Chapter 1: Justification
Is anyone in America happy with our political system? Every year our culture war deepens and our politics take another turn down the vicious cycle of dysfunction.
The structure of our government is the root cause of our political dysfunction: an unrepresentative Legislature stymied by two-party hyper-partisan gridlock; an Executive, elected by an archaic mechanism, gobbling up the power left in the vacuum of decades of Legislative inaction; and a Judiciary losing credibility with the public due to blatant corruption and its weaponization of its authority by partisan judges for their partisan ends.
Our Constitution is failing us. It’s time to change it.
We pride ourselves on being the leader of the democratic world, yet by today’s standards America is a deficient democracy. And if democracy means equal representation—one person one vote—we have never been a democracy and we never will be unless and until we address the fundamental contradictions of our founding documents, the Declaration and Constitution.
In the first, we declare it a self-evident truth that “All [humans] are created equal.” But in the second, we undermine our declaration by implementing profoundly undemocratic structures of government. These anti-democratic structures of our government were and are intentional, and have worked and continue to work as intended. The early United States was built on the backs of millions of enslaved people, and slavery as an institution was ended only after 4 years of bloody Civil War. Part of the reason slavery lasted as long as it did was due to the power of the undemocratic Senate and an unrepresentative House, which granted additional voting power not just to small states, but to the enslavers specifically. Slavery is over, but the Senate endures.
The structure of our Constitution limits our government from upholding our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: it is failing us on climate and migration, it is failing to defend our human rights, and it is failing us on affordable housing while saddling us with medical and student debt. So, in the language of the Declaration, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [certain unalienable Rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
We can and should build upon the Framers’ Constitution, but only insofar as we deem it worthy, relevant, useful, and fair by our standards today. The Framers brilliantly devised a novel system of government. But they are not gods. Their words are not commandments; their government imperfect. They themselves knew this! As Thomas Jefferson said, “No society can make a perpetual constitution… The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being… If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” To change the Constitution is forever our right.
In this book, I propose structural reforms to the Constitution to implement a government that tries to live up to that self-evident truth that all humans are created equal. I modeled these reforms by redrawing every Congressional district and found that, with a new system, over three quarters of Americans would get to vote in a competitive Congressional district, far better than the current 10 percent of Americans who will have the opportunity to vote in a competitive district in 2024. With so many competitive elections, new parties, with new ideas, would gain representation in Congress. The two-party establishment would be forced to adapt or die. And rebalancing the checks between our three branches of government would usher in a new era of American democracy. An era of political stability, and with less economically disruptive civil strife.
The powers that be will not like these reforms. But after January 6th and with the 2024 election upon us, America’s political status quo is untenable. As of December 2023, 72% of Americans were dissatisfied with the working of American democracy! People speak openly of civil war! Disillusionment and cynicism permeate every corner of our politics, and for good reason. I believe the antidote to our political cynicism, if there is any, is a positive and realistic vision for what our government could be.
This book attempts to describe such a vision.