I wrote the following in response to the NYT essay about secession:
'It continues to grate upon my sense of democracy, of the idea that 'we the people' are really in charge, real time, right now, of our reality and our destiny. Are we instead permanently shackled by some genuinely half-baked ideas from the 18th century? By badly written and poorly thought out laws?
Isn't the principle that we can create the societies and institutions we really want the governing principle? Besides the idea of secessions, why the heck can we not eliminate the absurd electoral college along with the supremely undemocratic filibuster? Rather than promote and champion the underlying and guiding principles and values that led to the creation of the United States it seems that instead we refuse to modify or eliminate those characteristics that are in direct opposition to those principles and values.'
This law professor has the same questions, objections and ideas about what needs fixing in our system. It seems so damn obvious if you accept the idea that democracy means self-governance by the majority. Anything that disempowers that majority power is anti-democratic.
It's only a small part of this essay, but the professor, by quoting Madison, raises the fundamental flaw in the Constitution that I identified in my comment on the secession essay:
'I'm no scholar, but this tension between states rights and federal power seems to endure, never to have been resolved in any conclusive way. It has never, never made the least bit of sense to me that what is legal in California is illegal in Texas. That's no way to run a country, is it?
I don't want to be a citizen of North Carolina or New York first and a citizen of the United States second. I have a US passport, not a NC passport.
It just looks to me like this tension, this relationship, between state and nation screws things up at many levels. I don't see how it helps anything or anyone.
If the structure of things is such that Texas is allowed, even encouraged, to make laws that deviate from US law - what's the point? Everything is fuzzy, vague, ambiguous, unsatisfying, inconclusive.'
'Even Madison conceded that if we thought of the Constitution as a national charter rather than a federal arrangement among sovereign states, “the supreme and ultimate authority” would reside with the majority, which had the power to “alter or abolish its established government.”