Change, What Is It Good For?

The late Justice Thurgood Marshall once said of the Constitution: 

“Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a Civil War, and momentous transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental policy.”

If you ask me (and if you have clicked onto this blog, you have asked me, whether you like it or not), I think Justice Marshall was right. And the validity of his statement is not an issue to be discussed only by Harvard Law students while really high on good weed. It matters to all of us. 

Unfortunately, we are all too filled up with daily concerns to have any time to think about these things. Especially now. Will Coronavirus kill me? Will it destroy my job? Will Trump make me drink bleach?

Try to take a moment, though, and think about the implications of Justice Marshall’s statement. What questions now might we ask to improve the way we govern ourselves.

In that spirit, I offer this question: should we be a democracy or shouldn’t we be? This is not as easy a question as it might seem.  There are two very valid sides.

If we want democracy, then we have to implement it.  One way to start is kind of obvious. Let’s make the Electoral College as much a part of history as jousting. If there is any system that the Founders gave us that doesn’t work anymore, the Electoral College is right there just below slavery. How can any country that calls itself a “democracy” elect a leader who received less votes. The Electoral College has as much right to have an educational name as did Trump University.

And there is a way to do this without changing the Framer’s Constitution. The states decide how their Electors are chosen. There is a Compact now being circulated among the states where any state that signs up will then award its Electors to the candidate received the most votes in the country. The Compact won’t take effect until the Electoral votes of the agreeing states total 270, the amount needed to get elected. 

This solution is not out of the question.  There are already states totaling 196 electoral votes that have signed. Only 74 more are necessary.  States with another 84 votes have the Compact bills pending in their Legislatures. Pennsylvania, with 20 votes, is one of them. New York and New Jersey have already signed.

And how about one more idea? How about we use the best law we have to encourage people to do things, to encourage them to vote?  That law is the Internal Revenue Code.  Pay people to vote. Suppose everyone who votes gets a $100 credit against their taxes.  Not a deduction, a credit – a dollar for dollar reduction.  People clip coupons to save a few cents. Why won’t they vote to save $100? 

Well, that’s one side of the argument – the side that says we should be a democracy.  What if we shouldn’t be. 

We are hardly the same world that we were in 1787.  In that world, the issues people confronted were not simple ones, but they were a lot simpler.  There were no nuclear threats to destroy the planet in minutes. There were no events occurring in countries tens of thousands of miles away that had a daily impact on them. And so on. Maybe in that world, ordinary people could be trusted to make wise decisions.

But, even in that world, the Framers didn’t want to give much power to those people. Setting aside the ludicrous notion that only people who owned land could vote (not to mention slaves and women), even people who could vote didn’t choose Senators. They were chosen by State Legislatures.  Hell, the idea of creating the Senate in the first place – a body whose representation was not based on population was undemocratic.  And, of course, there was the cursed Electoral College.

Are ordinary people, like me, are qualified to decide the great questions of our time? I know a lot about sports, but I haven’t picked a Super Bowl winner in decades. 

Now, that doesn’t mean that my opinions and those of others are worthless.  They are worth thinking about.  Hence, this blog.  But, does that justify having the temerity to think that mine and other opinions like it should be controlling?  Not a chance.

Despite the emotional resonance of the rallying cry, “power to the people,” what sense does that really make? What other organization runs itself like that? Do businesses take a vote among their employees over what their marketing or their pricing strategies should be? People get MBA’s for a reason (I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I suppose it’s something). 

So, how do we change into a non-democratic nation?  That’s not as easy an answer as the one about how we get more democratic.  But, as you may have guessed, I have a suggestion.   

Entry into every other form of enterprise is screened by an examination of qualification.  Try to get into a college without demonstrating why they should let you. Try to graduate without passing the exams (except maybe, again, from Trump University). Try to get a job without sending a resume and passing their oral exams better known as “interviews.” Let’s apply the same process to voting.

Of course, voter qualification tests have a horrible history.  They were used to prevent blacks from voting.  But, that doesn’t mean that a fair and equitably administered voter qualification test would be just as bad. It wouldn’t require a Jeopardy winner to pass it.  It would only ask very basic questions. We have experts who can do that. Maybe the polling people?  Maybe the SAT people?  Maybe not the Republican Party.

There are other questions about our system that we need to be askingl.  Maybe those can be subjects of future blogs. The point, as Justice Marshall made it, is that change has made us what we are. is what We have to continue to change with the needs of the times in which we live.

This time is for me is cocktail hour.  Soon, I will change into someone who doesn’t give a shit about any of this.