BJ
Time has today published an op-ed by Mark Weston that encourages the 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton to pledge to refuse to pay Federal taxes ‘until democracy is restored’.
The reasoning is a curious amalgam of a baseless contention that the presidency of a candidate who does not win the popular vote, but who nevertheless has sufficient electors in the Electoral College to become president, is somehow anti-democratic and therefore illegitimate, and the pre-American Revolution slogan ‘No taxation without representation,’ which was then, and is used today, as an assertion of a denial of rights.
Weston’s inflammatory assertions neatly sidestep the express terms of the US Constitution, and the mechanism that it provides to elect a President, with the bald assertion that the Electoral College is ‘out-dated’. Weston either doesn’t understand, or chooses to ignore, the historical record which shows that the US Founding Fathers deliberately chose a hybrid system to elect the President; and that one significant benefit of the Electoral College is that it protects the interests of the smaller states by preventing complete domination by the more populous areas such as California and New York, which in fact already exert a significantly greater influence on the choice of a President because those states have a larger number of electors in the Electoral College.
Weston argues that a federal tax strike will lead to a ‘rebirth of democracy’, the implicit assumption being that a free and mostly-fair election conducted in accordance with the terms of the US Constitution is not democratic, presumably because his preferred candidate lost.
Of course, Weston’s position is itself profoundly undemocratic, propounding as it does the use of fiscal pressure to force changes to the Constitution. Article 5 of the Constitution sets out the process of amendment, and provides that proposed amendments approved by super-majorities in the Senate and Congress, or a supermajority at a National Convention convened by Congress at the request of ¾ of the states (currently 38), are then sent to the States for ratification, and only become operative when ratified in ¾ of the states. There have been 27 amendments to the US Constitution since ratification in 1788, although it is often now said that the current process is unworkable in the modern sharply divided political climate. Whether that is true or not, fiscal strike is no part of the process, and is little more than a disappointed segment of the electorate holding the remainder to ransom to force a fundamental change to the structure of government, rather than arguing for and obtaining the necessary support and following the procedure that has until now served the US quite well.
The intemperate outbursts of disappointed Democrats are not a sound basis for Constitutional reform.Photo by Ninian Reid 