? Willie Horton and the scare tactics of racism took care of Dukakis' lead in the polls and Bush went on to win the election. The Republican platform? Patriotism, plus the instillation of fears on the issues of race, abortion, and gun control. The Republicans appealed to the mob and won. This is a pretty shoddy way to run a republic.

We have to look at mobocracy as an ecological principle rooted in the evolutionary development of the biochemistry and physiology of humans. Mobocracy is not an expression of rationality but rather of pure emotion. Most often the emotion expressed is fear—fear that hopes that something or someone will come along that gives us a way to mask our panic by wearing a face of anger. After all, what is rationally uplifting in the notion that you can be a meal for hungry wild dogs, wolves, lions, tigers, bears, coyotes, jackals, and a host of other animals?

The social grouping of humans into biological families was undoubtedly one of the responses to the extreme vulnerability humans have when naked in the face of predation. (Humans assuming dominion over the world before they had languages and tools is a non-concept.)

So here we are today with an archaic biochemistry geared to flight or fight, both based on fear rather than confidence, and anxiety rather than tranquility—and this in spite of living with the absolute technological power (nuclear weapons and all our other tools) to change or destroy anything on the face of the Earth we see fit to destroy, including ourselves. Deep within, however, we know that this awesome power is not ours to use individually. We cringe when confronted with the negative "could be's" of life, and wait for that something or someone to come along and provide us with an easy, not necessarily honest, way to show anger, hoping that we are perceived as bigger and braver than we really are.

Religion has not solved this problem of fear and anxiety either because, in the final analysis, the moral and ethics associated with religions—particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—fall on the side of dominating nature and other humans whose ethos are not compatible with theirs. This is a departure from the notions of democracy and equality in early Christianity, but those notions were discarded by most Christians when Christianity became the imperial religion. These concepts and their related ethics are only now reentering Christianity as many persons worldwide become knowledgeable about the principles of ecology and the societal issues spawned by ignorance or wanton disregard of them. The Eastern religions, while advocating cooperation with nature, also advocate a passivity to authority. In our Western religious thought we have assumed that God empowers us where our biochemistry does not. However, it seems fair to speculate that, had we developed the biochemistry of a predator, we probably would have never developed language and the technology that goes with it. What else does a successful predator need except a good meal and companionship? Our success, as humans, lies in the fact that we were poor prey.

Appeals to the mob are appeals to the animal nature of humans, not to the humane qualities of the species. Appeals to the mob rely on emotion not reason, and they are aimed at inducing the fear of the consequences of an opponent's success.

There has been no discussion of national issues in the last 20 years of presidential elections. The last presidents to have a reasoned agenda for the betterment of the nation were Kennedy and Johnson. Every president since then has run on the basis of negatives.

Nixon, from the beginnings of his presidential aspirations, recommended increases in defense spending to counter the communist threat and obtain cuts in social programs. The communists became the favorite bete noir of the Republicans and irrational defense spending—which became the norm—was played out against those fears, accompanied by heed being paid to the underlying, insistent drumbeat of calls for reduced social spending. Nixon was one of the original communist witch hunters in the Congress. He won his first seat in the House of Representatives by accusing his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas of communist sympathies. (His accusations, however, were not upheld.)

Jimmy Carter ran against the bureaucracy. He had a number of good ideas, but how to run the executive branch of the Federal Government was not one of them.

Reagan gave us the "Evil Empire" in spades with cooked up intelligence estimates and a feel-good-be-happy, it's "Morning in America," way to look at life.

By the way, as the nation's S&Ls were being looted and the borrow-and-spend structure of our tax system was producing the greatest funds transfer program in the world to help the needy rich, Reagan's intention was to transfer the entire social welfare budget of the Federal Government to the states in four years, then eliminate all Federal funding for those programs.

George Bush, as noted above, ran on a platform of Willie Horton, etc. Twenty years of mobocracy has so completely, turned off the electorate that "None of the Above" got a substantial vote in the primaries of several states this year, and numerous polls indicate that people will not vote because there are no acceptable choices among the candidates. The poor have been dropped out of the election process altogether. And who can expect them or, for that matter, even the middle class to participate in a presidential election process when all they can do is vote either for Twiddle Dee or Twiddle Dum? Instead of discussions of issues vital to the future of our lives and the life of our nation, we get strident, blatant, glaring, and obtrusive emotional appeals to prurient information about the personal lives of the candidates. Who needs this?

The Federal Campaign Reform Act had raised some hope that the playing field for presidential elections would be leveled. The law requires small contributions from many citizens to qualify for Federal matching funds, and relatively modest limits were set on the general election. As usual, however, money seeks its own level. Through the cracks and crannies it crept in so that today the Federal campaign funding process has been so completely prostituted that it is farcical to think of the system as fair or honest.

The Federal funding law was subverted by "soft money"—that money that is not given to the candidate or his campaign organization but is donated in very large quantities to the general political party which, ironically, is then free to spend it indirectly on behalf of the candidate. The Federal funds in the general election may be in the range of twenty to thirty, million dollars per candidate. Bush is estimated to have more than ten times that amount in "soft money."

Prostitution is the right word. The sacred electoral process of the republic has been prostituted by the profane money grubbers. One of the reasons Ross Perot is an acceptable alternative in this sordid process is that, at the least, we know where the money is coming from and what special privileges it will buy. Since Perot is buying the presidency for himself he is not beholden to any money grubber but himself. The American people have a special fondness for independent men, whether they are John Wayne on the lone prairie or Bill Gates at Microsoft. This characteric constitutes Perot's folk-appeal: A truly independent man who would be president. Independence may be a great trait for a president, but the process that goes with it happens to be a lousy way to run a republic. It relegates to the citizens-sovereign passive roles in what should be an active process.

There is a basic question we should ask: For whom should the elected representatives of the people work? We the People are the sovereign. A republic is a government where the supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives: Should the citizens-sovereign, We the People, abdicate our power and authority to money grubbers and magnates that pay for an election? Should the representatives that we passively approve through a truncated election process share power with the people who pay for elections? Should the definition of our republic be a government where the supreme power is held by the people who pay for elections and their bought-and-paid-for representatives? That is exactly what we have now, and it flies in the face of everything we hold sacred and feel reverent toward in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We blaspheme our sacred texts, we prostitute our exalted republic, we profane the hallowed ground trod upon by generations of patriots who fought and died for our liberty. We have sold out the nation to an immoral, iniquitous, corrupt, monied class whose principles of conduct, said Horace are, "Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means."

Money is of utmost importance in a technological society, but it should not be used to diminish the power of the citizens-sovereign, to arrogate functions of the government to favor one class of the society over other classes of the society, or to inhibit millions of people from voting. Government should not be the toy, of the magnates. Representatives and Senators should not be property. Elected representatives of the citizens-sovereign should not be able to enrich themselves on unused campaign funds. Before the advent of PACs the Federal government was thought to be relatively immune from influence either by business, big or small, or the magnates.

There, in fact, existed the notion that the Federal Government, since it could not be bullied around like the state and local governments, should collect taxes, then, through revenue sharing, should pass the taxes down through the system to state and local governments (read that, cities.) Considering the present condition of the government, this concept is mere wishful thinking. The pitiable condition of our Federal Government came about because of the machinations of the magnates and the special interest PACs. They supported Reaganism, which gushed money from the middle and lower classes to them because of the Federal government's failure to collect taxes from them, because the Federal Government went on a defense spending binge from which the magnates profited, and because the Federal Government incurred a huge debt which allowed unlimited, risk free investment for the magnates who have millions or billions to invest in the debt.

One-person-one-vote took care of the injustices of Jeffersonian democracy. The cities, after centuries of supporting the development of rural America, East and West, finally got some say in their own legislatures and the needs were beginning to be heard in Congress. Along came the behemoth of the money express, the presidency was captured by the magnates, the government was divided, and we found ourselves in a real mess. Enormous deficits that have significantly inhibited business and industry, a rotting infrastructure which imperils and inhibits economic activity, a defense establishment ready to fight wars on three continents and seven seas in time of peace, and worse than anything yet, a divided, nation.

The nation is divided by race, religion, and class. Our presidency actually intervened with business and industry to inhibit finding an accommodation with labor over the conditions of employment. The only union man we have ever had as president busted a union and poisoned the waters for management labor relations for eight years.

There can be no better time to re-examine the basis for our government. There can be no more appropriate time to examine concepts and theories of government put forth by the Founders and Framers and examine them in the light of our modern condition. We must reform the electoral process or we will cease to exist as a viable entity. We will become the suzerain of our creditors, Japan and Germany.

Such a situation would not affect the magnates in the slightest since, by nature, the magnates are anational, not national, or even international; they are above all government—anational. One-person-one-vote solved the problem of the ecological equity of the representational basis of government. The problem is that money has made one-person-one-vote irrelevant. To restore relevance to one-person-one-vote, private money must be removed from the electoral process. We have privatized the electoral process to the extent that it no longer works for the citizens-sovereign, and while citizens-sovereign's money is not spent on elections, neither are the citizens-sovereign being served by government.

Let's start with the reasons we have our government. Firstly, there is the founding document of the nation, Statute-at-Large #1 of the United States Statutes-at-Large, the Declaration of Independence. The recipe for government in the Declaration is an autecological analysis for the reason for government, that is to secure certain unalienable rights for individual persons. The sacrosanct text is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That when any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such princples and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Since The Articles of Confederation were superseded by the Constitution, they are no longer relevant. It is useful to point out, however, that the Articles were alienable—in the same context that the Constitution is alienable. Some future convention following all the niceties of the law could convene and give us a new governing document superseding the Constitution. On the other hand, the Declaration Of Independence is unalienable. It can not be changed without overthrowing the nation and establishing a new nation. A revolution could overthrow our present government, declare the nation to be in a "State of Nature," and establish a new government on new principles. Or we could be conquered by an outside military force and a new form of government could be imposed upon us. In only these two ways can the Declaration be superseded. As long as our nation proceeds from the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris, the Declaration is the bedrock upon which the nation rests.

Having said that, and having established that the fundamental document of our existence as a nation is the. Declaration of Independence, we note that it is the Constitution that rules our daily existence as a nation. It is the set of rules by which we govern ourselves and conduct our lives and the life of the nation.

The Constitution also has a recipe for government. It is based in part upon autecological principles and in part on synecological principles. The Preamble contains the recipe and follows:

We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,

• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defence,
• promote the general Welfare,
• and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America

Justice and Welfare are autecological concepts and the common defense and domestic Tranquility are synecological concepts. Autecological relates to the individual. Synecological relates to the community.

The principle that is established with not one scintilla of doubt is that the people are the sovereign—the citizens-sovereign. We are a government, by, of, and for the citizens-sovereign. We are also a republic where the supreme power is held by the citizens-sovereign and their elected representatives. Anything that diminishes this simple concept derogates the republic. The Preamble provides a succinct checklist against which to judge our elected Representatives, Senators, and the President. Just what have they done for us lately that promotes the items in the Preamble? One day Idt should devise a score card for the Congress and the President based on these items.

It should be patently obvious that in order to get the consent of the governed, the governed have to vote. Voting, in our republic which requires the consent of the governed, is not a privilege but an obligation. Our electoral system must incorporate this obligation in law. No person should be forced to vote for one or another candidate or issue for which they have no interest or perhaps even have contempt, but no person should be excused from appearing at the polling place on the appropriate day and voting either for the candidate and/or issue withholding his/her vote for either/both of these, or merely "voting" present. Failure to do so should result in a fine of 25 dollars. The funds from the failure-to-vote fines should be dedicated to the electoral process. This obligation would arise at the Federal level as the Declaration (consent of the governed) is at that level; therefore, the obligation would be mandatory in all elections at all levels of government. We are living in breach of our social contract as spelled out in the Declaration if we fail in our obligation to vote. If people constituting a majority of those registered ever should vote only that they are present, the election should be nullified and a new one scheduled.

Every person in the United States should be registered to vote the instant he/she is born. Their registration to vote should occur when they are assigned a Social Security number, and that should occur the minute the individual is born.

Voter fraud should be minimized by requiring residents to live in the jurisdiction in which they vote for a long enough time to establish who they are and where their residence is. This should not take more than 30 days to verify, and should be capable of resolution in 10 days or 10 minutes.

A comprehensive computer registration file should be maintained for all citizens, whether eligible to vote or not, and should constitute a central reference for all election officials throughout the nation. The central computer should be maintained and operated by the U. S. Census Bureau. All election offices in the United States should be able to access this computer 24 hours a day. It should be on the optic fiber superhighway.

No state or agent of any state within the United States should be permitted to interfere, delay, obfuscate, confuse, or in any way jeopardize the right to register or vote, on the part of any citizen-sovereign of the United States. Such interference should be a felony class violation of the U.S. penal code and subject to fine and imprisonment.

While the Constitution leaves to the states the business of administrating the election procedures for the United States, this is not a free form grant of power to interfere with or regulate the voting process. The 50 states are to expedite the requirement of the Declaration, namely, to see that the consent of the governed is obtained in each election. Anything less than full, expeditious compliance is in derogation of the states' obligation to fulfill the terms of the Declaration to which they are subject as the Federal government is.

The privatization of the electoral process must cease forthwith. No private funds should be expended in any manner that could in any way influence the outcome of an election. The supreme power in a republic is held by the citizens-sovereign and their elected representatives. This relationship can not be tainted with private influence.

All officials at all levels of our government should represent the people who pay their salaries and for whom the government was established in the first place. The citizens-sovereign pay for government in the form of taxation; the citizens-sovereign should also pay for the electoral process inasmuch as it is an integral part of government. If the citizens-sovereign paid for the electoral process as well as for the government process, there would be a greater possibility that elected officials would work for the citizens-sovereign. This is not a theoretical state ment. Currently, the elected officials of our government too often work for the people who pay their campaign expenses. As John Bricker, Senator from Ohio, once said, "If I don't represent the railroads in the Congress who will?" That doesn't leave too much doubt as to where his campaign money came from.

Who should represent the private interests in the Congress and other levels of government? Lobbyists, of course. Elected officials should not constitute a built-in lobby in the legislature. The use of private money in small amounts or in-kind service should bring with it misdemeanor citations. Large amounts of money should invoke felony charges.

Depending upon the level of government the elected office serves, small grants should be available upon application for individuals who want to serve by seeking election. Primaries should be held to reduce the field, and run-off elections held if necessary. For the general elections, larger but still modest sums of money would be made available, and free advertising would be available in the local newspapers and on the local radio and television. Newspapers should have an obligation to assist in good government in exdhange for their hallowed place in our system Of governance. As radio and television operate in the public domain their participation should be part of their licensing procedure.

Just imagine a primary where not one or two unemployed lawyers were on each party ticket, but where 50 to 100 persons were on each slate! The electoral system has to encourage, not discourage people to seek public office. To that end, many should be encouraged to compete in the beginning of the process and then be eliminated competitively, not arbitrarily for lack of a few bucks. Who runs for office should be dependent upon will, not bucks, and who makes it all the way to an election should be dependent upon brains and skill, not fat cat contributions.

The process will cost millions,, maybe even billions, but it will establish the dream of the Founders and Framers. It will establish a nation which will have justified the death and injury of those who fought its wars. It will establish a republic where, in the words of Phillip Mazzai, "All men (persons) ought to be born free and indpendent." It will result in a republic by the people, of the people, and for the people that will long endure as a bastion of hope and freedom for all the world to emulate. Let's hear it for the Founders and the Framers.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility