BartSimpson BartSimpson:
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2.Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, returning the election of Senators to state legislatures
Your objection is that people who are not represented by a state legislature don't get to vote for Senators and that's not going to be any different. Only states get to have Senators. Territories like Puerto Rico and Guam do not.
What it does is it removes the Senators from being beholden to their national parties and instead being beholden to the states they're supposed to serve.
This way the agenda of a state legislature is better represented at the Federal level which is as it used to be.
Too bad for the territories. Letting them hold up legislation would make as much sense as Canada allowing Nunavut to bring Parliament to a halt.
The rest is too theoretical and not enough reality. In a gerrymandered situation, especially in states where the boundaries for both the state reps and the ones in the congressional House have been re-written so cruelly that a Dem now has a one-in-three chance of winning where a GOP has a two-in-three chance, being able to cast a vote for a Dem senator is the only opportunity for those outside the power arrangement to have any representation at all. Allowing legislatures to appoint Senators from states where the GOP is never ever going to lose again thanks to the gerrymandering is an attempt to effectively annihilate the Democratic Party out of anything except the race for POTUS.
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4.Require a balanced budget and limit federal spending and taxation
Your objection is the same as what the ruling class and the bankers down here say and that's led us to $20 trillion in debt. We either act to get the debt under control now or the nation will eventually default. Those are the choices. [/quote]
The banks aren't going to call in their markers because they make too much money off of interest charges. Foreign lenders can't either because the US could just default and collapse the banks and governments they owe. The only real argument for debt reduction is that too much money is lost in interest payments that can be spent elsewhere. Saying there will ever be an economic collapse due to debt held by governments is the ultimate red herring, especially when it irrationally gets compared to an individual or family household debt. It just doesn't work that way.
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10.Create a process where two-thirds of the states can nullify federal laws
If 38 states object to a Federal law then it should be overturned or the government overthrown. You worry about a return to the Civil War and this measure would help prevent one.
What happens when the population in the twelve states that don't approve is equal to or, more likely, greater by far than the population of the thirty-eight states that effectively want to outlaw the federal government? Why should some right-wingers in Nebraska or Alabama be able to gut laws and departments that benefit California or New York? You'd go mad with pure rage (and rightfully so) if someone ever suggested to you that some putrid little place like Burma or Albania had an equal voice in dictating foreign laws that would negatively affect the United States. Why are you in favour of the same thing being legitimized inside your own country by smaller states, most of whom fund their basic systems thanks almost entirely to the taxation largesse of the more populated ones?
Like I said, this is all mostly libertarian day-dreaming, combined with a huge dollop of the American right-wing trying to exterminate the Democratic party altogether, where the sunshine-and-lollipops theories do not come anywhere close to matching basic daily reality.