How Democratic Is The US Constitution?

"How Democratic is the American Constitution" is the title of a book by Robert Dahl, a distinguished political science professor from Yale. To quote the book liner: "Refusing to accept the American Constitution as sacred text, Dahl challenges us all to think critically about the origins of our political system and to consider the opportunities for creating a more democratic society".

This task is made more difficult because the principles underlying
American "democracy" are rather schizophrenic. On the state level the People are sovereign. On the federal level we have a system of dual sovereignty... where the states and the People have suffrage and are both represented in Washington. Given our origins from sovereign colonies and the hardball politics of the Constitutional Convention, dual sovereignty was probably the only alternative at the time. Yet did the Framers' endless system of checks and balances set the primitive politics of 1787 in cement? Is the structure of the Constitution so rigid it's virtually reform-proof? Does the concept of dual suffrage make the US Constitution un- or anti-democratic?

As I wrote in a previous article, we're raised to understand why the Constitution is as it is. We were never encouraged to critique it or ask what desirable principles were compromised away at the Constitutional Convention. We are also raised to think how states and citizens within those states are represented. We're not to think about how any given CITIZEN is represented. Yet if we do, we uncover a hidden political realm that calls into question the official justifications for our system... thus its moral legitimacy.

As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22 sophistry may require otherwise, but for all intents and purposes those sovereign states are merely the PEOPLE who live within. In actual practice the Constitution's recognition of state sovereignty is manifest as a series of anti-democratic vote weighing/dilution formulas that ultimately grant some CITIZENS a bigger vote than others based upon nothing else but their choice of state residence. These formulas underlie the Senate, the Electoral College, and the amendment process. In 1964 the Supreme Court ruled such formulas were illegal on all other levels of government. Was this the nation's first Affirmative Action plan?

The anti-democratic aspects of such schemes are mathematically verifiable. Currently about 15% of the population gets 50% of the Senate seats and it may soon be 10%. A Wyoming citizen's vote for president weighs about 3.5X that of a California citizen's vote. In 1900 the population ratio between the biggest and smallest states, California and Wyoming, was 16 to 1. Using 2005 US Census estimates it's now 70.9 to 1. This means any Wyoming citizen's vote for the Senate weighs about 70.9X that of any California citizen's vote. Here are the numbers. It shows a bumpy but clear demographic trend that is making the US Senate, therefore the Constitution itself, more and more anti-democratic.

2005... 70.945 : 1
2000... 77.019 : 1
1990... 65.610 : 1
1980... 50.402 : 1
1970... 60.078 : 1
1960... 47.618 : 1
1950... 36.437 : 1
1940... 27.547 : 1
1930... 25.169 : 1
1920... 17.627 : 1
1910... 16.288 : 1
1900... 16.049 : 1

When it comes to the amendment process about 3.8% of the population in the 12 smallest states can theoretically block any amendment. Some might believe that this insures that there must be vast unanimity before any amendment is passed. Not true. There is NOTHING in the Constitution to insure this. In fact the 3/4 smallest states that can ratify any amendment now consist of less that 40% of the population.

Then there's Election 2000. The anti-democratic EC formula gave each citizen's vote in Bush's Florida lead 1013X the weight in deciding the outcome of any citizen's vote in Gore's national lead. More on this in a future post.

In my last article I listed the elements that I believed insured a government is morally legitimate. I started with these two:

* Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.
* Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.

The above was taken directly from a 1964 US Supreme Court voting rights case "REYNOLDS v. SIMS" which can be found here: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=377&invol=533

"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system."

It goes on to make the moral case for one person, one vote... where all votes weigh the same. Unfortunately this moral standard does not, can not under current Constitution, apply to the federal government itself. Yet unless it does, we'll have more Election 2000s where the anti-democratic EC allows the minority to legally seize control of the government against the will of the majority.

(revised 3-25)

ulTRAX