Thinking about The Republic

Dear Ted and Jody:

As threatened, I have some thoughts on our Republic. They are not formed as an academic article or essay, rather a bit more informal—notes or first thoughts, if you will. I suspect I will be revising and extending these thoughts. So without further ado…

On September 17, 1787 as Benjamin Franklin, was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked by Elizabeth Willing Powell ” . . .what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin responded with seven words: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

In 1787 the definition of a republic was literally the same as it is today. Today the Oxford Advanced Lerner’s Dictionary defines a Republic as “a country that is governed by a president and politicians elected by the people and where there is no king or queen.”

In the Federalist No. 10, September 22, 1787, a republic is a government in which “a scheme of representation takes place.” It was clear even then that there would be no monarch.

It is also pretty clear from the record of the Constitutional Convention that the founders were creating a republic. And that they intended to guarantee that the state’s each would have republican governments.

If one marries the basic notion of a republic with the earlier revolutionary rhetoric of liberty, equality, and freedom one can pretty much conclude the founders meant a republic in which all citizens were equal and had an equal voice in selecting representatives and leaders: one citizen one vote. However the founders got a bit squirrely about how solid citizen’s information about presidential candidates from other states would be, so they set up the Electoral Collage.

Oddly from before the founding of our republic, through today, the goal of the founders has been thwarted by state legislatures which adopted gerrymandered legislative districts, and voting rules that can, most charitably, be called restrictive. Clearly, gerrymandered legislative districts and restrictive voting laws are unconstitutional as they violate the intent of the framers to establish and maintain a republic. Interestingly, the majority on the Supreme Court seems to have missed the point that gerrymandering is a criminal (actually, unconstitutional) scheme to keep one party in power regardless of the votes of citizens and hence discriminates against voters assigned to such districts. And, that same Court majority seems to have also missed the criminal (unconstitutional) intent of restrictive laws to exclude some voters from their right to vote.

The courts seemed to not notice gerrymandering and restrictive voting practices until the middle of the 20th Century. In that period the courts upheld and applied the Voting Rights act and began striking down blatant gerrymandering. Until the recent Robert’s Court declared distracting to be a political question, and began to take apart the Voting rights Act, the courts had been an instrument for perfecting republicanism by moving towards the ideal of equal sized legislative districts that were compact and contiguous with all citizens within a state having the same proportional impact on who was to represent them in making laws.

Ironically in the mid 1960s, the courts were on track to make the states more republican then they were able to make the U S government. For the Constitution provided two Senators for each state and a president and vice president to be elected through an Electoral College. Neither the Senate nor the Electoral College meet the test of each citizen being equally represented. Further, the Electoral College has been further “perverted ” by 48 states’ legislatures enacting that winner of that state’s popular vote be awarded all of the state’s Electoral College votes. That all came to a halt with the Supreme Court Majority deciding the work of their predecessors was for naught as, in their view, distracting decisions were political decisions. My question is how can at least five justices on the Supreme Court mistake an on going criminal conspiracy to control government with a political decision?

I would argue that one part of the remedy for the current UN-republican (UN-representative) “distribution” of voters in legislative districts (federal and state) would be to require a distracting map to have equal numbers of registered voters in each district with the smallest standard deviation of geographic size for a state from all possible legislative maps. While lawyers, which all the Justices are, have little to no formal training in mathematics, distracting is largely a three dimensional mapping problem. To find a unique solution more than one constraint is needed. We start with the equal numbers constraint, and then add that the resulting allocation scheme have districts that begin to approximate similar geographic sizes (minimizing the difference in size by using the standard deviation of the square miles across districts across all possible maps). If two constraints are not sufficient to find a unique map, then change the second constraint to, or add a third, such as the standard deviation across maps should not exceed .01% of the average standard deviation across all possible maps with the lowest 10% of standard deviations. What is going on here, is with these constraints one is removing most, if not all, of the discretion that district map drawers have in deciding where lines are drawn. It is in the discretion wherein the ability to commit a crime against the Constitution lies.

When the Constitution was written, there were 13 former colonies which could have gone in 13 different directions to state or nation status. The compromise that the Articles of Confederation was to keep them together into one nation. The Constitution make the arrangement a bit more solid. When additional states were added, except for Texas and Hawaii the new states were added from territory which was “owned” by the United States of America. So in the original formulation the republic was a collection of potentially independent republics which could have gone different ways. 35 of the rest of the states only had options of remaining territories owned by the United States or applying for statehood. Once one state was newly admitted, the notion of states being represented in the United States began to be a historical fiction and no longer a reality. Indeed, the outcome of the Civil War cemented the fictional history. The United States of America has gravitated to become a nation of “We the people” –a republic of the people no longer a republic of the states. As Carl Sandburg put it. Before the Civil War, “These United States of America are . . .” After the Civil War, “The United States of America is . . .” It is time to make the change in verbs true.

Epilogue: Much discussion today is whether or not the US will remain a democracy after the next presidential election. I have heard Reverend Al Sharpton ask “Has it been a democracy, yet.” I would ask the same question about the US being able to remain a Republic after the next election. “Has it been a Republic yet?” No, but we still could get there. There is a contemporary bluer between what a republic is and what a democracy is. Simply put a republic is an indirect democratic system of governance.

Love, Ed

PS. Images from last evening.