​Part 13 of 13
 
“What happens next Reb?”
“Forward.”
“I mean for We the People?”
“Forward.”
“Specifically.”
“There are constitutional solutions Gus.”
“Amendment.”
“For sure.”
“Amend what though?”
“The representation ratio in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3.”
“It’s 2017.”
“Yes.”
“So 2020 is the next Enumeration.”
“Correct.”
“If Congress is going to make amends, they have to get started.”
“True: Article 1 certainly does not say Congress can set its own number of representatives for We the People.”
“That’s our birthright.”
“And that’s the usurpation.”

​“How many constitutional solutions are there Johnny?”
“Three.”
“So amend the representation ratio from thirty Thousand to a new number is one way.”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“Completing the original Bill of Rights.”
“That sounds appealing.”
“Of course.”
“What does completing the Bill of Rights mean?”
“States voting for Article the first.”
“Okay.”
“Article the first would raise the ratio from thirty Thousand to fifty Thousand.”
“What’s its status?”
“Available.”
“Meaning?”
“Something like 27 states would have to pass it to become law.”
“Sounds easier than a new representation ratio.”
“It would be, and it would complete part of our founding.”
“The Bill of Rights.”
“Yes.”

“What’s the third constitutional solution Reb?”
“Honor our founding and the founders’ creation, We the People.”
“By using the thirty Thousand in 2020.”
“That’s it.”
“And it got this way because of George?”
“He put the thirty Thousand in the Constitution.”
“Washington did?”
“It was forty Thousand until the last day of the Convention.”
“Then George ordered the change?”
“No, he requested it.”
“Okay.”
“They made the change on the spot.”
“Left their mark ‘eh?”
“Left a smudge on the Constitution.”
“Metaphor.”
“Appears so.”
“What day did George smudge our Constitution?”
“Seventeen September 1787.”
“Constitution Day.”
“Forward is as easy as one, two three Gus.”
“Johnny, we should shine some light on representation.”
“Indeed.”
 
*Next Up: 4 April and some spring and summer thoughts. Gus Kotka and Johnny Reb will begin again 17 September 2017 in Part II of Republican Values: On Our Way.
 
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

We shall dream again.

The “we” is We the People. Women are more than half of We the People yet have only 18% representation in the US House.

The “shall” is constitutional. Counting the people is the purpose of the decennial Census; lawmakers are then to divide by the representation ratio in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution: “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”

The “dream” is foundational. The representation ratio is the constitutional definition of We the People.

The “again” is time. 2016’s presidential election is not about a woman in the White House: it’s about women in the US House of Representatives. Congress always added seats (representatives) to the US House after each Census: in 1920, they suddenly stopped.

We shall dream again America ~ as it’s a heritage dream ~ one that represents all of US.

Bryan W. Brickner

Women’s Suffrage Documentary

*This post continues a theme from January 2013: the under-representation of women in the US House. It’s an updated excerpt from the introduction of my 2006 book, Article the first of the Bill of Rights: Constitutional representation – the forgotten story of We the People. The main update: in 2006 the US House was 16% women – today it’s 18%.

The founders approach to government was scientific. They had many ideas about how to build a new government, but they also had a lot of doubt. This led to debates on how to proceed, as revolutions are never clear.

The founders attempted to build a system that would protect such rights as the (now) famous, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” They also knew, when talking of citizens and representation, that there was no monopoly on how to define those three rights. Freedom is a deep well; it has also been aptly referred to as an abyss. Our revolutionaries certainly knew the abyss. Thirteen colonies do not revolt against their King and fight an eight-year civil war and not come to know the abyss. Those subjects-turned radical revolutionaries who took up arms against their law and the King of England, they had firsthand knowledge of how deep the well of human freedom ran – they lived it and then left us a blueprint: the US Constitution.

The first time I considered constitutional representation a political issue, rather than a historical one, was in graduate school at Purdue University. Before that, when I taught high school US history classes, I recall discussing the representation ratio but dismissing it; frankly, it seemed old.

Then, as a political science graduate student, I was assistanting a professor who was lecturing on the US Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and James Madison. At one point, the third clause in Article I, Section 2 entered the lecture. After class we discussed the size of a constitutional House, one based on the constitutional ratio of “one for every thirty Thousand.” The House would be huge, we agreed, but mostly we thought it impractical.

That was nearly twenty years ago. Since then I began to think of the representation ratio in constitutional, and not congressional, terms. If we were to build a new Congress based on the constitutional ratio of one for every thirty Thousand, we would have a House of Representatives of 10,000 members. This would bring dozens of groups (factions) into the constitutional process and fundamentally change Congress. For example, women won the right to suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), but have never received their right to representation according to their numbers. Women are more than 50 percent of We the People, and yet they are represented in the current House, our 113th, with 79 Representatives, or 18 percent of the representation; that is a 32 percent under-representation of women as a group. Such under-representations of We the People create profound political, and constitutional, consequences.

Bryan W. Brickner

There’s no Blue Ox in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), though there does seem to be about everything else.

The book is an English Christian classic for its allegorical portrayal of a pilgrim’s pilgrimage. In Bunyan’s tale, “Christian” is both a metaphor (one who accepts Jesus as Christ) and the name of the Pilgrim who takes a life changing journey from the City of Destruction to Mount Zion and the Celestial City. Christian’s trip reads like Alice in Wonderland dosed with Voltaire’s Candide and highway-tested with Zarathustra-like problem solving. For example, after seeing the cross, dropping his burden and watching it fall into the mouth of a sepulchre (burial pit), Christian meets three Shining Ones (angels) who bless him with gifts; he then breaks into song:

Who’s this? the Pilgrim. How! ‘tis very true,
Old things are passed away, all’s become new.
Strange! He’s another man, upon my word.
They be fine feathers that make a fine bird.

Then Christian gave three leaps for joy, and went on, singing:

Thus far did I come laden with my sin;
Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in
Till I came hither: What a place is this!
Must here be the beginning of my bliss?
Must here the burden fall from off my back?
Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?
Blest cross! blest sepulchre! blest rather be
The Man that there was put to shame for me![i]

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was a “tinker” by trade (he fixed pots and pans and traveled Gypsy-like) and an earthy-type of preacher (imagine a swearing Puritan). He was jailed twelve years for preaching Protestantism (basically, he wanted to preach his way – the way he felt the Good Lord); they would have let him out if only he’d stop the preaching – but he kept saying he’d preach his word of God as soon as he was out the prison gates. Bunyan began The Pilgrim’s Progress while jailed (he wrote lots of books) and the Quakers helped secure his unconditional release through petition to the English Crown.

How famous was John Bunyan? Ben Franklin wrote in his Autobiography (1791) that The Pilgrim’s Progress was the second most popular book in colonial America (Bible first); he also said, as a noted book collector, that Bunyan’s works were his first complete collection.

Obviously, Bunyan and the Protestants didn’t invent the Pilgrim: there have been and will be Jewish pilgrims, Catholic pilgrims and even Nothing-in-Particular pilgrims. In the US though, our founding and what we celebrate on Thanksgiving Day are rooted in a Protestant-Puritan Pilgrim Age.

This problem, that there are no Protestants on the US Supreme Court (the last one was in 2010, Justice John Paul Stevens), is not a religious problem; Article VI of the US Constitution is clear on that question, as it states: “but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” No, this is about representation and twelve words in Article I of the US Constitution: “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand.” Unambiguously, this is not religious: it’s representational and about representing We the People in Congress according to our birthright – George Washington’s number, 30,000.

The US Congress sets the number of justices on the Court and a constitutional House of 10,000 Representatives would certainly add judges; to wit, as things are, five judges decide the fate of a law for a nation of over 300 million citizens: that’s one justice for every 60 million people.

Here’s a just bid: add a nine before the nine to make it 99.

Yeah, 99 Supremes instead of nine. That alone would add Protestants (51% of Americans according to Pew Research), Nothing-in-Particulars (12%), Mormons (1.7%), Atheists (1.6%), Buddhists (0.7%), and Muslims (0.6%) to the six Catholics (24%) and three Jewish (1.7%) justices on the Court. While we are on the topic, let’s think of adding citizens like a truck driver judge (approximately 0.5%), you know, people familiar with life on the road, journeying like a pilgrim across this land of ours – yeah that sounds supreme as well.

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, after encountering the Shining Ones, Christian’s dreamscape takes him to three men in iron fetters – Simple, Sloth and Presumption – reminding all of us in the 21st century (and perhaps even this weekend) that maybe things haven’t changed that much.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone ~ Peace Up!
Bryan W. Brickner

[i] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Washington Square Press [1678] 1961), 37.

An introductory essay for ~
The Book of the Is: A book on bridges
(2013)

The Book of the Is is a theory of the Is (everything and nothing).

As a theory of the Is it bridges to solutions (mostly political ones).

The Is and Is Not, as political theories, were noted in the work of Parmenides, a pre-Socratic thinker. Parmenides thought the Is Not to be an inscrutable path; he also understood humans would still choose that path: the same is true today.

Regardless of your political identification, libertarian, progressive, conservative, liberal, communist and/or tea partier, the ratified US Constitution is “an Is” and it contains the peace terms for US citizenry. Those terms, the peace terms of We the People, are as follows:

·      USC Article I, Section 2, Clause 3: “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”

·      USC Article V: the Amendment process is available for US citizenry to alter these ratified peace terms (the “thirty Thousand” in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 for example).

·      USC 7th Amendment: regarding common law, preserves the right to trial by jury in the districts of thirty Thousand mandated in Article I, “where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars [$20].”

·      Article the first of the congressional Bill of Rights (1789): this proposed and active amendment (the first and last of the original twelve), would change the ratio ratified in Article I from thirty Thousand to “fifty Thousand.”

We the People have already won the war between “us” and the peace terms have been ratified. Evidently, it is up to us to build the peace, as that is and will be our heritage: representing We the People in Congress according to our numbers.

Constitutions quell challenges, making them an integral part of our Is. This is not a question of morality in the sense of right and wrong: the US Constitution is not a moral concern – it’s a legal one. What’s to be done with this Is – these terms of peace – that’s up to US.

The Book of the Is (2013)

 The Signing of the US Constitution

As recorded in The Records of the Federal Convention, 17 September 1787

George Washington addresses the Convention (bold added):

When the President rose, for the purpose of putting the question, he said that although his situation had hitherto restrained him from offering his sentiments on questions depending in the House, and it might be thought, ought now to impose silence on him, yet he could not forbear expressing his wish that the alteration proposed might take place. It was much to be desired that the objections to the plan recommended might be made as few as possible – The smallness of the proportion of Representatives had been considered by many members of the Convention, an insufficient security for the rights & interests of the people. He acknowledged that it had always appeared to himself among the exceptionable parts of the plan; and late as the present moment was for admitting amendments, he thought this of so much consequence that it would give much satisfaction to see it adopted.

Yes ... "among the exceptionable parts of the plan."
Happy Constitution Day! ~ And thanks George!

Excerpt from Chapter 3:9, Oligarchy
The Book of the Is (2013)

9
In Federalist 56, Madison defends the House against the charge that it: “will be too small to possess a due knowledge of the interests of its constituents.” The founders wanted to insure local interests were represented; Madison’s theories require Representatives to bring local knowledge to the federal House. The founders also believed: “every Representative will have much information to acquire concerning all other States.”

The House wasn’t (just) designed as a place to make laws: it was designed as a place of knowledge as well. Not only would a large House send more Representatives to Washington, it would also send more Representatives back home with new knowledge. The initial House had 65 members: the current has 435. It’s hard to see how 435 can come home and let 300 million of us know what’s going on – thus the form letters.