This article is a great example of something I have thought about, but not quite found words to state the case or flesh out the thoughts further. My blogs focus mostly on being "readers", sort of the Utne Reader or Mother Jones, but from a mostly conservative and libertarian point of view.
Shattering the Illusion of Representation
On June 7, 2010, In Secession, issues, By Tom.
One of the rallying cries of the American Revolution was “No Taxation without Representation!” as they were protesting a series of taxes imposed by a far away imperial government on the free people of the various colonies, without any consultation of their legislatures. Personally I would prefer the rallying cry of: “No Taxation!” but even if you accept the idea that some taxation is justified so long as there is fair representation then clearly the colonists were justified in their revolution and secession and clearly South Carolina would be justified in a modern secession.
The reason for this has two parts: First, it is a simple mathematical fact that South Carolina has zero influence on the federal government, which I will illustrate. Second, the US federal government imposes laws and taxes on individuals without any sort of check or balance from the state legislatures, as we have seen with current events such as the Bush-backed TARP bailout and the Obama-backed Healthcare takeover. If the federal government stuck to its original role under the Articles of Confederation, we may be in a different situation today. However the US Constitution (intentionally or not) gave the federal government supremacy over the state governments and therefore took away the rights of individuals to govern themselves. No matter how careful or inspired the construction of the Constitution and its series of checks and balances, mathematically it works out so that the most populous states run the show, and the rest of us are stuck with their decisions. This is especially true in our current situation since the Supreme Court has decided to re-write the constitution and since the President has the power to write laws from his desk. In effect, the home team is making up the rules as they go along, and they have the officials on their payroll.
For the purpose of this post, I will focus on the mathematics. As you are well aware of, the US Government consists of three branches, the executive, judicial, and legislative. I will show you how your vote as a South Carolinian has absolutely no effect on any of those branches. Lets start with the executive:
When electing a president, the United States government uses the Electoral College, wherein each state is assigned a certain number of votes based on population. Once a candidate has earned 270 electoral votes, they have won the election. South Carolina has 8 electoral votes out of a total of 538.
This pales in comparison to the larger states: California has 55, almost 7 times as many. New York has 31, nearly 4 times as many as South Carolina. To put that in perspective, in order for the smallest states to cancel out the vote of just the one state of California: South Carolina, West Virginia, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming would all have to vote for the same person (the opposite of California’s vote.) How likely does that sound? Not very.
Clearly you can see that your vote for president (as a South Carolinian) simply has no effect on the outcome. In fact, all that’s needed to win the presidency are the electoral college votes from the following states:
The next branch of government is the Judicial, and as we have illustrated before, the members of the Supreme Court simply do not represent the people of South Carolina. Also, the judicial branch is appointed by the executive branch, and as we have no impact on the executive, we also have no impact on the judicial.
Finally there is the legislative branch. This branch is broken into two parts: the House of Representatives, with representation apportioned to the states by population, and the Senate, where each state gets two representatives without regard for population. In the House there are 435 seats (as opposed to the constitutionally guaranteed 1 seat per 30,000 people), of which only 6 are from South Carolina.
Again we can compare this to California, who has 53 seats, or nearly 9 times as many:
In fact, in order for a bill to pass the house, in only needs to meet the approval of the members from the top 9 states:
So here again we see that your vote in South Carolina just doesn’t matter. You could take your favorite politician ever, clone them 6 times and put them in all of our seats in the House, and they wouldn’t make a bit of difference whatsoever. Their votes are simply drowned out by those of the larger states.
Moving on to the Senate, we finally see a group where South Carolina has equal representation with the other states. However, this legislative body is far removed from its intended purpose and has become a cesspool of lobbyists, pork barrel spending, partisan politics, etc. The reason for this is the 17th Amendment to the constitution, which changed the Senate from a body of representatives of each state into a body of popularly elected legislators, just like the House of Representatives. The reason this is so damaging is that Senators have 6 year terms and have a great deal of power and authority, so once they are elected they quickly lose interest in representing their electors or their state, and instead serve special interests and lobbyists. If they do something against the wishes of their state, so what! Where the state once had the authority to remove them and appoint new Senators, now we have basically an oligarchy that can do whatever they want.
To sum it all up, the situation is thus: the federal government controls our lives, and we have no say in it. They make laws that we must live with, and their laws affect what we can and cannot do in a supposedly free country, and we are left begging at their feet. If we wanted to drill offshore for oil to lower the gas prices and bring in thousands of jobs, too bad. If we wanted to legalize marijuana so that we could stop arresting people for ridiculous reasons and wasting so much money that could be spent elsewhere, too bad. If we wanted to encourage new construction of nuclear power plants to become more energy independent, too bad. If we wanted to protect jobs by enforcing immigration law, too bad. If we wanted to allow competing currencies to protect the buying power of our poor and our seniors from constant inflation, too bad. South Carolina’s citizens do not own their own lives and do not control their own government, and that will be the case so long as we are a member of the United States. The mathematical case for secession is clear.
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