I think this short term benefit of always choosing security over freedom has always been too tempting for politicans and leaders not to do it. The founders recognized this, which is why the 4th Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, is supposed to be enforced by the separate branch of government that is the Judicial Branch.
But you know what? The Judicial Branch hasn't kept up with the Executive at all. The Executive Branch has huge agencies within it. The Judicial Branch is just a few judges and their staff.
Why isn't there a Judicial Branch agency that safeguards the Constitution from the other two branches?? Why couldn't this agency have a bunch of people with Top Secret clearances working for it who answer to nobody but the Supreme Court and can be contacted by Edward Snowden type whistle-blowers whenever someone feels the folks they work for are undermining the Constitution?
We need a Constitution Protection Agency that is part of the Judicial Branch. Their entire job should be going after the bastards in the other two branches who go against the constitution.
You're saying the police power is the province of the Judicial Branch?! This is a...unique interpretation. The Constitution divides the power of the government in legislative (making law), executive (promulgating and enforcing law), and judicial (evaluation of the law). In common law jurisdictions the judicial branch does not have any kind of police power, and to the best of my knowledge never has had.
I am perplexed by the number of HNers that seem to think we live in a civil law jurisdiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
Because there is no authority for such an agency in Article III, and because the type of ombudsman agency you describe would be undertaking investigations of a sort that are executive, rather than judicial, so that even if Congress attempted to create such an agency, it would be (were it Constitutional at all) an Article II agency subject to the President even if Congress gave the Judiciary the power to appoint its officers.
I don't believe that a government can /ever/ effectively regulate itself--not matter how many/how strong the agencies you create.
The only effective remedy is a truly informed citizenry and civil disobedience.
You give far too much credit to politicians. They don't think of this as security vs. freedom, they think of it as power. Power for them, power for their party, power for their people. It's a simple explanation, but it fits. Heck, research has even shown that politicians will decide based on what keeps them in office, not what they "should" do [1]. Jefferson said it best: "All men having power ought to be mistrusted. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
[1] Congress: The Electoral Connection by David R. Mayhew
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Constitutional_Court_of...
...after the first four years, why would you vote for him again? It became clear almost from the first day of his presidency that his campaign promises were hollow.
Stop letting your fear that a Republican might win get the better of you. Vote third party until the Democrats get their act together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
If you want to build a viable third party, start with local elections, build your farm team. It takes decades to be viable. Then at some point, one of the dominate coalitions will pivot and subsume the new platform.
It's happened many times in the USA.
That means we do not really have a choice. The only solution is to vote third party until the Democrats get their act together, especially in the swing states -- we need to hit them where it hurts until they get their act together.
Sure. Punish them. Get it out of your system.
You do have a choice. You can organize. You can be the change that you want to see.
As a political acquaintance of mine likes to say: Whenever I feel the heat, I see the light!
If you don't know how to get started, I recommend Camp Wellstone's organizer training and joining your local political party (whatever flavor you like) and become a precinct committee officer.
>The question is then; in a two party system where both offer the blue pill, who the hell do you vote for?
Greens or libertarians, which I have been doing for a long time. Real change starts at the ballot box.
No, real change starts with working to build a mass constituency that believes that real change is necessary, and agrees on the general direction of change.
If you want it to work, change through the ballot box is fairly late in that process.
I hope you check this—you should put an obfuscated e-mail address in your profile.
Voting 3rd party is anything else.
I vote 3rd party, which to me is invoking "none of the above."
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. That's just the legislator's fallacy: "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this."
You would be better off to try something that has more hope of actually working, like voting in the primaries. Or encouraging your state representatives to publicly finance elections for federal office in your state, so you have a better choice for federal candidates in the future. Or finding a way to convey to your representatives that you won't be supporting them in the future if they don't do something about this in the present, rather than waiting for the next election when the issue may no longer hold the attention of the public.
That's a fairly silly proposition that could justify any arbitrary change of action no matter how unlikely it was to produce better results (indeed, even if it was certain to provide worse results) than your current course of action.
> I vote 3rd party
Is it working? If not, shouldn't you, by your own standards, be doing anything else?
FPTP certainly makes 2-party outcomes more likely, but then so does unlimited election spending. It's not the foregone conclusion you suggest it is.
There have never been more than two nationally-competitive parties in the US. There have been times when a party collapsed and subsequently was replaced (the Federalists by the Whigs, and the Whigs by the Republicans.)
> Theodore Wilson was a Progressive Party candidate
Presumably, you mean (former) President Theodore Roosevelt, who, formed the Progressive Party in a factional split from the Republican Party over his dissatisfaction with his hand-picked successor.
And who didn't win, so isn't an illustration of your claim that parties other than the two major ones have put Presidents in office.
> and in the UK, which also has a first-past-the-post system, there are multiple parties and the country is currently governed by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats
The UK and US differ in that, in additional to FPTP voting for members of the national legislature, the US has a separately (and indirectly) elected strong executive using a means that is even more strongly favors the two major parties than simple single-member district FPTP elections do; this not only gives a greater tendency for a major party to win control of the administration by winning the Presidential election, it further limits the expected influence of non-major party candidates for the national legislature, which further reduces their prospects.
So, yes, there is a well-understood structural reason in the electoral that the US has even less representative government and a stronger tendency to a two-party system (even though it has weaker parties) than the UK, even though both use FPTP for the national legislature.
You are quite right about the key difference with the US having an elected executive vs the parliamentary democacy system of the UK, but I don't see how FPTP prevent the election of Congressional candidates from outside the two major parties. There are usually a few independents in either chamber of Congress, but I don't see any particular reason why another party couldn't make a showing if it were willing to put in the organizational leg-work.
In my (limited) experience American politicians and parties are excessively focused on elective office; being from Ireland myself I think long-term success stems from building a solid local constituency. So for example, I think it's a complete waste of time for the Green party to run candidates in the US presidential election, instead of working to capture a few seats in Congress or in state legislatures. I have been involved in a few such local campaigns, and what I've observed is that on failing to win a major election the candidates tend to exit politics instead.
It doesn't prevent it, it just makes it extremely rare. The reason is, essentially, Tragedy of the Commons: for each individual voter, the most strongest result from voting for a minor party candidate rather than the least-opposed major party candidate is to make it more likely that their most-opposed major party candidate will win over their least-opposed major party candidate.
> There are usually a few independents in either chamber of Congress
Since WWII, there's sometimes a few independents in Congress in total, but rarely more than 1-2 in either chamber, and often none in one or both chambers. Things were a little different earlier (in part because the two-party system in each state was sometimes not the same as the national two-party system; e.g., in Minnesota for a considerable period, the two competitive parties were the Farmer-Labor Party and the Republican Party.)
And even the very small number of independents in Congress overstates the non-party influence; very often the "independents" in Congress are either people who were elected as members of one party and then defected after being elected (sometimes being re-elected as independents once they have secured the advantages of incumbency), and at other times they are independents that one of the two major parties has chosen not to oppose in general elections. (Note that the two independents currently in the US Congress, both in the Senate, include one of each of those descriptions.)
However nowadays the two major parties certainly do cooperate in ensuring that there remain only two major parties, rather aggressively going even further than FPTP would otherwise lead to in keeping additional political parties weak. It's easier to get elected without a party affiliation at all than to be elected as a party other than D or R.
Whether it is "deliberately engineered" to do that or not, it has a fairly well-demonstrated effect of doing that compared to systems which provide more proportional results. Intent is pretty much irrelevant.
In retrospect, maybe they were voting against Bush. In the next election maybe a majority will vote against Obama, and the game will keep going.
They wanted to believe. Even then Obama gave off considerable whiffs of being a relative political neophyte who felt entitled -- or even destined -- to power, and was given an easy path into the White House by an all-too-eager Democratic apparatus. Still, I was glad he won in 2008 because of his platform; he eventually reneged on so many of his campaign promises that I could not, in good conscience, vote for him in 2012.
I don't even blame those people. For example I am a car enthusiast but not a car engineer, so while I may love the Porsche brand for the emotional connections it has in my mind, a car engineer who really knows what he's talking about may very well know for a fact that the tech for part X is better in a Toyota. I don't know and I don't care.
People just get disappointed in politicians because they operate in an incentive system that rewards them for not keeping their promises, because votes are a 'sunk revenue' once in office. If laws were made in a private market, they'd be incentivized to be more consistent.
"Vote for higher welfare for lazy people? Get real?!? Vote down the poor food tax and WIN two year supply of McDonalds today![1]"
[1] Terms and conditions apply.
What you're specifically alleging could be equally applied to elections in which Nixon was involved, which wer influenced by McCarthyism, when J Edgar Hoover was in office...we could go on tracing it back to the suppression of Shays' Rebellion in 1787 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shay%27s_Rebellion#Impact_on_Co...).
Political opponents are not the crux of democracy. Very few things in the apparatus of government are dismantled upon the election of any office. Office holders set the direction and make the crucial decisions, but they are not the messiahs we make them out to be. It's comforting to believe in benevolent dictators and lofty monarchs, but if your only real choice is between two people, you're already failing as a democracy.
The choice for an elected official should stand on that candidate's character and their willingness to listen and engage on the issues you care about. But the issues themselves are something you yourself remain responsible for.
We haven't had a "true democratic election" since we came up with party platforms.
Yup. My disappointment is tempered with the knowledge that we (The People) aren't doing our jobs very well either.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
-- Frederick Douglass
"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it"
-- FDR
Politicians only respond to pressure. Period. From a game theoretic standpoint, it makes perfect sense: Why take a position today which could come back and bite them tomorrow? Better to take the safe route, the status quo.
I have modest experience with this, mostly disappointment. The small successes we had happened when we packed hearings with bodies.
If you can mobilize and won't go away, politicians will do anything to make you go away. It doesn't matter who's in the chair: Democrat, Republican, fruitcake, saint, elected, appointed, whatever. You make a stink, you get your way.
Sometimes you have to make a very big stink. And the personal costs are often very high.
Also telling were the pregnant pauses when posed questions about the NSA, the backtracking on and modification of sentences that he realised were about to be dangerous, and the fact that he quipped about journalists reading body language when he met Putin - which rather tells us what was on his mind.
Now, my honest opinion is that at worst he sometimes flat out lies, or at least cleverly tries to confuse people. He says that he had an orderly plan for reviewing privacy issues, all the while, I think that his administration has consistently been trying to keep things hushed up.