What's at stake, after all, is citizens' representation in Congress. Partisan gerrymandering undermines the whole notion of a representative government. For proof, just look toward the lopsided seat distribution in the current Congress.

I chose this passage because I believe that it sums up the entirety of what is being said in both of the articles assigned. One does not have to be a history major or a political scientist to see that in no way does gerrymandering benefit those being represented. That’s not to say that this is “always” true. But in politics, as it is in life, the words “always” and “never” rarely if ever come into play. However it does seem plausible to state that the majority of the time gerrymandering does not serve the best interests of those being represented so much as it does that of those running for office and the eventual turn out of which political party will gain the most power in congress. If the goal is to provide fair and equal representation of their constituents in the House of Representatives how can this be possible when the election district that a congressman represents is drawn up in a way that makes this impossible since the make up of the district is skewed to support a particular party far above and beyond the people in that district? In a prima facie view this amounts to little more than election rigging.
            The practice of gerrymandering election districts needs to be put to a stop and a new, fair and truly representative system needs to be put in place. It would seem to me that the fairest way to do this would be to place a grid over the boundaries of each state and divide it in terms of square miles or whatever unit of measure works so long as it is unbiased and then draw the division lines for each district as close to the dividing lines of the grid so as to assign an equal number of people to every district. Then the representative from that district should be elected to represent that district. I think it would be best, although not necessary, for that person to come from that district. By drawing the boundaries this way it would ensure that there was no political bias toward how the districts were drawn up, they would just be divided equally and let the chips fall where they may. Districts would be of different sizes in terms of square miles but not of the number of people represented. In doing this the representative elected would have the obligation to fairly represent the wants and needs of the people in his district and since the districts would be drawn up geometrically taking nothing into account but the number of people in the district it would cause the make-up of the district to randomly consist of people of various SES, race, and political affiliations. This method may sound overly simplistic but sometimes the simplest way is the best because it leaves little if any room for bias. The people from each district would elect their congressional representatives to represent their needs and wants and not to help a particular party gain majority control and power in the House.

All Citizenship, even in its early forms, was a principle of equality, and that' during this period it was a developing institution. Starting at the point where all men were free and, in theory, capable of enjoying rights, it grew by enriching the body of rights which they were capable of enjoying. But these rights did not conflict with the inequalities of capitalist society; they were, on the contrary, necessary to the maintenance of that particular form of inequality. The explanation lies in the fact that the core of citizenship at this stage was composed of civil rights. And civil rights were indispensable to a competitive market economy. They gave to each man, as part of his individual status, the power to engage as an independent unit in the economic struggle and made it possible to deny to him social protection on the ground that he was equipped with the means to protect him-self. 

I chose this passage because it struck me to be at the heart of the whole idea of civil rights and what the idea means not merely on the surface but at its core. Civil rights were then and are still now a developing concept. To say that we have reached the pinnacle of civil rights, that all men are truly equal is simply and undeniably untrue. In this country it is easy to say that we are all bound by the same set of rules regarding civil rights but this is not more than a superficial statement. True the rules may be the same but the opportunities differ incredibly and this is mostly based on the fact that we are a capitalist society. Now I am not knocking capitalism, I am just stating that it does have a direct and negative correlation to the concept of civil rights and that it affects civil rights on many different levels. In this country there is no honest way to deny that SES is everything. The opportunities afforded to the middle class do not even come close to those afforded to the rich, not to mention the uber-rich or to those living in poverty.

            Look at the so called American Dream, aptly named because you would have to be asleep to believe it. There was a time when it was common to tell a child that anything was possible for him when he grew up, that he could be president someday. But in reality that is an unadulterated lie. The average child in this country has no chance of ever becoming president because his SES simply won’t allow for it. There are many things that factor into becoming president. George W. Bush proved to us that intelligence isn’t one of them but at the same time confirmed that money and political power and connections certainly are. Having said that as an overstated point to demonstrate how each person may have equal civil rights under the law, it also shows how a market economy limits the accessibility to those rights.

            The other side of the coin also holds true. Yes we all have the same civil rights but these rights are as much limitations as they are protections since it is a given that everyone should be and technically is afforded an equal opportunity to achieve the “American Dream” that in most cases they are left to fend for themselves in doing so, Now putting the “Dream” aside, it also leaves a person to fend for themselves to merely survive day to day since the level of social protection – economic assistance in the form or food, money and shelter is so limited und un fairly and unevenly distributed. There is no doubt that rights re not equal to those of low SES, people of color and people who are new to the country and face a language barrier.
            So on the surface, we all have the same rights and protections, but under that very thin veil things are not nearly what they seem or what the people who really run this country would like you to think that they are.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

 

I chose this passage because it seems apparent to me, especially in light of the soon upcoming elections that of the percentage of Americans who do exercise the civil obligation to vote, many if not all of those feel, with a great deal of certainty that here is where their political and moral obligation as a citizen both begins and ends. I think that to a great extent the average American who does votes does so for the candidate who is most closely in line with his or her own person and moral beliefs in what is best for the economy first and society second. I would dare say that few would vote against their own pocketbook for the greater good although I also realize that I may be allowing my own cynicism to come a little close to the surface in saying this.  Be that as it may I have a great deal of confidence in saying that Americans believe that their obligation as a moral component of society, consists of conducting themselves within the bounds of both the laws of the land as well as those of their particular faith so long as neither requires too much of a proactive approach. People are willing to obey the law and follow the tenants of their faith when they are in agreement with it and believe that it is for the greater good but very few will ever come to challenge it when they feel it is discriminatory against a particular faction of society and out of those few who are willing to speak out, speaking out is about as far as they are willing to go. Taking action is something that is always left for someone else to do or it is assumed that things will work themselves out, that the politicians or religious leaders will eventually get it sorted out and that the chips will fall where they should and not just where they may. How lucky we are that great men like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t think this way.  As Americans looking at the many challenges that we currently face as a society we need more men like Dr. King to step up and lead and more citizens to have guts enough to stand behind them and back them in their efforts to change things from how they are to how they ought to be. Sometimes the majority is not the majority, just the people that make the most noise while the true majority sit back and wish things would change.

Making Progress

In fact, once a program has been adopted by a large number of states it may become recognized as a legitimate state responsibility, some-thing which all states ought to have. When this happens it becomes extremely difficult for state decision makers to resist even the weakest kinds of demands to institute the program for fear of arousing public suspicions about their good intentions; once a program has gained the stamp of legitimacy, it has a momentum of its own..

 

The reason I chose this section is because I feel it brings the whole substance of the article into summation. Although it is interesting to look at which states are most likely to try something new first and how quickly this new idea will be adopted by the other states and how it assimilates into the American culture what I think is most important is that it happens at all. America is advanced citizenship and in order for that to work and prosper it is important that new ideas and concepts evolve, get tested and then become part of the fabric of the nation. If we had to depend on the national government to do this, especially in a country as large as our the wheels of progress would move much more slowly because testing something new, the legalization of medical marijuana or gay marriage for example, on such a large population would be of much greater risk and take much longer to evaluate. But if these new ideas are tested at the state level, a more limited population, the risk is greatly reduced and the outcome and public reaction, whether rejected or accepted, can be gauged much more quickly.

            Once an idea is given legitimacy it is much easier for the other states to adopt similar versions of the same concept with the eventual potential of it becoming accepted on the Federal level. One of the icons incorporated into the Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill is an unfinished pyramid. The pyramid is unfinished because this country is meant to me unfinished, it is meant to always be a work in progress. One of the best ways for this work in progress to evolve efficiently is to allow the various states to test new ideas, evaluate the results and then, should the prove positive and effective have the other states adopt them at whatever rate and at whatever time those who govern that state feel is correct.  The pyramid is never meant to be finished, this country is never meant to be finished but it is meant to evolve and that is why it is of the utmost importance that the states all try new ideas, as they see fit for their population and then for the rest of the states to follow suit as they see fit without intervention from the Federal Government because this method of progress will allow more ideas to be tested at one time and for society to progress with more speed and diversity.

Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

The second piece by Rachel Barkow, looks at the eight amendment of the Constitution and how it might relate to the current problem of imprisonment in the U.S. Despite the repeated claims to being the land of the free, the U.S. leads the rest of the world in the number of people in prison, which as she points out is made up of significantly larger portions of minority groups in the country. Certainly the profit motive is still alive and well at least, because running prisons has become a profitable industry as of late, led by corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) which also lobbys the government for longer prison terms and less leniency, not because it feels threatened by criminals, but because shorter prison terms would mean less business. The U.S. is also the third largest in terms of the number of executions carried out by the justice system behind only Saudi Arabia and China.

The reason I chose this section is because as a substance abuse counselor I personally know many people who have suffered long sentences due to mandatory minimums which have done no good and in many cases have done a great deal of damage and it my strong belief that mandatory minimums need to be abolished and that the entire prison system needs to be completely revamped. Mandatory minimums do not do any good for anyone except for the prison system itself whether public or privatized; it has become nothing more than a very profitable business with little or no regard for rehabilitating people.

In New York State the prison system is most often referred to by the acronym DOCS, which translates to Department of Correctional Services. But this name is little more than a sad joke since there is little if anything at all that justifies the prison system as being correctional in any way.  If you wanted to be more accurate it would simply be called the Department of Detention because that is really all they do. Few if any come out of the prison system as better people and of those incarcerated the longer the sentence the less likely they will be better suited for society because they have become institutionalized and no longer know how to function in the outside world.

The United States currently imprisons more people per capita than any other country in the world.  Although US citizens make up only about five percent of the world’s population we currently house more than twenty percent of the world’s prisoners, the majority of those being people of color. (Slate.com 2010).

In addition to the record number of incarcerations is the number of people who are imprisoned for incredibly long and unjustifiable periods of time for what are indisputably minor infractions, many of these involving drug sales or possession. This leads to the statute of mandatory minimums.  It is unfathomable to me as to how this concept makes any sense at all. The whole idea of having a judge hear a case is so that should the jury find a person guilty, or in the case of trial by judge, if the judge deems someone guilty of what he has been accused then he should have the ability to lean on his good sense and experienced, guided by prior case law to impose a sentence that he deems appropriate. Having mandatory minimums reduces a judge to little more than a Parking Enforcement Officer – park in front of a fire hydrant you get a $50 ticket.  That PEO doesn’t have the discretion to say “Well the car is only half way into the hydrant area so I’ll make the ticket only $30 dollars, that should be sufficient.” Under the statutes of mandatory minimums a judge has no more ability to decide proper punishment that a PEO.  The whole concept is ludicrous.

One of the best examples of this abuse of power over sentencing is the Rockefeller Drug Laws.  The main idea of these laws was to send drug felons to prison with very lengthy sentences even first time offenders caught with small amounts of narcotics.  The sentences were mandatory and leniency was unacceptable (New York Times).  One example of the outrageousness of these laws was a 45 year old man who was arrested in Jamaica, Queens in 1995.  He was arrested for selling while holding six $10 bags of crack.  For this offense he was sentenced to 12½ to 25 years. The felon himself said that incarceration didn’t help.  Drugs are readily available in prison and you are more focused on day to day survival that you are on changing yourself (NY Times 2009).

In 2009 under Gov. Paterson and the Democratic legislative leaders these laws were amended to restore sentencing discretion to judges especially in lower-level drug possession crimes.  Judges would be allowed to send offenders to treatment programs instead of prison.  This is just one example of how sentencing laws and mandatory minimums have gotten out of hand and how and why this discretion must be returned to judges where it belongs.

One last thing that I would like to address although it was only briefly mentioned in the article is the idea of executions as a form of punishment. As the article states, the US comes in third as far as the number of executions performed, exceeded only by Saudi Arabia and China - Now there is a group we want to be associated with when it comes to how we treat our citizens... In this all I can say that it is my belief that execution is wrong on every level.  No doubt society has a right to protect itself but it does not have the right to be vengeful.  It has the right to punish but it does not have the right to kill. I cannot think of any way to put it more concisely than this.

 

However the greatest danger from factions, Madison thought were "majority factions" (i.e. the poor). Madison is confident that a minority faction can be handled by the mechanisms of popular government, although he assumes people would actually do something and not just sit back passively if a minority was trying to take control or "usurp" authority. Majority factions however have spelt doom for democratic governments since ancient times Madison argues. He believes that the Constitution contains the "cure" for the democratic "disease." He singles out two aspects: representative government and the large size of the state. He identifies these as the major difference between "republican" and "democratic" government. Democracy was kind of a dirty word for many of the founders and they preferred "republic" (Latin for "the people's business") instead. The point he is trying to make is that he believes that voting for representatives from among the "wise property owners" would add stability to the government.

I chose this passage because it really made me think hard about the way today’s government operates and how nearly Utopian it would be if it actually operated the way Madison envisioned it to.

As I read this passage it wasn’t much of a stretch to see how what Madison refers to as “majority factions” for which he used the poor as an example have now morphed into what we refer to as lobbyists who are paid by the rich and powerful, both people and corporations, to sway the vote of our representatives in their favor rather than in the best interest of the people who elected them as their representatives. The first major difference in modern government is that the factions we now need to be concerned about are not the poor but quite opposite, the very rich.  His fear was that these “majority factions” could undermine the power of the government making it no longer representative of all the people but rather just a majority portion of the people.  Today we have “minority factions” doing just this.  It has often been said that money is power and in the case of our government today this couldn’t be truer. Although he believed that representatives being chosen from the “wise property owners,” in other words what we would refer to today as the upper class would be the cure for this problem.  In today’s world this concept has backfired. He felt that if people were elected from the “wise” the more educated, and the people who had money that these same people would do the right thing in representing the population as a whole.  In a perfect world this might be true, but in both the time that Madison believed this and even more so in today’s world this is a very idealistic statement.  People are and always have been more concerned with their own self-interests and in the case of politicians; the interests of the people who get them into office and these people are the minority not the majority.

All we need to do is to look at the politicians who are elected to represent “the people.”  Rarely if ever do the representatives come from the lower or even the middle class.  They come from the people that Madison proposed they would be the upper class, the people who have money because these are the people with the power and connections to raise the money necessary to run a campaign and get elected to office.  Once they are in office they become obligated to the people who got them there; once again the people with the power and the money.  Now it may be true that politicians must, at least to the so extent represent and support the wants of the majority who elected them, or at least give the appearance that this is what they are doing because being a representative is a paying job and these people wish the keep their job and even more so, the power and prestige that comes with it.  However at the same time they are indebted to the powerful people and large corporations who enabled them to win the trust of the majority of the people and thus be elected.

So although Madison’s idealistic idea of a “representative government” and “the large size of the state” do in many ways add to the stability of the government they do not in any way cure the influence of the “majority factions” but instead allows for the formation of “minority factions,” once again the rich and elite to usurp the power of the government.  By allowing lobbyists, who represent a “small faction,” and for rich and powerful people to have so much influence over elections and our representatives; to influence the votes of the representatives who have been duly elected to represent all the people, sway their votes in an effort to support those who got them elected and not truly the majority of the people.  This is certainly not what the founding fathers envisioned as the way our government should operate.

What it Means to be an American

“As long as we thought of Americanism as the “melting pot.” Our American cultural tradition lay in the past.  It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.  It will be what we all make out of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future with a new key.”  - Trans-National America, Randolph Bourne

I chose this selection because I felt that in a very brief manner it summed up the notion of what the founder’s thought American culture was supposed to be while just as succinctly pointed out what it is, what direction it is moving in, and what vast opportunities it holds for the future.

When Teddy Roosevelt stated, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty and that is loyalty to the American people.”  He said so much in so few words.  He believed in the concept of the “melting pot” a crucible that would “melt” all incoming immigrants into an amalgam and pour them out into molds that would form “Americans.” But one doesn’t have to dig too deep to see the absurdity of this concept from its surface to its core.  It is contradictory to the very nature of this country and should be seen as anathema to both native born “Americans” and to every immigrant that has come to this country especially considering that every single person who has or ever will enjoy the privilege of citizenship in this great nation was at one time an immigrant.

First of all is it our language or our ideals, principals and aspirations that make us Americans?  If we say that it is our language then we must admit failure as a nation.  This country was founded by immigrants who only by default spoke English, men and women who came to this land to break away from the tyranny of the English monarchy and in forming this nation they declared in our Declaration of Independence very eloquently what the basis of this new nation was to be; the concept that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, the greatest among these being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Some years later the Bill of Rights guaranteed other rights that belong to every citizen of this land; the right to speak freely, the right to freedom of religion, the right to assemble and protest against their government and numerous others that are now deeply woven into the fabric that is the basis of this country.  These rights are also promises.  They are promises to every future immigrant coming to this country that these guarantees are something that they can look forward to as citizens and that are the greatest reason that many, if not most people immigrate to this country; the promise of a greater future.

Nowhere in the framework of this land is there any legal delineation that states that if you are to be an American you must forget your spoken language and now speak English, belong to a certain Church, or in any other way meld into a predetermined culture.  This concept is in fact the antithesis of the foundation of what this country is meant to be. This was an idea that come into being by powerful, albeit narrow-minded men who men who forgot that they themselves were immigrants coming to this country steeped in their own ideals and traditions while still seeking the same freedoms and that a great number of immigrants who migrated to this country both in times long past and in even the most recent times risked their very lives to do because they desired to share in these great truths of what it means to be an American.

So America should not be a “melting pot” that turns out all citizens to be the same.  It must be that “polyglot boarding house” that Roosevelt so feared.  I agree with Randolph Bourne when he said, “…we must perpetrate that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” Having people of different backgrounds and cultures coming together to share ideas and thus continue to complete this work that the founding fathers began, to form a new land where people have the freedom to hold onto and enjoy their cultural heritage while contributing to the basic concept that this is a place where everyone can come together and participate in their government, to form a country and a culture that is unlike and superior to any other in the history of civilization; this is what it truly means to be an American.  Every person who has ever landed upon these shores has done so with the dream of improving their own lot in life and to try to ensure that their children and their children’s children will have an even better life than they do.  This is the true “American Dream” and we must all band together, regardless of our differences and embrace our similarities as people to ensure that this dream continues and see to it that this great, unfinished country continues to grow and prosper and never forget that every citizen has their own individual and unique contribution to make to what it truly means to be an American and to what this country is and is to become.