The future is bright for Libertarians.
Our competition — Democrats and Republicans — are falling over each other to demonstrate their incompetence. In no time Libertarians will win elections with a two part message:
- “I told you so!”
- “Here’s what we need to do…”
The debacle about bailout and stimulus would be a comedy except for the fact that we (and our children and grandchildren) will be the ones to pay for it. If tanking the economy weren’t enough to make Americans look for another option, the US Senate has deliberately violated its oath to uphold the Constitution.
The very first section of the Constitution, Article I, defines the membership of our Congress. Section 2 says “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the People of the several States.” Section 3 says “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.”
Two Constitutional Amendments have impacted the legislature. The 14th Amendment of 1868 reduces Congressional representation to the degree that a state denies the vote to freed slaves, and the 17th Amendment of 1913 calls for the popular election of US Senators. However, both of these Amendments repeat the link between statehood and legislative membership.
On Tuesday, February 24, 2009, the US Senate voted to give the District Of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives (the bill would raise the number of Representatives to 437 and give an additional one to Utah “for balance”).
Our Congress has the authority to set the number of Representatives in the House. It does NOT have the authority to give representation to any jurisdiction that is not a state.
Senators have been demonstrating their ignorance of the Constitution they are sworn to uphold:
Senator Collins added a particularly infuriating postscript to the Associated Press. “The question of constitutionality should be resolved by the courts, not Congress.” Rather than risk offending any home state voters by exercising a judgement on the clear meaning of the Constitution, the Senator decided that this period of economic dislocation is the perfect time to have the government spend money on the inevitable and expensive lawsuit destined to reach the US Supreme Court.
Libertarians are big fans of the US Constitution. We have problems with certain parts of it (the authorization of the Post Office, for instance), but we know you cannot pass a law to override a Constitutional provision. It is our belief that there are two ways the District of Columbia can gain voting representation in the Congress. The easier method is to make the District a state, which would require a majority vote in both houses. The surer way is to start the process of amending the Constitution, although it is more complex and time consuming.
On the one hand, we are annoyed by the way our elected representatives are wasting their time. On the other, we recognize they are proving to more and more Americans that they cannot be trusted to run the government.
This should be the Libertarian dawn!
