America's Founding Wasn't Flawless. Neither Were The Founders

Who do we get to blame for congress and its absolute fear of accountability if not the founding fathers?  Didn't they realize that partisanship would someday become the subordinate of our demise? Some in congress have begun to excuse their uselessness by saying "no legislation is better than bad legislation".  Meanwhile, they allow all legislation and decisions of war to come exclusively through the executive branch and executive orders, functionally turning the office of the president into the king we abhor.  For Americans, choosing our next king has just gotten serious.

The founding design was flawed, and it still is.  Apparently, I am suppose to be afraid to say that, especially if I hope to declare myself as a truly conservative republican.  Not that I am striving to own one label or another, but there are people out there (Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Rand Ryan, Paul Paul, Iyn Rand) who are. Any one of these offshoots of the republican Medusa would love to solidify their place within a conservative electorate that has no true identity as a result of an unrecognizable face. Republican, Libertarian, Tea Party or Tea Party Libertarian's are all distinct aspects of a segmented party searching to coalesce around an identity that average Americans won't be afraid to look at, and a candidate who can best express this fractured face.

Paul Paul is actually a formidable candidate for republicans to put forth, in that he marries most aspects of what the party seems willing to accept as their identity.  The problem is that Paul Paul doesn't exist.  Neither does Rand Ryan, who could also connect the dots on conservative confusion if he were a person. The Tea Party is not reflected in any of these examples (real or mythical), because they remain the marginalized group under the republican umbrella.  As they continue to lose primary elections to traditional republicans or Libertarian up shoots, the impetus to put forth a Tea Party presidential candidate has lost much of the steam that it had at the start of Barack Obama's presidency. Libertarian's might remind you that they were originally described as Tea Party Libertarians, but their two famous faces in that crowd, Rand Paul and his father Ron, do not express the Tea Party aspects of the Libertarian banner.

In fact, Rand Paul will be the one conservative candidate in this election for president who, much like myself, sees plenty of errors in the founding documents, especially as they've disproportionately impacted brown skinned American's that are currently incarcerated in US prisons. Those who blame laws and regulations for our economic and social problems rarely see how our founding documents have always allowed whatever capitalism could afford. Regulations have never been designed to stop business, just to insure that only a select few maintain quick access to certain industry.  Big money can move mountains of regulations out of the way, or financially absorb them to speed things along. Everyone else must get in line.

The big money provision is firmly established and maintained within the founding documents, and little has changed since our founding.  If that is okay, which it very well might be, lets admit it and stop pretending that the founders wrote a flawless document of supreme opportunity for all.  We can easily disagree about how much industry owes society(socialism), but we shouldn't continue to argue about our imperialistic model, its intent, or its initial and remaining flaws.

What the founders created is the democratic freedom to be heard. That's it.  To be certain, democratic freedom is a powerful tool. Many capitalistic newsrooms use it daily to manipulate the masses.  Constitutionally condoned misogyny continues to force women to fight their way into a founding document that finally insists on equality, but can't undo the imbalance that former founding language fostered for way too long.  We will leave the racial stuff alone for now.

It might  be harsh to hold the founding fathers to task for misogyny that ruled their era and before them.  In fact, I only hope to reveal that any document made within the belly of imbalance was also vomited from that belly. Yet, despite all of that, the beauty of the constitution is not the surety of its founders but the surety of its foundation of freedom, in which democracy could overcome the natural failures of man, even theirs.

Would we have established an electoral college if the founders had advanced technology like today?  Technology is currently challenging all traditional means of voting, but it has yet to address the founding failures in how we actually vote for our president.

Conservatives deserve the lion share of credit for a clear understanding of this key issue for our nation.  The founders locked us into a two party reality that robs our ability to stand on principle and vote that way as well. Principled stands, like that of the Tea Party republicans, is what started this conservative segmentation, and both Tea Party and Libertarians will have to either wait their turn (Tea Party) or get behind Rand Paul (Libertarians) as a third party alternative.  For legitimacy sake, Libertarians may be forced to put forth a viable candidate regardless of the uncertain republican plan.  Four more years of Libertarians waiting to bear the face of the republican party for a run at the presidency could be the formula for the same kind of,  "waiting for our chance" decline that the Tea Party  is experiencing now.

Despite the distinct divide, if you asked any conservative segmentation of today's republicans to articulate their movement, the words "founding fathers" will certainly make their way into the explanation.  In essence, the hope is to insure that the concept of conservatism and the actual thing being conserved is easily repeatable and connectable in a short sound bite.  Modern conservatism is being segmented by economic motivations, social motivations or both.  The segmentation is correct and the founders were wrong.  Until a viable alternative party candidate wins the Presidency, the two party divide, securely established, designed and protected by our founders, will eventually split America into a handicapped nation.  Already, we lack the collective resolve to address the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) threat and groups like them WILL be emboldened to take advantage of this time in our history to increase their stature.

The founders should have given the president the freedom to destroy foreign enemies as needed just as they should have given American citizens the power to ouster a sitting president who doesn't act in our collective interest relative to war.

Oh! They did do that?

So what is the real problem then?

Congress (aka., power grabbers)

Congress was, and is, full of a bunch of people who think they could be president too.  A few are happy to simply represent their constituents at home, but most are power grabbers with ego's that afford them this character flaw.  The founders, seeking to be smarter than the country they were rejecting in this whole founding process, diminished the role of the president, or king, or whatever you call the person in charge, by sharing his responsibility with power grabbers, but leaving accountability at the foot of the king. Agreement becomes weakness to a power grabber. At its worst form, power grabbing turns into a stalemate stare down like we are witnessing in congress today.

Is congress still at the mercy of lobbyist and the likes as we used to suspect?  Only if they choose to be.  No congressional representative remains in office long if they do not play the game a little, but even that becomes a further indictment on those who place power above principle. Terms limits should be dictated by personal integrity, or an unwillingness to sale out.  Some of our nations best politicians will never ascend to national politics because state and local politics is a dirty challenge.  National politics is downright filthy.

Thanks to our founding, political principles are dictated by personal priorities resulting in the politics of lesser evils.  The founders probably intended for a closer connection to God then what we've maintained, but capitalistic compulsions (i.e., lawsuits that ran God away) ruled the day on that matter as well.

Now, God is still in schools, just only at the big money Catholic and Jesuit schools that can afford to circumvent the "No God" regulation, which poor people who love God can't easily navigate around (I got sent to the office several times while learning evolution in high school). An alternative party candidate will address this problem, but are we currently taking a 50 year approach towards dismantling the two party grip? Those currently on this route don't think so, but the remedy they seek lies in a fractured founding document that instituted an electoral methodology which marginalizes any state that dares put forth a third party candidate. Marginalized states will have to continue to put forth marginalized candidates for 50 years in my estimation before enough states will finally see the wisdom in the approach since the electoral process demands that ALL electoral votes from each state be cast on one candidate, regardless of what the other votes in that state reflect. Disinterested voters had better move to states where their vote can bear weight or they risk feeling further disinterest given the electoral process.

Is that simply losers lament?  No way.  It is discontent with a process that feels forgone long before you've gone off to stand in a long line just to receive a conclusion that you already expected. On presidential election nights, only a handful of states actually hang in the balance, and those states get pounded with campaign artillery for their troubles. Actually voting is important because turnout is not a forgone conclusion, but the polls make voters feel as if the conclusion is foregone, and seldom do polls significantly miss.

When a person's vote doesn't feel valuable, than voting loses virtue. The founders may not be responsible for that, but they can't get an ounce of credit for their lack of effort in protecting the sanctity of the voting process when they started out allowing shoddy behaviors, most notably the electoral college, as well as the systematic exclusion of millions from the two party electoral trick. However strongly you defend the founders for the use of it at our founding should be the same vigor at which you adjudicate them for not foreshadowing its eventual uselessness.

This is, in small part, an effort to discredit the flawless founding, but in large part it is a hope to convey a bigger concept.  Thank you founding fathers!  We know that creating a more perfect union could never mean perfection, and that electoral thing was good when it was good.  Now, its time to count the freakin' votes.  Its the only way to functionally destroy the dysfunctional two party system as we know it.  Through counting the vote and accessing all presidential candidates, and their campaigns, through public television (free TV only) and a free web- based campaign tool, we can force big money out of the presidency and the voice of America into it. If big money wants your vote, they can pay for door to door workers who come out and ask for your vote like they used to do in the good ole' days, when people respected the voting process.


.....or we could keep political gridlock instead.