Tag: constitution

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#BookReview: Distorting Democracy by Carolyn Renee Dupont

Distorting The Discussion. For a book about the history of the Electoral College that opens up admitting that the author thinks the Electoral College is foolhardy at best… the actual history here is quite good, and absolutely stuff virtually no one learns about even with a major in American History in college. (Perhaps Masters’ or PhD students specifically studying the EC or at least the Constitutional Convention that created it would know at least some of this?) So absolutely read this book for Parts I and II, where Dupont shows that the fights that we have today about the Electoral College have been there basically since its creation and have reignited every few decades since.

It is in Part III, where Dupont begins discussing the current debates about the issue, that her acknowledged disdain comes to the fore and truly distorts the discussion. Here, she creates strawman after strawman after strawman and “debunks” them… without ever actually getting to the heart of any of the arguments she is “debunking”.

Which is a shame, because throughout parts I and II, Dupont almost goes to pains to show that there have been some throughout American history who had at least part of the actual solution to the problems we now see – and were working to push that part of the solution through. In Part II, she even notes the other part to the solution… and glosses right on by it.

The solution that Dupont brings up repeatedly is the “District method” (vs the “General ticket” method we now call Winner-Take-All). Here, each Electoral Vote is, essentially, chosen by the popular vote of each Congressional District, with the overall popular vote of the State determining the Electoral Votes represented by that State’s US Senators. Going to that method right now would mean that both “large State” and “small State” (to use the Founders’ terms) or “urban” and “rural” (to use more modern terms) concerns would be more accurately represented in the overall Electoral College system.

But wait! There’s more! The item that Dupont glosses over is the 1920s era law passed by Congress capping the number of US Representatives at 435. This was the final nail in the coffin as far as how unequal the system currently appears, allowing even a District based Electoral Vote in Wyoming to represent 400K ish people vs a District based vote in Los Angeles to easily represent 3x as many people. But that is “simply” an Act of Congress… meaning Congress can remove that restriction at any time, even, literally, the day you are reading this review.

And then there becomes a point in the Constitutional Convention that even Dupont completely misses. You see, while I haven’t examined the relevant records myself (and perhaps Dupont could, and possibly release a 2nd edition of this text examining this), there are some who point out that the First Amendment as we know it… wasn’t the actual First Amendment. Instead, it was the *second*, and the actual First Amendment actually closed the “Representational loophole” that Article I, Section II of the Constitution created when it noted that the “number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand”. Reading that carefully, it means that the population represented by a single US Representative has a *minimum* – 30,000 people – meaning that the overall number of US Representatives has a *maximum* – 11,234 US Representatives, based on the US population in August 2024 as I write this review. But notice what this does *NOT* do – set a population *maximum* – and therefore an overall number of US Representatives *minimum*.

THIS is where the fight over the Electoral College misses its most crucial point – and it is a point Dupont seems to be entirely unaware or even ignorant of. If this so-called “true First Amendment” had passed, it would have set the population maximum per Representative – and therefore the minimum overall number of US Representatives – at 50,000 – or 6,740 US Representatives based on current US population as of late August 2024 as I write this review.

Combining the District Method Dupont discusses at length in the text here + this missing “actual First Amendment” would largely solve every single argument Dupont has against the Electoral College, and yet she missed such a crucial detail of James Madison’s own efforts regarding the construction of the Constitution – thereby distorting the discussion from the get-go.

Recommended, mainly for Parts I and II, where most everyone will learn quite a bit.

This review of Distorting Democracy by Carolyn Renee Dupont was originally written on August 30, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Highest Law In The Land by Jessica Pishko

An Imagined History. Pishko starts off this text openly admitting that, as the Southport NC Police Dept cop who murdered Keith Vidal in North Carolina a decade ago this year said less than two minutes after encountering Vidal – and 14 seconds after Vidal had already been Tasered and was being held on the group by two other cops when the kill shot was fired -, she “doesn’t have time” (paraphrase from her, exact words of the murderous cop) to do any real investigative journalism that might show any degree of nuance or any alternative explanations for anything she writes about in this book. She openly admits in the prologue that she is going to label anything and anyone who is not a leftist progressive as “far right” because “The intent of this book is not to desegregate all of the complexities of the far-right movements – I do not think I could if I tried – which is why I have opted for the simplest terminology. Most important to me is the acknowledgement that these sheriffs and their supporters are plainly opposed to the left and progressives.” (An exact quote from page 18 or so, at least of the ARC text I read.)

Thus, Pishko proceeds to concoct her imagined history, complete with narrative-defining boogeymen, the “Constitutional Sheriff’s And Peace Officer’s Association” or CSPOA, as it is so frequently noted on seemingly every other page throughout the narrative. Pishko “cites” well-debunked “facts” such as Donald Trump calling the Nazis at the Charlottesville, VA “Unite The Right” rally “very fine people” (actual fact: He openly decried the violence of this group specifically, noting that *other* people *not associated with them* were the “very fine people” that happened to be at the rally as well), or the repeated-three-times-throughout-the-narrative-that-I-caught bald-faced LIE that “the leading cause of death of children is gun violence”. Even when looking at the CDC data *that Pishko herself cites*, the only way to get to this is to include people that are not legally children – indeed, some of the 18 and 19yos included in these numbers are actively serving the US military in war zones! Pishko also claims that “AR-15 SBRs are the weapon of choice of mass shooters” despite the number of homicides via rifle – any form of rifle, not just so-called “assault weapons” – proving that to be untrue for many years now. She claims that she observed a man walking around at one rally with an “automatic” rifle. While this is *possible*, it is also *extremely* rare – and without inspecting the gun in question (which Pishko does not detail that she did, if she did it at all), there is no way of knowing from a distance that the rifle at hand was fully automatic.

No, as with one of her criticisms of one of her primary targets of scorn throughout this text – Pinal County AZ Sheriff Mark Lamb – the best that can be said of this text is that while it is well documented, clocking in at 33% or so documentation, it is “light on substance and heavy on [extreme leftist] vibes”.

Read this book – if your politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders. You’ll find a new boogeyman to scare yourself with in your fantasy world.

For anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders and living in the *real* world, don’t bother with this drivel. There are *far* superior books about the problems with modern police and how we got to this point, such as Radley Balko’s Rise Of The Warrior Cop.

Not recommended, unless you’re an extreme leftist or extreme masochist.

This review of The Highest Law In The Land by Jessica Pishko was originally written on August 26, 2024.

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#BookReview: No Democracy Lasts Forever by Erwin Chemerinsky

Unoriginal Hyper-Leftist Wet Dream. In all honesty, had I known that Chemerinsky was the Dean of the Berkely School of Law, I probably would never have picked up this book to begin with. I would have already known most of what he was going to say… and now having actually read it, I can positively say that 95% of my assumptions would have been correct.

Basically, however you feel about the Citizens United ruling, recent SCOTUS decisions, packing the Court, the Electoral College, and the well-debunked “Russian Collusion” conspiracy theory from the 2016 Presidential Election is largely how you’re going to feel about this book. It honestly reads as little more than hyper-leftist dreams about everything that has gone “wrong” with America for the last decade or two. Thus, some of you are going to sing this book’s praises from the highest places you can as loudly as you can. And some of you are going to want to take a window to those places just so you can be assured that you will be able to defenestrate this book from those places.

Chemerinsky *does* get *close* to some genuinely good ideas, ideas that could *actually* solve a lot of the problems he names… and then quickly backs away from them, for the most part. His one consistent good idea is that the process of “Winner Take All” as it relates to Electoral College votes does in fact need to end – a stance I’ve had for much of my adult life, particularly my politically engaged adult life. The more interesting things that he addresses but then thinks *secession* is more viable are as they relate to the number of Congressmen. Chemerinsky correctly points out that the only thing limiting the size of the US House to 435 members is a US law passed less than a century ago – and laws can be overturned in a number of ways. Here again, one weakness of Chemerinsky is that in proclaiming the Constitution a threat – and even spending quite a bit of the text here decrying the SCOTUS as a threat – he openly advocates for SCOTUS to take action against this law. But even this idea is hardly original, as people across the political spectrum have been proposing it for many years already.

Another point Chemerinsky gets truly close to a near-original idea (it has been proposed by at least one writer) is when he proposes – briefly, before quickly retracting it and dismissing it as unworkable – that States be broken into “smaller States”. But if “Democracy” is truly the end goal, and Chemerinsky wants everyone across the US to be as truly even as possible, why isn’t he going full-bore here? As others have written, first, build the House up to its Constitutionally mandated maximum size – every Congressman represents exactly 35,000 people, the Constitutionally mandated minimum number of people per Representative. That gives us something like 11K US Representatives. Now, take Chemerinsky’s own note here that “smaller States” would each get 2 US Senators… and make every single one of those US Rep Districts its own State. That would mean that every US Rep represents 35K people… and every Senator represents 35,000 / 2 == 17,500 people each. Meaning that for every 35,000 people, on average 1 Congressman of some level represents just under 12,000 people. Which in some urban areas is considerably less than an entire block, and in some rural areas could be several hundred square miles of territory. But Chemerinsky doesn’t go here, instead he just continually reiterates hyper leftist talking points rather than seeking actual solutions to the problems he decries.

Ultimately, I deducted two stars from this book – the first is for the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 12% of the text I read weeks before publication. Even being generous and lowering my 20-30% standard, as I’ve been trying to do of late, I just can’t justify allowing such a small bibliography against such grand claims. Even here, the bibliography itself is quite cherry picked and doesn’t show the full scope of what is going on through many of Chemerinsky’s claims, but I’ve never really addressed that issue in other reviews and won’t really address it here either.

The other star really was for the lack of objectivity and just how unoriginal very nearly everything about this book was. If you’ve seen nearly any left-leaning politician or activist speak in the last 20 years, they’re all saying much of the same things Chemerinsky is saying here – including more and more of them openly talking of secession, which would be ruinous on us all.

Again, at the end of the day your feelings about this book are largely going to hinge on just how ideologically aligned with extreme leftist US politics you are, so know that when making your decision to read this book. Some of you are going to LOVE this book, and others are going to HATE it, and it will largely be for exactly the same reasons.

Recommended.

This review of No Democracy Lasts Forever by Erwin Chemerinsky was originally written on July 31, 2024.

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#BookReview: From Parchment To Dust by Louis Michael Seidman

Progressive/ Liberal Polemic That Moves The Conversation Yet Doesn’t Go Through To The Logical Conclusion. Lysander Spooner once said, during the early Reconstruction period, that “Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize” (Spooner; No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, Appendix; 1870), and this is the same essential point that Seidman makes in proclaiming what he terms “Constitutional Skepticism”. Argued from a progressive/ leftist perspective of current American politics, Seidman’s text here uses at least one hyperbolic source (the oft-cited and yet demonstrably inaccurate and misleading GunViolenceArchive), stretches certain terms to implausible yet popular within his political allies lengths (claiming the events of Jan 6, 2020 in Washington DC to be an “insurrection”), and generally parrots progressive/ leftist talking points about at least two Supreme Court justices, the “problem of gun violence”, etc. All of this noted, within this particular sphere, Seidman actually makes his case reasonably well that the Constitution of the United States of America is, as Spooner proclaims, “of no authority”. And *to that point* and from the given perspective, Siedman is truly solid. Where he needs to expand his thinking a bit further is that he ultimately concludes that a more current Constitution, written by and binding on the “current generation” (which he fails to define, and fails to acknowledge that in any average human’s lifetime are three separate generations alive at any one time nor determine which of those generations should be allowed to bind the others according to his thinking) would be actually better than the one written so long ago and claiming to be binding forevermore. No, this is where he would actually do well to examine the writings of Spooner and other *anarchic* Constitutional Skeptics of American history and discuss his thoughts on their ideas as well. For, as Spooner then concluded his discussion quoted above, “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or bas been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist” – taking his own Constitutional Skepticism to its actual logical conclusion, which Seidman refuses to do. Still, this is very much a book that could actually help the overall political discussion both in the US and elsewhere, and it is one that many indeed need to read. Very much recommended.

This review of From Parchment To Dust by Louis Michael Seidman was originally written on October 1, 2021.