Loon- I need no lessons from you on the wording of
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Posted On: 02/20/2017 6:29:33 PM
Loon- I need no lessons from you on the wording of our seminal documents for separation and for governance.
Your take on both documents is that of a grade school kid. You know the words but not the music.
The first three words of the Declaration are commonly construed as intrinsically 'democratic'. But nowhere in either doc is there a suggestion of pure democracy, unconstrained by Constitutional protections and judicial review, as desirable.
That representatives at both the State and Federal level are elected through direct democracy establishes that there is no inherent disadvantage in so electing those leaders as well as governors and mayors, and of course constitutional and judicial constraints apply to those elections.
Your argument is based purely and solely on the archaic notion that 'small and rural' is morally superior to 'big and urban'.
Your defense of the Electoral College folds faster than superman on laundry day, in the first election in which the conservative candidate wins the popular vote but loses the electoral vote.
Don't even try, it's beyond dispute and entirely predictable from the double standards that conservative apply to damned near everything.
Some additional thoughts on the matter:
Your take on both documents is that of a grade school kid. You know the words but not the music.
The first three words of the Declaration are commonly construed as intrinsically 'democratic'. But nowhere in either doc is there a suggestion of pure democracy, unconstrained by Constitutional protections and judicial review, as desirable.
That representatives at both the State and Federal level are elected through direct democracy establishes that there is no inherent disadvantage in so electing those leaders as well as governors and mayors, and of course constitutional and judicial constraints apply to those elections.
Your argument is based purely and solely on the archaic notion that 'small and rural' is morally superior to 'big and urban'.
Your defense of the Electoral College folds faster than superman on laundry day, in the first election in which the conservative candidate wins the popular vote but loses the electoral vote.
Don't even try, it's beyond dispute and entirely predictable from the double standards that conservative apply to damned near everything.
Some additional thoughts on the matter:
Quote:
At the time of the constitution's writing, democracy generally meant direct Athenian-style democracy, unlimited by any sort of constitution.
Today, when we say democracy, we don't mean "citizens gather in a public place and use shards of broken pottery to vote on anything and everything, including ostracizing (or worse) any other citizen without a trial, presumption of innocence, any other legal rights, or an appeals process".
Usually, we prefix "democracy" with (lower-case l) "liberal", which is roughly the same thing as what the 18th century liberals like US founders, the British Whig party (which also included thinkers now considered "conservative" in the Anglo-American tradition, like Edmund Burke), and ethical/legal philosophers like Kant (who also disparaged what he called democracy, but advocated a system that -- again -- would today be described as a "liberal democracy"meant when they said "constitutional republic" or "constitutional monarchy".
Second, the constitution also doesn't directly say that government can't burn heretics at the stake. Instead, 1) prohibits establishment of religion, cruel and unusual punishment (with burning at the stake -- which could still be handed down as a sentence, even if unlikely to be carried out, in England at the time of constitution's writing -- being a punishment the founding fathers considered "cruel and unusual"
Going back to the question of democracy, simply put, there's no clause authorizing the president, a senator, speaker of the house, etc... to act as a dictator (unlike the Roman Republic, e.g., Cincinnatus), and the power of the president is checked by the judiciary and by congress; the congress in turn is elected in a mostly democratic manner (with the exception of the semi-democratic senate, which was originally appointed by state legislature and now elected in a rather unrepresentative fashion, e.g., a highly populous state like California gets the same two senators as does Vermont).
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