Majority Rule Is a Bit of a Constitutional Myth in America

By JIM SMITH

Among the many things we have come to know about American history, thanks to Donald Trump and his allies, is that the United States of America was not created as a democracy or even as a democratic republic. The anti-democratic provisions of the U.S. Constitution have been exploited by the right to assure that minority rule remains our country’s ongoing reality.

The origins of minority rule can be found in the compromises agreed to at the founding constitutional convention, which was called to replace the original “Articles of Confederation,” which were tilted even more toward minority rule. Those articles gave each of the 13 original states one vote and required unanimous agreement to amend them.

The U.S. Senate, which gives equal power — two votes — to every state regardless of population, preserved that undemocratic principle. Thus we have a situation where Wyoming has the same number of votes in the Senate as California, even though the latter has 65 times the population of the former.

With the less populated states having vastly different values and politics than the most populated states, the result is what we have today, where Senators representing 40 percent of the population outnumber Senators representing 60 percent of the population.

This will never change, because the process of amending the Constitution also has at its endpoint a situation in which all states carry the same weight in ratifying any amendment.

The most offensive violation of voting equality is found in the District of Columbia, where 705,000 Americans — more than live in Wyoming or Vermont — have no voting representation in either the House or Senate.

Then, of course, we have the Electoral College created in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which is anti-democratic in the number of electors assigned to each state. And it gives discretion to each state as to how it appoints its electors. All but two states have adopted a winner-take-all rule for appointing electors, which is about as anti-democratic as it can get.

But wait, there’s more!  The Constitution allows any state, through its legislature, to ignore the presidential vote of its population and send whoever it wants to the Electoral College. Thanks to gerrymandering, most legislatures could go completely against the will of its citizens if it so chooses.

As if the Constitution doesn’t do enough damage to the principle of one person/one vote, the Senate’s filibuster rule makes it impossible to pass critical legislation approved by up to 59 of its 100 members. And that’s a rule which the Senate imposes upon itself. Since no law goes to the President for his signature without a vote of both houses of Congress, the U.S. Senate routinely kills legislation approved by the majority of Representatives in the House and even by the majority of its members.

So here we are. America has a form of government that is less democratic than most countries in the “free world.” And now, as we are learning from the Select Committee on the January 6 Assault on the Capitol, the Republican Party is taking maximum advantage of the Constitution’s anti-democratic provisions to cement minority rule in the United States.

What I haven’t mentioned above is the origin and reasons for the anti-democratic provisions of the Constitution. It was all about white supremacy. The creation of a Senate which gave the southern slave states the same number of votes as the more populous northern states, was all about preserving slavery as a southern institution.

In my July 28, 2022, column (which you can find at www.TalkingTurkey.online)  I describe how the Constitution was written to protect and preserve slavery. There was in fact slavery in all 13 colonies, and the majority of “founder fathers” were slaveholders. The Declaration of Independence expressed some nice sentiments and railed against King George for “making slaves” of colonists, but when it came to forming a government, the colonists chose to protect their own institution of slavery.

We are aware by now that racism is the “original sin” of the United States, and that systemic racism has been and continues to be a factor in our political life. And since any change to our Constitution must follow the rules of that document, we are in fact shackled by it into a future of minority rule.

While right-wing extremists like to brandish their AR-15s (as they did in the Michigan statehouse) and talk of civil war, they could probably relax, because our Constitution and our courts are on their side.

 

This is America today: Neighbors call 911 on Black Realtor showing home to Black father and son

 

Racial Profiling Has ‘No Place in Our Country’

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Real estate pro Eric Brown, who is Black, was showing a home in Wyoming, Mich., last Sunday to client Roy Thorne and Thorne’s 15-year-old son, also both Black, when they noticed police surrounding the house. All three were ordered by police to exit the home with their hands up. They were placed in handcuffs. “[The police] keep their guns drawn on us until all of us were in cuffs," Thorne said.

Brown told police he was a real estate agent, produced his credentials, and explained he was showing the home to potential buyers. The Wyoming Police Department said officers immediately removed the handcuffs and told the men that neighbors had reported a break-in.

On Friday, in a prepared statement, NAR President Charlie Oppler responded to the incident:

“The detainment of Eric Brown, a REALTOR® from Michigan, and his clients during a recent home showing was deeply disturbing. Brown, his client, and his client’s 15-year-old son, all of whom are Black, had guns drawn upon them by local police and were detained after neighbors reported a break-in at the property. While, thankfully, neither Brown nor his clients were physically harmed in the incident, racial profiling—and the humiliation, indignity, and trauma that comes with it—has no place in our country. NAR’s top priority is the safety and well-being of all our members as we work tirelessly each and every day to make the American Dream of owning a home a reality for all.”

Brown told local media that he believes race was a factor in the police officers’ response, which the police have publicly denied. A week earlier, police said there had been a burglary at the same address that resulted in an arrest. A neighbor had contacted police to report that the same suspect had returned.

“The level of response and aggressiveness of the response . . . really threw me back,” Brown told the WOOD TV station. “Am I just automatically the criminal? Because that’s pretty much how we were treated in that situation.”

The Greater Regional Alliance of REALTORS®, Brown’s local board, said in a statement to members that the vast majority of comments it has fielded about the incident have expressed “support and pride in how Eric handled himself as the whole thing unfolded.

“The GRAR Board of Directors will be discussing Eric's experience at its upcoming meeting to determine what GRAR can or should be doing both in response to this event and in how we can contribute to the healing of the unrest in our communities that these types of situations incite,” the statement reads. “In the meantime, GRAR leadership will be doing its homework to attempt to ascertain the facts so that it does not contribute to the polarizing impact that can potentially result from this type of incident.”

https://www.woodtv.com/news/kent-county/it-threw-me-back-realtor-client-handcuffed-at-wyoming-home-after-911-call/

Fox News, OAN & Newsmax Are ‘Killing People’; Facebook Is Just a Multiplier

 

When President Biden said Facebook was “killing people,” I think we all understood what he meant, though he was forced to elaborate the next day.

My first reaction was that social media like Facebook and Twitter are only multipliers of the disinformation being broadcast by Fox News hosts, One America News (OAN), Newsmax and other right-wing media. They are the ones providing the fake news and disinformation about Covid-19 and the vaccines.

One thing I have observed about my emails from right-wing readers is that they rarely speak for themselves, especially in their social media posts. Rather, they retweet and “like” memes, and repeat what they heard on Fox News, et al. They can’t, it seems, think for themselves, only parrot what others tell them that resonates with their inner and often unspoken beliefs and biases.

One term for this phenomenon is “confirmation bias,” which Wikipedia defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.”  I realize that confirmation bias exists on both sides of the political divide. What makes it toxic is when those beliefs or values are rooted in demonstrably untrue facts. As both sides like to say in attacking the other, “You have a right to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.”

In that regard, you might ask why the Washington Post and  mainstream media have sections or segments on fact-checking, but I don’t recall such a segment on Fox News.

The dominant tactic we’re seeing in Republican circles is the use of “wedge issues” to stir the anger and fear in its base.  Think “critical race theory” or “Black Lives Matter” or “radical socialist agenda.”

Let’s look, for example, at critical race theory, a college-level course of study which is not taught in K-12. The allegation that it is taught in K-12 as a way of attacking the dominant caste (as Isabel Wilkerson calls white Americans in her bestseller Caste) is a great way of turning out voters to oust any school board member who would be so audacious as to defend the teaching (or even mention) of racism in our schools.

Wilkerson does a great job in Caste of comparing America’s systemic racism to the caste system of India and the Nazi demonization of non-Aryan races.

One comparison that relates to the debate over critical race theory is how Germany deals with its Nazi past versus how Republicans would like us to deal with our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism. In Germany today school children are required to learn about Nazism and how it developed. They are even required to visit a concentration camp. There are monuments that educate about the horrors of the holocaust. Displaying the swastika is illegal. There are no statues of Nazis.

Not so in America. The rebel flag of the Confederacy is a staple of white supremacists, who fight to maintain that legacy. I’m not saying that displaying that flag should be banned legally — that would violate the First Amendment — but I am saying that we should recognize it for what it is, an expression of anti-minority hatred and fear.

The quote that keeps coming to mind is Winston Churchill’s 1948 paraphrasing of George Santayana, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Germany lives by that lesson, but not us. Not surprisingly, Fox News, for example, totally ignored the centenary of the Tulsa massacre.

The Supreme Court has in the past upheld white supremacy and could do so again. The Dred Scott decision stated that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to Black people. In 1883 the Court upheld Alabama’s law banning interracial marriage. The Court didn’t reverse that ruling until 1967.

That same year the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine, not reversed until the 1954 Brown decision. Today’s conservative majority Court could “Make America Great Again” by upholding those new state laws promoting voter suppression.

 

Great Mini-Documentary (12 minutes) About Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - For Kids of All Ages!

 I wish every American would take the time to watch this video.

https://youtu.be/SZ5BgcFWTbo