|
NewLifeAdventure -> RE: Can a woman be President of the United States sans a Constitutional Amendment? (4/4/2016 7:09:29 AM)
|
Another term for Jefferson's faction was states right agrarian, as opposed to federalists that favored more centralized government for the sake of commerce and "defense" (really colonialism, as history has shown, including our own Revolution, that a decentralized defense is a harder target to conquer). Federalists went extinct, but not before packing the Supreme Court with the most significant consequences in the history of our government. We are who we are, for good or bad, because of the jurisprudence that began with the Marshall Court which, among other things, made themselves the final arbiter of the Constitution (the Constitution itself does not specifically state that). All Supreme Courts have engaged in judicial activism since then, including Justices who speak out against it.
What filled the Federalist void were the Whigs, also for centralized government for the sake of commerce and corporations, who also went extinct. At least before the advent of mass media, decentralized parties were more resilient than centralized parties. Filling the Whig void was the Republican party, also for centralized government for the sake of commerce, corporations and "defense." Thus as much as corporate-funded think tanks and interest groups want to turn it around, the Republican lineage is the pro-centralized, pro-commerce, pro-corporation track. Originally corporations were to pay the federal taxes, because that's who centralized federal government primarily benefited. Intrusion into individuals paying taxes occurred first, with social program intrusion following. The logical retraction to that would be shifting federal tax burden back to corporations again, followed by retraction of social programs, but no corporate funded think tank, interest group or mass media outlet will nurture that type of thinking.
Since the seventies, the decade of the Powell Memorandum and when the Supreme Court determined that money was free speech, there have been unrelenting trends, most notably wealth disparity, that have risen despite a Democratic president, Republican president, Democratic congress, Republican congress, split branches or unified branches. We have, as a fairly well known Princeton study empirically documented, an oligarchy. Voting for either legislative or executive branches is largely irrelevant to these trends. To overcome them we would have to start with overturning the jurisprudence groundwork first laid by the Marshall Court, which means the significant voting would be on Amendments, something that has become exceedingly rare precisely because of the marriage of wealth and power enabled by the Supreme Court.
|
|
|
|
