I regard it as wrongly decided. The Equal Protection Clause can be
reasonably interpreted to require that at least one house of a
two-house legislature be equipopulous, but equal representation is only
to prevent public action without approximately majority support, not
that majority is sufficient for public action. It can be sound
constitutional design to enable a minority to block public action.
It is notable that this question did not arise until legislatures
started considering proposals to redistribute wealth, and the would-be
recipients of the redistribution became frustrated by the ability of
the majority to block redistribution. That continues to this day.
As for direct election of the president, or any other public officials,
it should now be clear that the present marriage of the kind of egoists
that would seek public office with the public-choice pathological
domination of the election process by monied interests, should inspire
efforts to find better ways of selecting our officials, like from among
those who don't want to do it and who don't owe their selection to
anyone.
A few amendments
might improve the situation:
Proxy voting in legislative bodies elected by population
Members of the United States House of Representatives, and houses
of state legislatures whose members represent political subdivisions
that elect a number of representatives in proportion to their
population, shall elect representatives at large, and the number of
allocated representatives receiving the most votes shall be declared
elected. Each such elected representative shall cast the number of
votes he or she received in the last election in all proceedings of the
house to which elected. Each candidate shall, prior to election,
declare a list of successors if he or she becomes unable to serve, or
is removed from office, who shall be appointed to replace him or her.
Selection of members of legislative bodies not elected by
population
Members of the United States Senate, and houses of state
legislatures whose members represent political subdivisions not based
on population, shall be selected by a multi-stage nominating process
that first randomly selects precinct panels of twenty-four, who then
elect a person from each precinct, from among whom are randomly
selected twenty-four persons for the next higher jurisdiction or
district, and thus by alternating random selection and election to the
next level, when they reach the top level, the number of randomly
selected candidates shall be five, who shall be the nominees on the
ballot for the final election by general voters, except that general
voters may write-in other persons. Voters may vote for more than one
nominee, using the method of approval voting. There must also be an
alternative of "none of the above". The nominee receiving the most
votes shall be declared elected, unless "none of the above" wins, in
which case the position shall remain vacant.
Selecting electors for president and vice-president
The electors for president and vice-president shall be selected in
each state by the following procedure:
- An initial panel of citizens qualified to vote in that state
equal
to one hundred times the number of electors to be selected from that
state shall be selected at random, in a process that shall be
supervised by a randomly-selected grand jury specially empaneled for
that task;
- Members of this initial panel shall take an examination in
which
each shall recite from memory 20 randomly selected clauses of this
Constitution, and shall receive a score of one for each clause he or
she is able to recite without error;
- A second panel shall be selected from the first, consisting of
ten
times the number of electors to be selected, with the odds of selecting
each weighted by the score he or she received in the examination, and
with exclusion of any who scored zero;
- Members of the second panel shall meet, and each shall rank all
the
others in descending order of civic virtue, giving a score indicating
the rank consisting of the number of panelists for the highest down to
one for the lowest;
- The electors shall then be selected from this second panel at
random, but weighted by his or her average rank from the previous round
of peer assessments.
Not something redistributionists will welcome, of course.
On 01/15/2011 06:16 PM, Dan Johnson-Weinberger wrote:
Following up on Rob's last point, I wonder if Professor Gans and other
opponents of the National Popular Vote believe that Reynolds v. Sims
was wrongly decided.
-- Jon
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