While you cannot hold a federal poltician to a contract as to his or her performance, you can help educate other voters as to such person's voting record. The John Birch Society puts out scorecards on politicians' voting records based on the Constitutionality -- or lack thereof -- of the things for which they vote. Check out JBS.org for more, and I highly recommend the JBS.org's six-DVD series on "The Constitution Is the Solution."
I agree: political parties are a problem. They seem to foment and inspire cheating. Political parties make me think of team sports -- my team must win at all costs. Of course, the building block of political parties and of team sports are individual people, and some people are just dishonest. And it seems more and more people are dishonest. Maybe because fewer and fewer adults are teaching and demonstrating to children how to be a moral human being, about, the golden rule and about long-term consequences.
On a topic briefly mentioned: I fear RFK Jr. has been positioned by the puppet-masters (the people behind the UN, WHO, WEF, etc.) to be the next president. He was known as an environmentalist, and during the COVID lockdowns tweeted about how beneficial for the environment the lockdowns were -- forget the economic, educational and emotional disasters they caused to many, many human beings. He'll make a great President for the people who want everyone in 15 minute cities with no fossil fuel. I think part of that positioning is why he became the face of Children's Health Defense, a semi-antivaccine organization. As the COVID fallout becomes more clearly visible to more people, that affiliation is, I believe, intended to help him be elected.
I say semi-anti-vaccine organization because while it educates people about some of the fallout from vaccinations, and raises money on that basis, the lawsuits brought or publicized by RFK and CHD have not been designed to prevent the government from continuing to mandate health measures; they are brought on legal theories that, on appeal, are easily defeated when the rational basis test is applied by the appellate courts to the challenged governmental action: if there is any rational basis upon which the government could have concluded that mandating some health measure would be beneficial, then the government wins and the individual loses.
For a better chance at succeeding, lawsuits against mandated health interventions need to be based on theories based on fundamental Constitutional rights. In such cases, the strict scrutiny test applies. Under that test, any health mandate must not only further a "compelling governmental interest," but must have been narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.
A good Constitutional basis for such a law suit could be that the unenumerated Constitutional rights all belong to the People, not the States or the federal government. And one such unenumerated right is the right to make one's own decisions about one's body and its treatment.
RFK needs to get on the ballot in most if not all 50 states. At present he is on the ballot in just one state.
If he's being groomed as the next President, he'll get on the ballot in all 50 states and do so fairly soon. The longer he's only on a few states ballots the less credible a candidate he appears.
The way the elections operate, if he doesn't get on the ballot in at least most of the states, he cannot become President not even if the election goes into the House of Representatives.
I was pondering these issues, and remembered a libertarian proposal submitted in Reason magazine back in the 1980s. The writer said let’s have all candidates, for all offices, be voted in on a ‘contract’ basis. That is, a candidate would spell out in detail exactly what he would vote for, vote against, submit for legislation, etc. This would be considered legally a ‘contract’, just like a legal document you’d have with, say, a building contractor who was hired to add a second story to your house. If the builder doesn’t adhere to the terms of the contract, you can fire him, or sue him, or otherwise get legal satisfaction,right? Same with elected officials. If they don’t fulfill their promises to the voters, they have failed the terms of their contracts and can be replaced.
Sounds good, but the devil is in the details. Since no one can predict the future, you’d have to have fine-print ‘qualifiers’ that would amount to loopholes. A contractual promise to ‘vote against any more funding for Ukraine’ would have qualifiers in the fine print saying ‘unless doing so would constitute a danger to the security of our nation’ or similar blather, and the ‘contract’ in rendered to being without teeth.
My idea is that it could be a three-part contract. In part one, the candidate spells out the ideals he, in general, advocates, so that the voters can appraise him on his philosophical stances, such as he is pro-family, anti-socialist, etc, plus stances applicable to the office to which he aspires. In part two, he lists all of the ‘concrete’ votes - I will vote for the proposed school bonding, against building a new congressional office building, etc. If he votes any way other than what he’s promised, he has violated the terms of his contract with the voters, and can be replaced.
Part three is the difficult area. How can a contract be concrete, specific, and inviolable regarding big issues such as national security? No one can predict what may happen in the future, so how can we write a no-loopholes ‘contract’ regarding problems that arise in the future?
Peter, you have such a good legal mind, and you’ve said you like a challenge. If you could come up with a way to make this ‘contract’ idea loophole-proof, you could certainly gain more national recognition. Would you like to try?
The trick is to eliminate the details, and the way to do that is for politician and voter alike to be mindful of what elected officials can and cannot do.
If a candidate for Congress campaigns on repealing an unpopular bit of legislation, and promises in fact to repeal said legislation, there's no contract in the world that will paper over the fact that he's making a promise he has no capacity to keep.
The most powerful Congressman in Congress, the most powerful Senator in the Senate, has one and only one vote on anything. He or she can work to influence the votes of others, but not even through rank bribery can he or she absolutely control the votes of others.
If a congressman says "I will introduce legislation to do X", that's a promise he can keep, and we can evaluate his record on that basis.
If a congressman says "I will vote for/against Y", that, too, is a promise he can keep, and we can evaluate his record on that basis.
If a Presidential candidate ever again utters the words "read my lips", that is a sign that not only is he a political dunce, but he has no sense of recent Presidential history!
This was the tactic used by Newt Gingrich in the 1994 "Red Wave" election, where he promoted the "Contract with America." What he did was develop 10 legislative proposals that he summarized in a single document, and every GOP candidate signed on to the pledge. The pledge was that they would bring those proposals to the floor of the House and debate them, passing them into legislation if there was enough support in the House to do so.
Yet is important to understand that Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" was a political device only. It had no force as an actual contract, and never could have such force. However attractive such a contract might be in theory, it cannot be put into practice.
Such a contract, even if it were perfect and loophole-free, would be an additional requirement for sitting in Congress, and the Supreme Court has already nixed such ideas when it shot down state laws imposing term limits on a state's representatives and Senators in Congress. The requirements for being in Congress are spelled out in the Constitution and only the Constitution. The Constitution does not say "uphold your contract", and so there can be no legal mechanism to force that obedience.
But, is there a Constitutionally-valid way to have these loophole-free contracts with elected offices OTHER than Congress? Is there a concept proposal you could write up, and submit to, say, a political think tank or publication?
I would really like to you get the acclaim your mind deserves!
ALL of our Representatives take an oath to defend & protect the CONSTITUTION,
Therefore we have exactly all the contract we need. Bottom line here, ALL of our "representatives" have voted for unconstitutional "laws" - that is sick & twisted edicts by self-appointed demi-gods who think they can run our lives for us, while they have all the issues every mere mortal must deal with.
Which reminds me - when the ‘Twitter files’ came out, alleging that Biden had instructed the FBI to pay Twitter to censor speech, I thought hey, impeachable offense! It’s a clear violation of the First Amendment for government to interfere in free speech. I expected this to become a huge scandal, with calls to impeach Biden, yet little seems to have come of it. Anyone know the story on why this has faded away?
I suspect that the answer would hinge on the text of a particular state's Constitution, which would then have to be amended.
Federal elective offices are off the table absent an amendment to the US Constitution. Of that there is no doubt.
What state constitutions say about the requirements for state elective office (and, presumably local elective office) would be the determinant there. You could not write up a singular proposal that could cover all 50 states. Each state would have to be addressed separately.
I also suspect that such a contract is more effective as a political device than as a binding agreement. Every elected official stands for reelection every few years--a political "contract" vis-a-vis the 1994 "Contract with America" would provide a simple way to assess what promises an elected official did or did not keep, and which would then impact his or her reelection chances.
Even with a valid contract, establishing that the elected official had in fact breached the contract would ultimately be a matter that would have to be adjudicated by the courts. You would never be able to get the breach established by a court of competent jurisdiction before the official stood for reelection.
Yes, too many ways to finagle yourself out of liability. And good luck getting even a single state’s.Constitution amended!
But an answer to some big issue such as this one is going to awaken in your consciousness some day, Peter - like Einstein, you’ve got the brain for it.
The real answer is the simple one: people need to be civically active and engaged, and stop voting back in the same incumbent officials again and again and again.
Term limits are a good idea, but they are no substitute for an electorate that well and truly gives a damn about their communities and how they are governed.
Complacency is the toxin that erodes democracy. It was what destroyed the Roman Republic, and it is what is destroying the American Republic.
One can argue that the rise of political parties from “communities of shared interests” is inevitable. Such communities tend to be self-organizing at first, as those with the time and energy take leadership roles and begin directing the attention and efforts of the community to achieve their shared objective.
One could also argue that the parties thus organized have fallen under the control of a self-appointed clique (the so-called “political elites”) that now delivers a set of objectives that they have chosen to the community they purport to represent. This also is inevitable - people in a position of authority inevitably begin to value their own opinion, and the opinions of those close to them, over the opinions of those in far-removed places.
Thus, the expectation of the voters that they can redirect the government through the agency of their respective political parties is foiled by their lack of control over those parties.
So step one in returning control of the government to “We the People” is for the voters to regain control of their political parties. Best way to do that is to replace all of the party leadership with people who are NOT members of the elite, starting at the local level and working up.
Where I would encourage individual voters to focus their attention is on their particular political goals and desires, and NOT get inextricably bound to one party or another.
It may be that man's communal instincts are such that a measure of party apparatus is inevitable, but it is not inherent in those instincts that we elevate that party apparatus to the status of quasi-governmental.
Many people presume that if they are notionally "conservative" they vote Republican, and if they are notionally "progressive" they vote Democrat. Voters should at a minimum end such reflexive party loyalties. Let each party battle for each voter in each election, instead of blithely presuming that they already have a built in base of party loyalists who do not need to be won anew.
At the same time, that spirit of independence by the voter would at the very least mean the end of a two-party system in this country. There is nothing in the Constitution that demands we have but two major political parties, and there is nothing in the Constitution which demands that Congress be organized as if there are but two parties. Let us have five parties, or ten, or a hundred, but let each party, if we must have parties, be 100% committed towards realizing the political goals and agendas of whomever it counts as a supporter for that election cycle.
We might not be able to get away from parties altogether, but we absolutely can get away from the corruptocrat system we have now where parties believe they have an inalienable right to the support of certain voter groups just because.
Your consistent eloquence is a delight, Peter, and the fact that you eloquently put into words ideals I have held for decades is an appreciated treasure!
How I wish that America’s school districts would go back to requiring a Civics course that would introduce students to the Constitution, the division of power, the legislative process, and all the reasons why America was created to be a bold new kind of country, designed to be immune to the corruptions of the Old World. Libertarianism is not some ‘anarchy’, it is the freedom-based ideology on which this country was founded! Young people today don’t seem to have any idea what our country stands for, and what ideals must be preserved in order for America to continue. I have a recurring fantasy of having a booth at summer events, where my purpose there is to hand out copies of our Constitution. Sometimes I tell myself, go do it! But then I realize that too many of the young people would just throw the Constitution on the ground, and I don’t want to see that.
Thanks again, Peter, for all you do on your Substack to advance reason, freedom, and a beautiful frame of mind. Your readers adore you!
I also wish schools would do a decent job of educating America's youth on the Constitution and all the ways in which it truly is an exceptional document (it is the only written Constitution that espouses negative rights instead of positive rights, it is the oldest written Constitution still in effect, it is the only Constitution that acts as a binding upon government NOT upon the people).
But I also wish schools would do a decent job of teaching good English grammar, math, and science. Our schools today are producing a generation of functional illiterates--anyone with children or grandchildren today should give serious thought to homeschooling them.
"Partisan Politics will be the Death of this REPUBLIC"
who said that?
While you cannot hold a federal poltician to a contract as to his or her performance, you can help educate other voters as to such person's voting record. The John Birch Society puts out scorecards on politicians' voting records based on the Constitutionality -- or lack thereof -- of the things for which they vote. Check out JBS.org for more, and I highly recommend the JBS.org's six-DVD series on "The Constitution Is the Solution."
I agree: political parties are a problem. They seem to foment and inspire cheating. Political parties make me think of team sports -- my team must win at all costs. Of course, the building block of political parties and of team sports are individual people, and some people are just dishonest. And it seems more and more people are dishonest. Maybe because fewer and fewer adults are teaching and demonstrating to children how to be a moral human being, about, the golden rule and about long-term consequences.
On a topic briefly mentioned: I fear RFK Jr. has been positioned by the puppet-masters (the people behind the UN, WHO, WEF, etc.) to be the next president. He was known as an environmentalist, and during the COVID lockdowns tweeted about how beneficial for the environment the lockdowns were -- forget the economic, educational and emotional disasters they caused to many, many human beings. He'll make a great President for the people who want everyone in 15 minute cities with no fossil fuel. I think part of that positioning is why he became the face of Children's Health Defense, a semi-antivaccine organization. As the COVID fallout becomes more clearly visible to more people, that affiliation is, I believe, intended to help him be elected.
I say semi-anti-vaccine organization because while it educates people about some of the fallout from vaccinations, and raises money on that basis, the lawsuits brought or publicized by RFK and CHD have not been designed to prevent the government from continuing to mandate health measures; they are brought on legal theories that, on appeal, are easily defeated when the rational basis test is applied by the appellate courts to the challenged governmental action: if there is any rational basis upon which the government could have concluded that mandating some health measure would be beneficial, then the government wins and the individual loses.
For a better chance at succeeding, lawsuits against mandated health interventions need to be based on theories based on fundamental Constitutional rights. In such cases, the strict scrutiny test applies. Under that test, any health mandate must not only further a "compelling governmental interest," but must have been narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.
A good Constitutional basis for such a law suit could be that the unenumerated Constitutional rights all belong to the People, not the States or the federal government. And one such unenumerated right is the right to make one's own decisions about one's body and its treatment.
RFK needs to get on the ballot in most if not all 50 states. At present he is on the ballot in just one state.
If he's being groomed as the next President, he'll get on the ballot in all 50 states and do so fairly soon. The longer he's only on a few states ballots the less credible a candidate he appears.
The way the elections operate, if he doesn't get on the ballot in at least most of the states, he cannot become President not even if the election goes into the House of Representatives.
I was pondering these issues, and remembered a libertarian proposal submitted in Reason magazine back in the 1980s. The writer said let’s have all candidates, for all offices, be voted in on a ‘contract’ basis. That is, a candidate would spell out in detail exactly what he would vote for, vote against, submit for legislation, etc. This would be considered legally a ‘contract’, just like a legal document you’d have with, say, a building contractor who was hired to add a second story to your house. If the builder doesn’t adhere to the terms of the contract, you can fire him, or sue him, or otherwise get legal satisfaction,right? Same with elected officials. If they don’t fulfill their promises to the voters, they have failed the terms of their contracts and can be replaced.
Sounds good, but the devil is in the details. Since no one can predict the future, you’d have to have fine-print ‘qualifiers’ that would amount to loopholes. A contractual promise to ‘vote against any more funding for Ukraine’ would have qualifiers in the fine print saying ‘unless doing so would constitute a danger to the security of our nation’ or similar blather, and the ‘contract’ in rendered to being without teeth.
My idea is that it could be a three-part contract. In part one, the candidate spells out the ideals he, in general, advocates, so that the voters can appraise him on his philosophical stances, such as he is pro-family, anti-socialist, etc, plus stances applicable to the office to which he aspires. In part two, he lists all of the ‘concrete’ votes - I will vote for the proposed school bonding, against building a new congressional office building, etc. If he votes any way other than what he’s promised, he has violated the terms of his contract with the voters, and can be replaced.
Part three is the difficult area. How can a contract be concrete, specific, and inviolable regarding big issues such as national security? No one can predict what may happen in the future, so how can we write a no-loopholes ‘contract’ regarding problems that arise in the future?
Peter, you have such a good legal mind, and you’ve said you like a challenge. If you could come up with a way to make this ‘contract’ idea loophole-proof, you could certainly gain more national recognition. Would you like to try?
The trick is to eliminate the details, and the way to do that is for politician and voter alike to be mindful of what elected officials can and cannot do.
If a candidate for Congress campaigns on repealing an unpopular bit of legislation, and promises in fact to repeal said legislation, there's no contract in the world that will paper over the fact that he's making a promise he has no capacity to keep.
The most powerful Congressman in Congress, the most powerful Senator in the Senate, has one and only one vote on anything. He or she can work to influence the votes of others, but not even through rank bribery can he or she absolutely control the votes of others.
If a congressman says "I will introduce legislation to do X", that's a promise he can keep, and we can evaluate his record on that basis.
If a congressman says "I will vote for/against Y", that, too, is a promise he can keep, and we can evaluate his record on that basis.
If a Presidential candidate ever again utters the words "read my lips", that is a sign that not only is he a political dunce, but he has no sense of recent Presidential history!
This was the tactic used by Newt Gingrich in the 1994 "Red Wave" election, where he promoted the "Contract with America." What he did was develop 10 legislative proposals that he summarized in a single document, and every GOP candidate signed on to the pledge. The pledge was that they would bring those proposals to the floor of the House and debate them, passing them into legislation if there was enough support in the House to do so.
Yet is important to understand that Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" was a political device only. It had no force as an actual contract, and never could have such force. However attractive such a contract might be in theory, it cannot be put into practice.
Such a contract, even if it were perfect and loophole-free, would be an additional requirement for sitting in Congress, and the Supreme Court has already nixed such ideas when it shot down state laws imposing term limits on a state's representatives and Senators in Congress. The requirements for being in Congress are spelled out in the Constitution and only the Constitution. The Constitution does not say "uphold your contract", and so there can be no legal mechanism to force that obedience.
Well, I knew you’d be brilliant.
But, is there a Constitutionally-valid way to have these loophole-free contracts with elected offices OTHER than Congress? Is there a concept proposal you could write up, and submit to, say, a political think tank or publication?
I would really like to you get the acclaim your mind deserves!
ALL of our Representatives take an oath to defend & protect the CONSTITUTION,
Therefore we have exactly all the contract we need. Bottom line here, ALL of our "representatives" have voted for unconstitutional "laws" - that is sick & twisted edicts by self-appointed demi-gods who think they can run our lives for us, while they have all the issues every mere mortal must deal with.
Which reminds me - when the ‘Twitter files’ came out, alleging that Biden had instructed the FBI to pay Twitter to censor speech, I thought hey, impeachable offense! It’s a clear violation of the First Amendment for government to interfere in free speech. I expected this to become a huge scandal, with calls to impeach Biden, yet little seems to have come of it. Anyone know the story on why this has faded away?
I suspect that the answer would hinge on the text of a particular state's Constitution, which would then have to be amended.
Federal elective offices are off the table absent an amendment to the US Constitution. Of that there is no doubt.
What state constitutions say about the requirements for state elective office (and, presumably local elective office) would be the determinant there. You could not write up a singular proposal that could cover all 50 states. Each state would have to be addressed separately.
I also suspect that such a contract is more effective as a political device than as a binding agreement. Every elected official stands for reelection every few years--a political "contract" vis-a-vis the 1994 "Contract with America" would provide a simple way to assess what promises an elected official did or did not keep, and which would then impact his or her reelection chances.
Even with a valid contract, establishing that the elected official had in fact breached the contract would ultimately be a matter that would have to be adjudicated by the courts. You would never be able to get the breach established by a court of competent jurisdiction before the official stood for reelection.
Yes, too many ways to finagle yourself out of liability. And good luck getting even a single state’s.Constitution amended!
But an answer to some big issue such as this one is going to awaken in your consciousness some day, Peter - like Einstein, you’ve got the brain for it.
The real answer is the simple one: people need to be civically active and engaged, and stop voting back in the same incumbent officials again and again and again.
Term limits are a good idea, but they are no substitute for an electorate that well and truly gives a damn about their communities and how they are governed.
Complacency is the toxin that erodes democracy. It was what destroyed the Roman Republic, and it is what is destroying the American Republic.
One can argue that the rise of political parties from “communities of shared interests” is inevitable. Such communities tend to be self-organizing at first, as those with the time and energy take leadership roles and begin directing the attention and efforts of the community to achieve their shared objective.
One could also argue that the parties thus organized have fallen under the control of a self-appointed clique (the so-called “political elites”) that now delivers a set of objectives that they have chosen to the community they purport to represent. This also is inevitable - people in a position of authority inevitably begin to value their own opinion, and the opinions of those close to them, over the opinions of those in far-removed places.
Thus, the expectation of the voters that they can redirect the government through the agency of their respective political parties is foiled by their lack of control over those parties.
So step one in returning control of the government to “We the People” is for the voters to regain control of their political parties. Best way to do that is to replace all of the party leadership with people who are NOT members of the elite, starting at the local level and working up.
Good points, and yes, more local control on more of an ‘ad hoc’ basis!
Where I would encourage individual voters to focus their attention is on their particular political goals and desires, and NOT get inextricably bound to one party or another.
It may be that man's communal instincts are such that a measure of party apparatus is inevitable, but it is not inherent in those instincts that we elevate that party apparatus to the status of quasi-governmental.
Many people presume that if they are notionally "conservative" they vote Republican, and if they are notionally "progressive" they vote Democrat. Voters should at a minimum end such reflexive party loyalties. Let each party battle for each voter in each election, instead of blithely presuming that they already have a built in base of party loyalists who do not need to be won anew.
At the same time, that spirit of independence by the voter would at the very least mean the end of a two-party system in this country. There is nothing in the Constitution that demands we have but two major political parties, and there is nothing in the Constitution which demands that Congress be organized as if there are but two parties. Let us have five parties, or ten, or a hundred, but let each party, if we must have parties, be 100% committed towards realizing the political goals and agendas of whomever it counts as a supporter for that election cycle.
We might not be able to get away from parties altogether, but we absolutely can get away from the corruptocrat system we have now where parties believe they have an inalienable right to the support of certain voter groups just because.
Your consistent eloquence is a delight, Peter, and the fact that you eloquently put into words ideals I have held for decades is an appreciated treasure!
How I wish that America’s school districts would go back to requiring a Civics course that would introduce students to the Constitution, the division of power, the legislative process, and all the reasons why America was created to be a bold new kind of country, designed to be immune to the corruptions of the Old World. Libertarianism is not some ‘anarchy’, it is the freedom-based ideology on which this country was founded! Young people today don’t seem to have any idea what our country stands for, and what ideals must be preserved in order for America to continue. I have a recurring fantasy of having a booth at summer events, where my purpose there is to hand out copies of our Constitution. Sometimes I tell myself, go do it! But then I realize that too many of the young people would just throw the Constitution on the ground, and I don’t want to see that.
Thanks again, Peter, for all you do on your Substack to advance reason, freedom, and a beautiful frame of mind. Your readers adore you!
Thank you for your kind words!
I also wish schools would do a decent job of educating America's youth on the Constitution and all the ways in which it truly is an exceptional document (it is the only written Constitution that espouses negative rights instead of positive rights, it is the oldest written Constitution still in effect, it is the only Constitution that acts as a binding upon government NOT upon the people).
But I also wish schools would do a decent job of teaching good English grammar, math, and science. Our schools today are producing a generation of functional illiterates--anyone with children or grandchildren today should give serious thought to homeschooling them.