]]> http://www.epluribusunumblog.com/2011/08/buddy-roemer-new-order-for-democracy-for-sale/feed/ 2 http://www.epluribusunumblog.com/2011/02/the-end-bribery-of-congress-amendment-and-how-to-pass-it-despite-congress/ http://www.epluribusunumblog.com/2011/02/the-end-bribery-of-congress-amendment-and-how-to-pass-it-despite-congress/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:59:05 +0000 Ara Rubyan http://www.epluribusunumblog.com/?p=7939 Continue reading →]]> In a recent post of mine, I proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit political donations — by corporations — to sitting members of Congress and the White House, aka “legal bribery:”

Section 1: No elected member of the legislative or executive branch shall accept money, in-kind donations, offers of employment or anything of value from non-citizens of the United States.

Section 2. Nothing contained in this Amendment shall be construed to allow Congress or a State to make any law abridging the freedom of the press.

Go read my previous post; it goes into more detail about how this might work and why we need it.

For now, I want to address the tactical methods whereby the people could enact this amendment despite the Congress’ hesitation to restrict the ready flow of donations into their campaign coffers.

First, read the text of Article V of the Constitution:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

…and here’s what it means:

If at least two-thirds of the legislatures of the states so request, Congress is required to call a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments. This provision, many scholars argue, allows for a check on the power of the Congress to limit potential constitutional amendments. In fact, several proponents of constitutional revision, such as Larry J. Sabato in his book A More Perfect Constitution believe this is the only feasible way for large-scale constitutional change to occur.

This seems to suggest that state legislatures are the pressure point onto which public opinion must be applied. It would seem that the best way to affect this action would be to make it a campaign issue during each state’s legislative election campaign. In other words, force legislative candidates to sign a pledge that they will vote to call a convention for the purpose of proposing this amendment. No pledge, no vote. Michael Pertschuk wrote about this sort of citizen activism in The DeMarco Factor. And of course Americans for Tax Reform’s (i.e., Grover Norquist) “Tax Pledge” is probably the most famous example on the other side.

But are there any historical precedents for this sort of grassroots activism at the Constitutional level?

The state legislatures have, in times past, used their power to apply for a national convention in order to pressure Congress into proposing the desired amendment. For example, the movement to amend the Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. Senators began to see such proposals regularly pass the House of Representatives only to die in the Senate from the early 1890s onward. As time went by, more and more state legislatures adopted resolutions demanding that a convention be called, thus pressuring the Senate to finally relent and approve what later became the Seventeenth Amendment for fear that such a convention—if permitted to assemble—might stray to include issues above and beyond just the direct election of U.S. Senators.

There are “pro’s” and “con’s” to this approach:

• On the “pro” side, I think you’d quickly find that such a movement would gather support up and down the political spectrum, from “tea party” Republicans to progressive Democrats.
• On the “con” side would be the fear that the movement would be opening up a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.

Also: would it happen soon enough to make a real difference? Well, like the old saying goes: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second best time is right now. We need to start this at the state level during the 2012 election cycle to maximize the leverage over the mid-term elections of 2014. If successful, we could expect to see the amendment by the 2016 election cycle — at the earliest.

Also: Is this amendment the best way to end “legalized bribery?” Well, it’s a start. There are all sorts of loopholes that would need to be dealt with down the line — with additional amendments if necessary. The most obvious loophole is that those challenging the incumbent would be exempt from this amendment. The best reason for allowing this is that it levels the playing field without resorting to tricks like term limits. But the downside is that corporations would simply fund the challengers in order to sink the incumbents. The solution? Public financing of all candidates. Read this post for more details and some fresh ideas on how this could work.

But public financing is a separate battle. A similar movement would have to be organized to deal with that without slowing this one down.

In summary, here are the steps you’d want to follow at the state level:

1. Run a reputable poll showing broad support for the measure. As I stated earlier, it shouldn’t be hard to show.
2. Gather citizen support — via town hall meetings, for example — to vote FOR any legislator who “signs the pledge” to call for a Constitutional amendment in the next session of the state legislature after the election. Similarly, gather citizen support to vote AGAINST any legislator who refuses to sign the pledge — or breaks their promise once elected.
3. It may well be that it takes more than one election cycle to get the necessary votes in the state legislature. If so, repeat the cycle in the next election campaign.

We should have done this a long time ago. No matter. Let’s work together now to make it happen. There’s a lot at stake. The hour is getting late. The sooner we start, the better.

No, really. You can get a FREE pocket sized copy of the US Constitution to carry around just like Dennis Kucinich for only $3.00 shipping. Right Here.

Today is Constitution Day: The day in 1787, after being sequestered for four months, 55 delegates from 13 independent States emerged with a unifying document that would serve as a blueprint for Chairman Max Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee’s exhaustive effort to similarly work behind closed doors for months on end, eventually coming up with a pig of a health care bill no one on either side of the aisle will vote for.  (The Constitutional Convention delegates took an August recess just like our current Congress, but only for 10 days – slackers.)

You might find it interesting that our founding liberal, church-hating, civil rights guaranteeing, African-American loving, philandering third President – Thomas Jefferson – the man who headed the longest-lived freely elected political party, the Democratic-Republicans (now the Democratic Party) was in FRANCE during the signing ceremony.  John Adams, the original Massachusetts Liberal and brother of the original Teabagger, Sam, was away in the UK at the time.

More fun facts surrounding the signing of the Constitution include which State was misspelled and the name of the Clerk responsible for the typo (pen-o?) and how much he was paid to insult those God and Gun Clinging folks where they wrote the damn thing.

Money fact:

The national government spent $4.3 million during the first session of Congress from 1789-1791. During the last year that George Washington was President of the United States (1796-1797), the entire cost of running the federal government was $5,727,000. [Thus the tradition of growing government was born, Washington increased the cost of Federal Government by 33% in eight years. That would be like George W. Bush going from the $1.9 Trillion 2001 budget to $2.6 Trillion in 2008 - instead of the $2.9 Trillion budget he actually submitted. Oops.]

Scary fact:

The word “democracy” does not appear once in the Constitution.

So…

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee mixed it up in a remarkably civil discourse about marriage. They both made some fair points as in this exchange:

STEWART: Segregation used to be the law until the courts intervened.

HUCK: There’s a big difference between a person being black and a person practicing a lifestyle and engaging in a marital relationship.

STEWART: Okay, actually this is helpful because it gets to the crux of it. … And I’ll tell you this: Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality. And the protections that we have for religion — we protect religion. And talk about a lifestyle choice — that is absolutely a choice. Gay people don’t choose to be gay. At what age did you choose to not be gay?

Here’s the video:

[Note: if you haven't already done so, check out Huckabee's TV show. I think this guy has a real future in politics.]

Also in the news this morning, is a related comment from Dkos reader gladkov about how our notions of marriage have changed over the centuries from what the Bible teaches:

Fantastic! Minnesota Public Radio decides to cover the political protests in Minneapolis but in their long description of low protester turnout doesn’t see fit to mention that:

” Homes of college-aid protesters were raided by rifle-wielding police forces. Journalists were forcibly detained at gun point. Lawyers on the scene to represent the detainees were handcuffed. Computers, laptops, journals, diaries, and political pamphlets were seized from people’s homes. And all of this occurred against U.S. citizens, without a single act of violence having taken place, and nothing more serious than traffic blockage even alleged by authorities to have been planned.”

or:

”This is Eileen Clancy . . . The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don’t know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.”

There was a day when a journalist (or at least his or her editor) knew the difference between dog-bites-man – a few violent protesters at a political convention – and man-bites-dog – government surveillance and harassment of political opponents, illegal searches and seizures of private homes, arresting reporters and defense attorneys without probable cause, etc. The fact that the establishment press has decided to forgo that simple analysis when observing government conduct is, perhaps, the biggest man-bites-dog story of early 21st Century America.

Thank goodness for our ever-vigilant police state and our “liberal media” . You must be so glad to not be one of those dirty effing hippies…

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

This one’s huge.  From Politico’s Mike Allen (Hat Tip: TPM):

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from [Iraq's former intel director] Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Obligatory quotes from the likes of Bill O’Reilly are included which helped spread the fabrication written about at the end of 2003 on the front page of the London Daily Telegraph the very day they (supposedly?) captured Saddam, and the reporter was interviewed on Meet The Press soon after.  The letter was crafted by the CIA, but used to “prove” the 9/11 hijackers were connected and even trained by Iraq.

They absolutely lied us into a war.  Suskind seems to concentrate on the angle that it was illegal to use the CIA this way, influencing domestic politics, and that’s grounds for impeachment.  It seems to me there’s got to be a law somewhere out there that mandates the gas chamber for anyone who commits mass murder on the scale this represents.  The invasion of Iraq was not an act of war, it was an act of homicidal mania.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

Evidently, they secreted Habbush to Jordan and paid him $5 million in hush money, even though he still has a $1 million bounty on his head at the State Department.

The legendary tone-deafness and refusal to listen to advice that didn’t match the White House’s pre-conceived notions is also explored as well as a study on the rise of “plausible deniability” to a high art form under Dick Cheney’s influence.

So just how much time and money and lives did it cost us to go through the motions and act like they were really looking for WMD’s they knew weren’t there?

And for that matter, do you really trust them when the likes of Osama bin Laden conveniently shows up on our TV screens on the eve of an election, his authenticity “verified” by a CIA who could also magically produce letters “proving” the biggest lie of the 21st century?

Somebody’s got to charge someone with a goddamn crime sooner or later dammit, or we might as well shut this charade we call Truth, justice and the American Way down.

We are being robbed of our liberties. And Obama and McCain are equals in that theft. Both deserve to lose for their failure to defend the very essence of our country.

Well, yes, but … tomorrow is another day.

In other words liberty, and the fight for it, is an ongoing process. Soon, the ACLU will sue to overturn the legislation and it will wind it’s way through the courts. Maybe we’ll luck out and the SCOTUS will strike it down. Stranger things have happened — even with this version of the court.

Better yet: Obama will (hopefully) win and the next Congress may have an opportunity to reverse the legislation as well.

Then there’s the prospect of Atty Gen. Edwards prosecuting every single one of the telcos on criminal charges.

So it’s never “over.”

One thing for sure: FIRST, you need to win the freaking election, or most of what I just said is flushed down the toilet.

I was struck by Mark’s mention of the founding fathers and of Voltaire; Franklin in particular held him in high regard — no surprise there. I also note Mark’s mention of John Adams who, as President, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law, a heinous blot on constitutional history (part of which was still legal in 2008). Despite that, we remember Adams as a giant of the American Revolution, easily Jefferson’s equal. That Adams could be both things — a genius and yet a seriously flawed politician — should give us some insight into the quandaries (and temptations) of leadership in the American system of governance.

So here’s the thing: those of you who want to quit the game at this point are ceding the field to others who take comfort in our disunity. We’ll survive yesterday’s vote — one of many to come — in the Senate. But only if we don’t break apart. Tomorrow the sun will come up again and for many days to come. We’ll get another chance to get it right.

Attention should be paid to Russ Feingold, a champion of civil liberties but also a politician:

Maddow: With this vote, voters have to be asking if there is any meaningful difference between the parties on executive power, between the Democratic vision of executive power and the GOP. Certainly your vision of executive power is different than the president’s. But can you say the same for your party?

Feingold: I’m very concerned about it. People have a great right to be disappointed and to look at the 2006 election both rigard to Iraq and say, “What are they doing?” But having a Democratic president, in particular Barack Obama, should allow us to greatly change this mistake.

Barack Obama believes in the Constitution, he’s a Constitutional scholar. I believe he will have a better chance to look at these powers that have been given to the Executive branch. And even though he’ll be running the Executive branch, I think he will understand and help take the lead in fixing some of the worst provisions.

So this is a huge setback. It would have been better for Democrats to stand together and not let it happen in the first place because it is much harder to change it after the fact. But I do believe that Barack Obama is well-positioned in terms of his knowledge and his background and his beliefs to correct this. So I do think the people have a right be disappointed, but they also have a right to hope for change on this issue particularly, starting in January.

As Franklin said, we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]