…Sovereign civil society, with its fully independent citizen lawmaking, becomes a second legislative house when needed. The people don’t need demagogic, charlatan representatives speaking for them. They can speak for themselves in referendums. With the mix of citizen lawmaking and rep govt, governance swings from species-juvenile corruption to species-mature cooperation, centering on rights, equality, and sustainability…
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Part Two of a Four-Part Series
Renewal Objectives & Interactive Tools
© 2006 Stephen Neitzke
OK. Job 3 first. Here are the minimum objectives for the Constitutional renewal. This is the prize at the very top of our three jobs. This is where we have to go to prevent money-power’s massive corruptions from just snapping power out of our hands again.
Taken together, all of these things create the political dynamic that preserves the worthy core of our Constitution, the rights it houses, and our national continuity. We can expect the predators to instantly learn new tricks as they squirm to recover, but this set of changes should allow us to adapt to anything they hurl at us for a long time.
- All elections nonpartisan. Parties still legal, but absolutely barred from playing any role in the electoral process, from candidate selection to election.
- All representatives elected by the people directly. No more “Electoral College” corruption grounds. President, Vice President, and Attorney General elected independently. Requires a state-, regional-, and national-level primaries system for selection of national candidates.
- Congress reduced to a nonpartisan unicameral (3 senators per state to protect small from large) on the successful 1934 Nebraska model. No “conference committee” means no corruption of decisions made in floor debate, and no un-debated “riders” snuck in at the last minute. Provisions to bar gerrymandering, as Nebraska does. Provisions to ensure “clean money” for political campaigns. All 535 bicameral senators and members fired at once and put on the bricks, sans social, economic, and political power. 150 new senators put into place simultaneously, a year later. 4-year terms, off-set 2 years from national executive and judicial branch elections for considerations of governmental stability. Approx two-thirds reduction in money-sucking representatives. Cheaper, less waste, less secrecy, less corrupt, and more cooperative with civil society. Media loses its sweetheart deals with money-power and reverts to 4th Estate stuff. 69 years of success in Nebraska.
- Optimum system of fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking meshed with a still-strong but more-regulated representative government. This is the mating of the people’s horizontal, non-hierarchical, bottom-up lawmaking with the government’s vertical, hierarchical, top-down lawmaking. Both are needed to protect citizen equality and rights. ‘Fully independent’ means no government interference whatsoever — and no built-in citizen-management institutions to open corruption doors. ‘Citizen lawmaking’ unpacks to the petition processes of initiative (citizens formulating constitutional amendments and statutes), remand (name change from ‘referendum’ to eliminate confusion with referendum-the-vote — veto of Congress-passed legislation), and the recall (firing elected and appointed representatives or judges who need a career change). Sovereign civil society, with its fully independent citizen lawmaking, becomes a second legislative house when needed. The people don’t need demagogic, charlatan representatives speaking for them. They can speak for themselves in referendums. With the mix of citizen lawmaking and rep govt, governance swings from species-juvenile corruption to species-mature cooperation, centering on rights, equality, and sustainability. The dynamic majorities of issue-driven citizen lawmaking replace the rigid majorities of ideology-driven pure rep govt. Dynamic majorities, built from each citizen’s ability to vote his/her conscience on each issue, better protects the rights of individuals and minorities. They allow political parties — creatures of the rigid majority — to simply fade away. Good riddance.
- Online Citizen Institutions (OCIs) are crucial for citizen lawmaking. They will give sovereign civil society an institutional presence that can stand against representative government and corporate immortality. State-level OCIs — and their future, peer-reviewed, open-source, digitally secure, online “preferendum” (pre-referendum) voting system — are required for (1) the setting of citizen agendas; (2) the formulation and amending of initiative, remand, and recall petitions; (3) deciding when a particular petition is ready to be formally filed with the representative government; (4) monitoring and, if necessary, forcing the enactment of citizen-passed legislation; (5) monitoring and publishing real-time information on representative government’s institutions and individual representatives. All five items will be messy but are still easily done with advanced wiki, blog, and bulletin-board software. National-level OCI’s — for each “area” of, say, 12 groups of states — are needed to accomplish 1-5 above for national level legislation. We get to OCIs by experimenting with the “clearinghouse” web sites needed for organizing citizen efforts to ensure fairness in Election 2006.
- Federal judges elected by the citizens of the Court’s jurisdiction and subject to recall — Supremes included. “Judicial independence” is an 18th Century device for the protection of predator elitism’s corruptions and the class-race elite, at the expense of ordinary people. Given the present massive corruption of government, judges must be made dependent on the sovereign people. Bush v. Gore — unconstitutional, felonious (violated 18 USC 241, felony conspiracy against the rights of all Americans to have a president elected in accord with the Constitution), and treasonous (parallel with the findings of treason for the 1860s seccessionist state legislators) — began the conspiracy to elevate the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy. The conspiracy includes all 9 Supremes, Clinton, his AG, many in his DOJ hierarchy, Bush-Cheney, their AG, and many of their DOJ hierarchy. The Supremes’ ruling in Bush v. Gore established an unconstitutional anti-law regime. Everything done by the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy since the taking of power, January 2001, has been unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous. Felony forfeits judicial and executive immunity. All of the co-conspirators can be criminally prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, even if they still hold public office. Untangling this train wreck will be a legal nightmare. Other recent Supreme Court Rulings that are also unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous are Raich v. Gonzales (medical marijuana) and Kelo v. City of New London (eminent domain). Both of those rulings created unconstitutional anti-law regimes that must be legally untangled, hopefully at great expense to the corporate predators responsible. Both rulings also created felony conspiracies against rights. The assenting Supremes in all such rulings are treasonous constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting. Their only rightful place is in federal prison.
- DOJ an independent agency. AG independently elected and subject to recall. Reasons for this should be self-apparent. 4-year term. Elected on the same ballot as President and Vice President.
- Constitutional provisions defining and penalizing feasance violations (malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance) of the Constitution by public officials and judges. Bush v. Gore likely would not have happened had the Constitution contained a mandatory penalty for judicial malpractice against its provisions, stripping the judges of their social, economic, and political power. The feasance violations are age-old ways in which public officials and judges violate constitutions. They should have been defined and penalized in the 1787 original.
Nuance stuff ahead of the 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention), which is obviously needed for the renewal, includes tending to Alexander Hamilton’s “solemn and authoritative act” of Constitutional change. See Hamilton’s Federalist 78 for the full text. Note there that Hamilton calls on “judicial independence” to protect the predator elites from ordinary people wanting to change anything. Then see the US Civil War for what happens when the keepers of the Union deem citizen action a sedition instead of a solemn and authoritative act of change. No wiggle room. We have to meet the Constitution’s authors on their own terms.
“Solemn and authoritative act” of change means using the Constitution’s Article 5 and state government calls for the 2nd NCC. Simple resolutions calling for the convention will not do what we need. Legislative packages of a generic enabling act will be required in a minimum of 34 states. The package must protect the convention from predator take-over, and force convention delegates to work with state and national majorities in non-binding referendums during the convention — or face individual recall, or face convention disbandment and re-start from scratch.
The non-binding referendums can be used by the delegates to guide them in all sorts of provisions not mentioned aboue in our basic objectives. (Such referendums are not mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore not barred. We should’ve been using them for decades, allowing civil society to set informal agendas for Congress.) For example, we need to heavily restrict presidential Executive Orders and provide for “clean-money-only” campaign financing. The convention’s delegates write a spread of possible provisions, the people approve one or more per topic in a non-binding referendum.
The non-binding referendums are half the interactive story. The generic legislative package has to provide for the people triggering required delegate action. No problem.
Delegates from any state not backed by the generic legislation and its required provisions, as defined by a simple majority of the 34 states required to call the convention, will not be credentialed.
This is power politics by the people. Our generic legislation packages will have to come from at least 18 states. There are 17 states in which the citizens have free-ranging CAIs (constitutional amendment initiatives). In those states, the people are more powerful legislatively than is the state government. The people are the state. Predator politicians cannot meddle with legislation packed into the state’s constitution.
That leaves one state to be picked up. We’ll get that one and many more in THE FEAR. It’s another thing that the CAI is good for. THE FEAR will happen in the reduction of partisan bicamerals to nonpartisan unicamerals in, say, ten states. It’s a good bet that, with the mostly criminal and corrupt legislators of ten states on the bricks and job-hunting, the rest of the corrupt cowards will be falling all over themselves trying to be the people’s buddies — trying to weasel their way into keeping their bicamerals and their social, economic, and poltical power.
We need wide discussion of, and agreement on provisions for the generic legislation package going in. However, once you start thinking about what is needed, the pieces fall into place quite naturally. (We can talk specifics some other time.) There should be relatively little controversy.
Most predator possibilities for torpedoing the convention can be anticipated and blocked beforehand, in the generic legislation. In the event of a really nasty surprise from the predators, a fail-safe can be built in, taking down the whole enterprise on a non-binding national referendum, providing time for state-level legislative corrections, and re-starting from scratch. Those are losses that we should expect. The predators stand to lose their obscenely excessive profits and power, and we should expect them to fight like tigers to keep as much as they can.
Of course, nothing done in the 2nd NCC becomes binding Constitutional law until ratified. And that brings up another need of ours.
Before we get to the end of the 2nd NCC, we need a stand-alone Constitution amendment n place, specifying that all future Constitutional amendments will be ratified or rejected only by a referendum of the people. “Consent of the governed” does not mean of, by, and for the money-power fascists. Consent of the governed is not something done by representatives — not in the massively corrupt Congress, and not in any potentially corrupt “special” ratifying convention.
The stand-alone amendment will have to be forced. No bought-out, sold-out Congress will ever do it for us out the goodness of their hearts. Predator elites do not share power. Still, when the time is right, we’ll ask them to do it for us — after THE FEAR has set in. When they know we’re coming for them, and they’re trying to cut a deal, they’ll be our buddies. Bet is, that they’ll fast-track our referendum-ratification amendment right on through.
THE FEAR is an interactive tool.
OK. How does that feel? Breath of fresh air? Or is it something more like nausea? Buck up. As an old friend of mine liked to say, “Nothing is really difficult, it’s just that some things take longer than others.”
Coming in Part 3: Impeachments & Criminal Prosecutions
Written by Stephen Neitzke [send him email], who is the founder of the Direct Democracy League. He is the author of “The State of the Republic, 1776-2004″ as well as a number of other works, which can be found at www.ddleague-usa.net and on his blog at http://ddrevived.blogspot.com. Stephen is a featured columnist at www.populistamerica.com