Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 4) - Time For A Change The Constitution?

  The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

Now, for Part 4.

One thing I can respect about LARB is it puts out stuff I would not ordinarily read, and with which I might not agree with. A prime example is the review Is Restructuring the Answer?. The book being reviewed, Reimagining The American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government by Stephen H. Legomsky, is diametrically in opposition to my own ideas of opening the state governments, of even making them more decentralized from the federal government.

IS RESTRUCTURING the answer to many of the United States’ most pressing social problems? Washington University professor emeritus Stephen H. Legomsky thinks so and concludes, in his superb new book Reimagining the American Union, that abolishing state government is the most urgent challenge for those who seek to create a true democracy. State government, he argues, is “the single greatest obstacle to genuine democratic rule. It is also a needless source of fiscal waste. Together, these harms far outweigh any benefits that state government might be claimed to supply.”

I admit having a bee in my bonnet about state constitutional law. There is on this hard drive an unfinished manuscript on the issue.

Let also admit that state constitutions are both different from the federal constitution in their scope and concerns, but also collectively unimaginative.

I do not see state constitutions as aping the federal constitution but copying from one another. In other words, there is a horizontal constitutionalism deriving from the earliest state constitution even unto today. Not overhauled since 1851, Indiana manages to be an example of this like a fossil.

State constitutions need approval by Congress. The federal government insures that the states will preserve republican government. All that is in the federal constitution, and my computer is going too slow for me to search out the citations. The point is that here is the reason for the unimaginative copying: the states copy what has been previously approved so that their work will also be approved.

I am fascinated by a provision in Indiana's Bill of Rights that prohibits bail in cases of murder and treason. How could there be treason against Indiana that is not also treason against the United States? The answer I came to years ago is that if the United States dissolved itself, the States would remain. Only then could there be treason against the state not punishable by federal law.

I do not see this as supporting the idea of the federal government as a compact of the states. The federal government is the union of the American people. A state constitution is the expression of that state's people. Dissolve the national union, the state remains as the government of its people.

Direct rule on a national basis means that when the national union is dissolved, then all union is dissolved.

The states have not lived up to their potential - certainly not as laboratories of democracy. I prefer more expansive experimentation that might bring a different politician to the national stage. Instead, we have seen the states willingly giving up protection of civil rights and fiscal policy to the federal government. 

What kind of experiments?

Try a more parliamentarian system instead of what we have currently.

The states emphasize protection of civil rights. A state analog to 18 U.S.C. 1853 is a start there.

More provisions allowing direct action in legislation and constitutional amendment by citizens.

Introducing proportional representation that will give space to third parties.

Remove political parties from the primaries that determine our candidates.

Instead of reorganizing the constitution to omit the states, let us reorganize the role of political parties in our political life. The federal government does not mention political parties, and neither do, I believe, state constitutions. They exist as para-constitutional institutions. However, like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the old PRI of Mexico, they control the gateways to our politics. They stifle any political reform that curbs their power. 

sch 8/2