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One
concern of those who drafted the Constitution of the United States was that
representatives should not have such small constituencies that the office
would fail to attract able candidates.
Even so, Chairman of the Convention, George Washington, called for a
minimum constituency of 30,000 instead of the already approved 40,000. This was his only suggestion regarding
details of the Constitution and it was adopted. THE
FEDERALIST, No. 51 states that “dependence on the people is, no doubt, the
primary control on the government.” No. 52 adds “… it is particularly
essential that ..” the representative “… have an immediate dependence on and
an intimate sympathy with the people.” Now, with
the congressional districts having average populations of about 690,000, and with only 524,160 minutes in a
year, we face a very different situation.
All Representatives, whatever their origins, become members of the
upper class by virtue of their salaries and perks alone. The long sessions and increasing details of their involvement in
nearly all matters of government, keep their minds and bodies within the
confines of the “Beltway” most of the time.
National journalists, pollsters, lobbyists, and congressional staff
members, along with legislative “earmarks,” get them reelected. Meanwhile, it is literally impossible for
them to allot one minute of their time per year to each constituent. Our
representatives should be much more numerous; they should spend most of their
working time in their districts; and they should have infrequent, but
authoritative votes on major public issues.
In order to add that to the Constitution, I suggest the
following: Proposed amendment |
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About
Ivan W. Parkins: Dr.
Parkins is a retired professor of Political Science from Central Michigan
University. He received his PhD from
the University of Chicago and is a graduate of the United States Naval
Academy. Dr. Parkins served as a naval
officer during WWII aboard the battleship Alabama. He is a recent widower with three
daughters, 3 grand children and 2 great grand children. Dr. Parkins has written extensively, having
authored 3 books and a newspaper opinion column for many years. |
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FACTS TO PONDER: The First Amendment to our Constitution is
not what the First Congress proposed for that spot. Partisan divisions of Congress and the
Presidency in the second half of the twentieth century differed extremely
from those in the first half. Since 1930, no Republican President has
enjoyed a partisan congressional division as favorable as Clinton’s was in
1993-1994, but all other Democrat Presidents have fared better than Clinton. If the average Representative were to spend
1000 hours per year meeting face-to-face with individual constituents, it
would not be possible to spend 10 seconds with each constituent. In just 5 weeks of 2006, Israel lost
approximately twice (as a percentage of its population) as many soldiers in
Lebanon as our military fatalities in five years of the “War on Terror”. Just the increase of
violent deaths domestically, among American youths in the 1960’s and ‘70’s,
exceeded our combat fatalities in Vietnam. According to the World Health
Organization’s calculations of increased malaria deaths following the ban on
DDT, that policy has already been more deadly than Hitler’s “final solution”. The pension funds held by state and local
governments, and by corporations, for their employees exceed the “National
Debt”. None of the above is a secret, but none is
emphasized in the mass media. See
attached link for more
information.
American
Politics |
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Ivan Parkins |
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DISASSEMBLE THE HOUSE By Ivan W. Parkins PhD. |
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Excerpts
from: Perspectives For American Society The strength of democracy lies not so much in any special capacity that
it may have for discovering truths or for making truths known as in its
ability to detect and serve the many views and interests of its citizens. |
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To order
Dr. Parkins book, Perspectives For
American Society Contact
info@americanpoliticalcommentary.com |
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©Ivan W. Parkins 2008, All articles, text, web pages property of
Ivan W. Parkins. Use of any material
requires permission of the author and can be obtained by contacting info@americanpoliticalcommentary.com |
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A KILLER ISSUE by Ivan Parkins The New York Times story, January 13,
2008, (front page) “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”, an
account of at least 121 killings in America by veterans of Afghanistan and
Iraq. As disinformation, it follows an
old style. Nearly, forty years ago, I
replied to a similar disinformation article that appeared in what was then
one of our top literary periodicals. “MORALS, MILITARY and the INTELLECTUAL”
Opinion column, Daily Times-News, 02/18/70, Mt.
Pleasant, Michigan: The human toll of military combat is so great that only a brute or a fool
could fail to question the causes and excuses for war. It is not easy, however, to comprehend what
a specific military effort, such as that in Vietnam, costs and accomplishes,
apart from the combat itself. SATURDAY REVIEW, February 14,
1970, carries an “essay review” by Father (Professor) Daniel Berrigan, S.J.,
who admits to having destroyed draft records and other acts of protest. The burden of the review is an emotional
charge of insensitivity and brutality aimed at the military. It is illustrated with references to a
particularly nasty incident of rape and murder committed by Americans in
Vietnam. With monumental
self-righteousness, the reviewer juxtaposes his behavior to that of the
persons, “whose decisions make such crimes inevitable.” That numerous crimes,
unrelated to combat, have been committed by our troops in Vietnam is not to
be doubted. But the crime rate of
Americans is also regrettably high under other circumstances. If military leaders are personally
responsible for crimes of our troops, what responsibility do clergymen and
professors bear for the crimes of errant church members and students? Nowhere does Father Berrigan
assert, much less attempt to prove, that the crimes of our troops in Vietnam
are more numerous or more brutal than the crimes which similar numbers of
young Americans commit as civilians in the United States. Neither is any evidence offered that the
South Vietnamese would enjoy a more secure life in the absence of our
troops. In short, nothing more substantial
than the tone of the review would contradict even the extreme hypothesis that
our military presence in Vietnam is having a humane and salutary effect upon
both our own men and the South Vietnamese. Berrigan is unabashedly
eloquent in both his charges against those who support the Vietnam War and
the sanctimony of his claims for the protesters. But his eloquence is an
affectation of diction and style, utterly lacking in logic and
substance. Such a polemic discloses
much more about the character of the persons who write, publish, and accept
it than it does about the character of those it maligns. Logically, it is an expression of crude
prejudice against a superficially defined group of “others,” and does not
deserve to be treated with greater dignity than any other outburst of
bigotry. That a work so lacking in the
elements of logic and reason should be chosen for publication in a magazine
as prominent as SATURDAY REVIEW can only raise doubts about the probity and
integrity of the magazine’s editors. How much of the intellectual
establishment has committed itself so self-righteously against the war in
Vietnam that it feels no need to examine its own position and arguments? And, since intellectuals claim exemption
from conventional demands of patriotism based on their special role as
thinkers, is not gross neglect of that endeavor evidence of moral turpitude? And it continues today,
disinformation or the manipulation of information to support a point of view
may be accurate; it is simply not the most significant true information on
that subject. With the wide
availability of sources of information, it becomes more incumbent upon the
reader to validate the information.
Fortunately, others with more details than I, have already replied to the TIMES
article. Please note that my “Facts to
Ponder” suggest some other areas of disinformation now prevalent. I.
W. Parkins 1/20/2008 |
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AMERICA’S CRISIS, 2008 By Ivan Parkins During the Franklin Roosevelt Administration,
and for about a decade after, “liberal” academics contended that
strong executive leadership had rescued our divided political system. The weakness from which the two Roosevelt’s
(plus Lincoln
and Jackson) had rescued the nation, was an inability to
control powerful minority interests. I did,
and I do, subscribe to that broad thesis. What materialized during the
Vietnam War, and especially in the 1968 elections, was the rise of a new
special interest.
Burgeoning college enrollments, new and more pervasive communication media , private
foundations, etc. created a rapidly growing mass of extensively schooled and
nationally organized persons.
Dominating, as they did and still do, the main channels of
communication, they maligned old institutions and elites. Meanwhile, they made themselves the most
politically potent and legally protected elite- and ultimately the enemies of
strong Presidents. In this nation, a clear
majority of the public can do almost anything that can be
accomplished politically. But only a talented
and vigorous President is able to assemble and maintain majority
support. In the late twentieth
century, with the outlets for political information more centralized and
united than ever before, we had conflicts on an unprecedented scale between
professional communicators and those Presidents who won the largest popular
majorities at the polls. Americans are now
understandably confused and depressed.
The solution, I’m convinced, is more diverse information and
accountability from professional communicators regarding the
information that they disseminate. The First Amendment should not
canonize professors, journalists, artists, or protesters. I.W. Parkins, January 25, 2008 |
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Book Review: AMERICAN CREATION by Joseph Ellis Joseph Ellis’ book, AMERICAN CREATION, is a fitting sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winners, FOUNDING BROTHERS and HIS EXCELLENCY. It sets forth more clearly, than I have ever
before seen, just what our nation’s founders did achieve in the face
of specific difficulties, and what the
difficulties were that they failed to overcome. Essentially, they exceeded amazingly well
at turning colonies into an independent, large, and free republic that proved
to be both durable and expandable.
They failed to resolve two huge problems, native rights and racial
freedoms. Ellis is easy to read and
especially reasonable. He
is
specific about assigning both credits and failures to individuals, most of
whom he obviously admires. He
attributes much of their greatness to their pursuit of lasting fame rather
than immediate popularity. They were,
along with some fortunate circumstances and coincidences, creators of the
United States |
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More Excerpts from: PERSPECTIVES FOR AMERICAN SOCIETY The
dominion of Europe spread to the ends of the earth. The West had risen to a point that, in terms of
geopolitics, could not help but be the zenith of its power. But how significant are the views that
attempt to measure the rise of the West in such materialistic terms? It has
become intellectually fashionable to follow every acknowledgment of Western
superiority in material things with condemnation of materialism and the
West. But the shallowness of mind and
spirit exposed in such evaluations may be more characteristic of those
intellectuals who do the condemning than of the Western civilization that
they pretend to evaluate. |