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Teach1's avatar

The American Democracy Experiment is unique in human history, and it deserves a fighting chance to prosper. It is prudent, however, to recognize that this form of governance is NOT a democracy in the sense that many people on the 'left' tend to want it to be. Nor is it a republican governance system in the manner that many people on the extreme right think it ought to be. In the summation of our new AI system: "As of 20 Jun 2023, the United States is a constitutional and federal republic, according to the Constitution of the United States. 0 A republic is a form of government where the people delegate their responsibility to elected representatives in government to make decisions, while a democracy is a form of government where every person has a voice. 1 The Constitution creates the form of government we have in the United States, which is a constitutional and federal republic. 0 While it is common for people, including American politicians, to refer to the US as a "democracy," this is shorthand for the representational republic that exists, not for a pure democracy."

American voters who have taken their treasured system of governance for granted while they have enjoyed the last 80 years of peace and prosperity have re-elected their corporate-owned elective representatives with a near 90% repetition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_stagnation_in_the_United_States).

Mr. Hartman's research is impeccable, and timely; Congress, composed of our elected representatives in the House and the Senate, has the ability and the fortress-like ability to write important legislation that precludes a challenge by a stacked court system. When our elected representative do not insert a judicial exclusion clause it is 'de facto' a backdoor trojan horse (https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Trojan-horse) that their corporate supporters may have suggested in the face of lacking enough floor votes to prevent the passage of legislation that specific corporations or the Chamber of Commerce want to have a longer opportunity to limit or eliminate over time, and out of the public spotlight, with expensive court challenges that the public can't fund well.

The American Democracy-that-is-really-a-representative-Republican experiment with a balancing lever of the Electoral College to weigh the will of a massive number of urban voters against the will of the more sparsely populated rural states can, and should survive, with corporations and dangerously rich people NOT being allowed to control the Commons with deceptive advertising-media ownership, voter restrictive districts and an almost unlimited ability to lobby and pressure all our elected people to do their bidding.

Power corrupts all people (https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/cgg/ID/5095/Power-Corrupts.htm) unless each elected individual has limited time in office to create an invisible network of corporate contributions, or unless each elected person has an ethical basis and a personal fortune to withstand intense pressure. As individual American voters, the post-Baby-Boomer generation ought to think about being more pragmatic and more involved in lowering the re-election data. What if our state and federal elected officials knew that their constituency was going to send them home after 1-2 terms regardless? WHAT IF THE PERCENT OF VOTERS, BE THEY FROM THE LEFT OR THE RIGHT SYSTEMATICALLY STOPPED VOTING FOR ALL INCUMBENT POLITICIANS.

What IF voters used the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale called The Emperor's Clothes (https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/68/fairy-tales-and-other-traditional-stories/5637/the-emperors-new-clothes/) and DEMANDED that all critical legislation include a Judicial Exclusion "“SEC. 267. JUDICIAL REVIEW. No determination, finding, action, or omission under this title shall be subject to judicial review.” as cited by Mr. Hartman. The absence of this should be an automatic legislative message that our children's children will be unable to trust this legislation.

Mr. Hartman Citations:

Congress has the sole power to overrule Supreme Court decisions, and even the power — which they asserted in the recent bill to raise the debt ceiling — to exempt laws from judicial review, the power of the Court to strike things down based on their bizarre interpretations of the Constitution.

Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution is unambiguous, asserting that Congress is the first among equals, as I laid out at length on December 29th in an article titled Gorsuch Knows “Three Co-Equal Branches” Is a Myth. That clause of the Constitution says:

“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

And Congress, in the legislation to lift the debt ceiling that was signed into law by Joe Biden the first week of this month, reached back to that section of the Constitution, asserting their power to do something called “court-stripping”:

“SEC. 267. JUDICIAL REVIEW. No determination, finding, action, or omission under this title shall be subject to judicial review.”

Judicial review, of course, is the practice the Supreme Court itself legalized in 1803 in the Marbury v Madison case wherein it strikes down or even re-writes laws passed by Congress and signed by the president.

That judicial review power exists nowhere in the Contitution: the Supreme Court gave it to itself in Marbury, a decision then-President Jefferson raged against and both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln openly ignored.

Justice Roberts himself — back when he was a lawyer working for Ronald Reagan trying to find ways to overturn Roe v Wade and Brown v Board — wrote extensively about how the Reagan administration and Republicans in Congress could pass legislation overturning both decisions and then simply insert court-stripping language like that above to prevent it from being overturned. (This is treated extensively in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.)

A nation where two powerful corporations can overwhelm the will of 1.3 million citizens (the population of Maine) can hardly call itself a democratic republic: instead, it’s the very definition of a corrupt oligarchy.

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William Politt's avatar

Every day one can read a story (stories?) about how one or more big businesses uses its market power to cross the line from the purported amorality of capital to outright immorality and often enough criminality. Unions have been neutered as a countervailing force, and the federal government has neutered itself. All of Adam Smith's worst predictions have come true. I can only wonder whose worst predictions will be next.

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