JEQuidam

Does George Washington's warning about political parties resonate with Americans in 2008? Or will this just not make sense to people? "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty." — George Washington, September 19, 1796 George Washington spoke at length about the "baneful effects" of political parties: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Baneful_Parties.htm

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the answers provided by Senators Obama and McCain at Saddleback: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Saddleback_16AUG2008.htm

By chance, is anyone here familiar with the paper entitled "Efficient rounding of approximate designs"? By Pukelsheim and Rieder, it was published in Biometrika, 1992 (79, 4, pp. 763-70). I would like to discuss it with someone who understands it in order to determine whether or not my take on it is correct. It is a rather obscure subject; the paper's summary is as follows: "Discretization methods to round an approximate design into an exact design for a given sample size n are discussed. There is a unique method, called efficient rounding, which has the smallest loss of efficiency under a wide family of optimality criteria. The efficient rounding method is a multiplier method of apportionment which otherwise is known as the method of John Quincy Adams or the method of smallest divisors."

I don't disagree with your larger point, but I don't believe there should be an amendment that tells the the states exactly how they should implement the EC. That is a state-by-state matter. For example, I believe that the states should discontinue the winner-take-all convention (as Maine and Nebraska have already done), but that change should not be imposed on the states by a federal amendment. It helps if you understand that we (the people) elect these electors. They are prominent members of the community. You can be certain that if an Elector who was chosen for the McCain slate then voted for Obama (or vice versa) that elector would not want to return home after the convention. (Like the Aussies, we Yanks can be rather beligerent but, unlike the Aussies, we still got our guns.) So why bother maintaining the EC? Well, as a practical matter, it would require a constitutional amendment to eliminate it. (I would oppose such an amendment.) The only compelling reason for eliminating the EC is the risk that the EC vote will not reflect the PV, which happened in the 2000 election (where the EC went to Bush but the PV went to Gore), and that happened even though all the electors voted as directed by their electorates! As was shown by two mathematicians, that result came about because we have too few congressional districts to ensure a predictable result. That analysis is provided on this page: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/section_IX.htm#B (The "Neubauer-Zeitlin Analysis".) I also favor the Electoral College because it would prevent, IMO, a situation where a nefarious candidate is voted into office by a plurality of the popular vote. For example, let's say we had Presidential candidates A, B, C and D and, further, assume that "D" expressed totalitarian views and appeared to be bent on undermining our liberties (but he promised to make the trains run on time). Normally, such a candidate would not garner significant popular support. However, two days before the election (in this hypothetical) a bomb is detonated in the Congress, killing many people; candidate "D" then announces that the bomb was the plot of foreign extremists and that he would bring law and order! Here is the popular vote result: A: 18%, B: 23%, C: 29% and D: 30%. So, even though 70% of the voters did NOT want D as the President, they would have him anyway if the popular vote prevailed. There is no doubt in my mind that the good people who comprise the Electoral College would prevent that situation, for the sake of the nation, by uniting behind an acceptable candidate (e.g., "C"). Their electorate would demand that of them. Sadly, that has become true, but it was not supposed to be that way. Our states were, in effect, nations. Lost to memory is the fact that the word "Congress" was used to describe a meeting of nations. Our situation has devolved as the states have allowed their balls to be cut off so they have essentially become federal counties. Repealing the 17th Amendment would help reverse that. There will need to be an implementation committee to figure all that out. Personally, I'm inclined to allow the districts to be drawn according to the local postal areas; i.e., combine the local carrier routes until they add to 50,000.

Good luck with that. Let us know how that works out. As I earlier pointed out, the same two-party duopoly that controls the federal Reps controls the local Reps. The Reps primarily serve their respective parties with regard to maintaining the status quo. Real change (as opposed to the more comfortable rhetorical change) will not come about until we take back our Reps from the parties and the special interests.

...and I know of no other way to do that than by downsizing the congressional districts; that would make the mega-party obsolete. Better yet, with small districts, a very large number of Representatives would be independents (as many were back in the early 1800s). I don't need my Rep to represent party interests; the Representative should represent the citizens of his/her district!

The states' governments are controlled by the same two-party duopoly that controls the federal House; hence, the states' goverments will never do what you expect of them (i.e., fix it). As I've argued previously on this thread, increasing our number of congressional districts to 6,000 will break the two-party stranglehold on our government, and then that would allow other necessary initiatives to proceed (such as repealing the 17th amendment).

Like you, I've heard about them, but don't know much about them. But, my feeling is that's why we pay our state legislators the big bucks, to make decisions more difficult than determining the state's highway budget. I don't see how moving the "election battle" out of the huge arena of millions of citizens, and into the smaller arena of the state legislature, would make them any worse than they already are. Certainly the candidates would not have to raise the millions and millions of dollars necessary to fund a mass marketing campaign to all the citizens. In any case, if we had 6,000 congressional districts, that would provide the citizenry with all the representation we need. We can then return the Senators to the states' legislators.

Agree, however, because of the Senator's massively sized districts, they still are dependent on the financial and political support of lobbyists and special interests. Repealling the 17th amendment (so that the state's legislatures can choose their Senators) would virtually eliminate that.

I believe that the 17th amendment should be repealed in conjunction with increasing our total number of congressional districts.

You are correct, and that is an extremely important "nit". That is true for some of the FFs, but certainly not all. The "people" they tended to trust least were those who aspired to hold power. In any case, most, if not all of the FFs, certainly trusted "the people" (in the general sense) more than they trusted the goverment.

I wish I had the time to respond to all that. And, in any case, those points would be better addressed in a new thread (that perhaps you could start). Your contentions were evidently posed to be merely provocative rather than insightful. (Did you ever hear the expression that "sarcasm is the protest of the weak"?) It is further difficult to compare what is essentially a large island nation (with the population of Texas) to a much larger 50-state union. Being a Southerner, I will respond to the following point though. It's been about 150 years since our so called "Civil War" (technically it was a war of secession). Over 600,000 good people died in that battle, the cause of which is best explained by the following quote: "I have given as fair an idea of the debate on this question, in the convention that framed the Constitution, as possible. It was then and there that the hydra of slavery struck its fangs in the Constitution; and once inoculated with the poison of the monster, the government was only able to purify itself in the flames of a great civil war...." -- Historian George Washington Williams

OK. I thought it might require an amendment (rather than just legislation). Anway, our House of 435 will never propose such an amendment. There are far too many developers and real estate investors who want to maintain this expanded eminent domain. Of course, I believe that we will have to greatly expand our representation in order for this to be accomplished. BTW, everyone should be sure to watch “Porked: Earmarks for Profit”. It is an excellent (and disturbing) documentary produced by Fox News. I assume they will broadcast it again. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,361061,00.html

Your clarification is, of course, correct. And the fact that the House can orginate bills for raising revenue is a power that they have that the Senate does not. Well said. And the only way to correct that problem is via the Congress and, as I said earlier, they lack the balls and the initiative to do what is necessary. Why? Because their primary constituency is the special interests that provide them with the financial support and/or voting blocks necessary to maintain their sinecure. We the people are usually, at best, the Reps secondary constituency.

Excellent! So then I assume you would not object if a larger federal House (per the original posting here) constrained the decision of SCOTUS on that particular matter. We are now in agreement! (I refer to a "larger" federal House because the current one, of 435, will never have the balls or iniative to do that job.)