Support the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting (FAIR) Act

Last week, a bi-partisan group in Congress introduced the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting (FAIR) Act, which would take the power to draw congressional district lines away from the state legislatures and mandate that it be conducted instead by a nonpartisan commission in each state. This legislation is critically important and 21st Century Jeffersonians should give the bill their full support.

The representatives filing the bill were John Tanner (D-TN), Mike Castle (R-DE), Allen Boyd (D-FL), Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Baron Hill (D-IN). On the other side of the Capitol, Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) filed companion legislation in the Senate. These men should be congratulated for the public service they have rendered to America by introducing this bill. It is refreshing to see that, every once in awhile, Republicans and Democrats are still capable of being republicans and democrats.

This blog has previously discussed the urgent need for redistricting reform on a national scale. Under the current system, most states simply allow the state legislatures to draw the lines of congressional districts. In practice, this means that whichever political party controls the state legislature can draw the districts in such a manner as to maximize the number of seats their party is likely to win by packing voters who support the minority party into as few seats as possible. The result is usually that the majority party gets a far greater proportion of congressional representation in their state than is actually justified by the percentage of the vote they received.

It also means that millions of Americans effectively have no representation in Congress. If one party routinely gets 70% of the vote in a given district, the person who represents that district is free to ignore his or her constituents from the other party. If you're unlucky enough to be a Republican in a Democratic district or a Democrat in a Republican district, you might as well not have a Congressman.

The provisions of the FAIR Act would go a long way toward fixing this problem. If it becomes law, each state will have its congressional districts drawn by a nonpartisan commission. The membership of the commission will be chosen by the floor leaders of the two major parties in each state legislature, with both parties getting to select an equal number of commissioners. Qualifications for being a commissioner will exclude those who have actively worked in politics during the preceding four years, and commissioners themselves will be forbidden from running for Congress until another session of redistricting has taken place.

The bill would prohibit states from redrawing congressional districts more than once in a decade, thus preventing episodes such as former House Speaker Tom DeLay's brutal power grab in Texas back in 2003. The commissions would be prohibited from taking into account factors such as past voting history or party affiliation of citizens, and would have to respect political boundaries such as city limits and county lines. Once the commission presents its plan, the legislature can either accept or reject it, but cannot amend it.

If adopted, the FAIR Act would massively benefit the democratic process in America. Political parties would no longer be able to gerrymander their states purely for partisan advantage, nor would potential congressional candidates be allowed to draw up districts in which they themselves intend to run. Competitiveness would be greatly restored to congressional elections, thus giving citizens real voice in determining who represents them in Congress and forcing representatives to pay attention to all their constituents. Simply put, the passage of this law would be the greatest victory for democracy in America since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

21st Century Jeffersonians should support this legislation with all the power at their disposal. Contact your representatives and ask them to support this bill. Write letters to the editor to your local newspaper to help spread the word. Email your friends and family about it. The powers-that-be don't want this bill to advance through the legislative process, and the most effective way for them to block it would simply be to ignore and hope the people don't mobilize in its support. This is an opportunity to strike a real blow for freedom, and we should not let it pass us by.

Cattle ID Plan Unnecessary, Expensive and Intrusive

A plan by the federal government to implement a national identification system for cattle has run into intense opposition from ranchers. This should come as no surprise when one examines the flawed and intrusive plan.

The Department of Agriculture wants to mark cattle with electronic tags and a centralized computer database to track the movements of livestock in order to monitor possible outbreaks of animal diseases. It's called the National Animal Identification System, or NAIS. Its utility in fighting animal diseases is debatable, but even if it were effective it would only matter to large agribusiness operations and would have little or no benefit to small, independent ranchers.

The opposition to NAIS from independent ranchers is understandable. First of all, they would bear the financial cost, which would be enormous. Each electronic tag would cost at least $2, and requiring one for every single animal would add enormously to the cost of doing business at a time when the poor economy is already hitting the livelihood of independent ranchers. The time and effort that ranchers would have to spend in sending reports to the federal government, as they would have to do whenever an animal died or changed premises, would add even more to their already heavy burden.

Aside from the cost to independent ranchers, NAIS would also represent a significant increase in the administrative structure of the Department of Agriculture, the costs of which would be on the shoulders of federal taxpayers. Considering our disastrous national fiscal situation, we need to be shrinking the federal government, not making it bigger.

There also objections to the NAIS, interestingly enough, on the grounds of the separation of church and state. Amish farmers have opposed the plan because they see tagging livestock "as making a mark", which they consider sinful. They also believe that the use of electronic technology violates their right to live in their traditional, non-technological lifestyle. The federal government has absolutely no right to interfere with the religious lives of citizens, as specified by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Giant agribusiness corporations are supportive of the plan, and no wonder. It fits nicely into their efforts to export meat products to foreign countries, and the added costs would be compensated for them by increased profits. But small independently-run and family-owned ranches have no such advantages, and the added costs will certainly drive a large number of them out of business. Indeed, some of these ranchers believe that one of the true motives on the part of NAIS supporters is to help agribusiness drive small operators out of business.

Independent ranchers are generally people of strong Jeffersonian impulses, determined to remain independent from both government and corporate control. Anything that threatens their economic well-being is a threat to 21st Century Jeffersonianism. But this plan represents more than an economic threat to independent ranchers; it represents yet another example of the federal government increasing its power to intervene in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. This is a federal program that we certainly need to get rid of, and the sooner the better.

Turning Responsibility for Iraq Over to the Iraqis

June 30 is the deadline for American troops to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities so that Iraqi security forces can take control. This process has been underway for several months now and it looks as though the deadline will be met. American forces will be redeployed outside the Iraqi cities, ready to intervene if necessary and beginning to focus instead on training the Iraqis.

With a disturbing rise in violence in recent weeks, some are raising concerns that the American withdrawal from the cities could result in a return to the security situation of years past, when insurgents and ethnic militias engaged in bloody guerrilla warfare, largely characterized by massive suicide bombings. Perhaps so. But if increased violence does take place, it's no longer our problem.

We have occupied Iraq now for six years. For most of that time, we have been training Iraqi security forces and propping up the elected Iraqi government. This effort has cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers. It has also cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iraqis have had a long time to get ready to take over their own security, and we have provided them with more than enough in the way of resources for them to do it.

If violence escalates after the American withdraw, we can only conclude that the cause is not a lack of Iraqi ability, but a lack of Iraqi will. And in that case, we should simply wash our hands of the whole affair.

From the standpoint of a 21st Century Jeffersonian, the invasion of Iraq was a foolish and utterly misguided mistake from the beginning. Unnecessary wars are not acceptable under any circumstances, and it should have been completely clear that Iraq posed no threat to the United States. More fundamentally, meddling in the affairs of other countries is almost always a recipe for disaster, and the convoluted mix of religion and politics in the Middle East make this particular part of the world especially dangerous. Were Jefferson alive today, he would certainly advise us to have as little to do with the Middle East as possible.

Jefferson would have wholeheartedly approved of President Obama's determination to extricate the United States from Iraq as soon as reasonably possible. We have given the Iraqis the tools to secure their own country. Whether or not they do so is up to them. Meanwhile, it's time for us to bring our troops home.

Jackson's Death Reveals the Triviality of American Popular Culture

Yesterday's unexpected announcement that singer Michael Jackson had died immediately resulted in an intense media frenzy which reveals a great deal about modern American culture.

Obviously, any individual's death is a sad event, but why is Jackson's death such a massive news story? Three of the country's leading historians, Ernest May, David Herbert Donald and John Hope Franklin, have passed away in the last few months, but there was no media frenzy for any of them. Henry King, an attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and was described as the "George Washington of international law", died last month and no news station mentioned a word. Judith Krug, the librarian who founded Banned Books Week, passed away in April and no media outlet noticed. Nor did any major news outlet note the passing, earlier this year, of astrophysicist Mario Acuña, who designed experiments for several planetary exploration missions and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.

For that matter, how many ordinary citizens who worked as community leaders, volunteered in local hospitals, bravely served as firefighters or police officers, or lovingly raised children as stay-at-home mothers died yesterday, with no more mention than a short obituary in the local newspaper?

The fact that Americans are apparently much more moved by the death of an entertainer than by the deaths of arguably much more deserving citizens is a manifestation of a very real problem: America is being entertained to death. The fixation people have with the personal lives of entertainers shows that we are now more concerned with amusing ourselves than we are with becoming better individuals or with addressing serious national issues. The American obsession with pop entertainment has become a steady dripping of acid that is slowly dissolving our national soul.

Of course, there is a tremendous difference between art and entertainment. Art is an aesthetic manifestation of truth and beauty, whereas entertainment is an effort to distract and relax the brain. Some musicians create art, while others merely entertain. Revealingly, those musicians whose music has the greatest artistic quality generally ignored by the readers of the tabloid press. It's the entertainers they're obsessed with.

Pop entertainment is to modern America what bread and circuses were to the ancient Romans. The Romans were so lulled by free food and so fixated by gladiatorial entertainment that they ignored the corruption within the Roman government, the bankruptcy of the treasury, and the barbarians smashing through the imperial frontiers. Consequently, their civilization collapsed. Similarly, many modern Americans are too busy watching reality television or discussing the latest Hollywood rumors to be bothered with anything requiring them to actually act as responsible citizens.

A glance at the average magazine stand provides clear evidence of this. For every thoughtful and informative periodical like The Economist or Scientific American, the reading of which might actually make one a better-informed and more well-rounded citizen, there are literally dozens of magazines focused on the personal lives or hairstyles of entertainment celebrities, with no redeeming or useful content whatsoever. It's enough to make a Jeffersonian recoil in horror.

Of course, we need entertainment to rest our brains and provide a reprieve from our professional and civic work. Recharging our batteries, so to speak, is an end for which entertainment is a means. But in modern American, rather than being a reprieve from work, entertainment has become a replacement for it. Our lives should be devoted to improving ourselves and our society, but truthfully our lives seem devoted to entertaining ourselves. Rather than serving as a means to an end, entertainment has become an end unto itself.

The average American can tell you the names of any number of pop entertainers, but has no idea who their representative in Congress is. The average American can tell you who won last year's Super Bowl, but has no idea who won last year's Nobel Peace Prize. If Thomas Jefferson could see how our society has evolved, he would frankly tell us that our priorities are the exact opposite of what they should be. And if America is ever to be the nation Jefferson dreamed it could be, we will have to get our priorities straight once again.

A well-informed and well-educated citizenry is a prerequisite for a free and prosperous society. We no longer have that, and the pop entertainment industry is largely to blame. We need to put down the copy of People and pick up the copy of The Economist. We need to turn off our televisions and reopen our books. We need to cease our psychological dependence on pop entertainment and again dedicate ourselves to self-improvement and good citizenship. If we don't, we risk going the way of the Roman Empire, with our civic identity gradually dissolving until we wake up one day and discover that our country has fallen apart.

Legislative Battle Rages Over Funds for F-22 Raptor

The F-22 Raptor is by far the most sophisticated fighter aircraft ever developed. It is also monumentally expensive, with a price tag of $339 million per aircraft when development costs are taken into account. Designed in the waning days of the Cold War as a replacement for the F-15, the mission of the F-22 was to be an air superiority fighter that would take on the Soviet Air Force.

When planned production of the F-22 ends in 2011, the United States Air Force will have taken delivery of 187 fighters. The White House and the Defense Department assert that no more are needed, that any additional F-22s would be a waste of money, and that the production line should therefore be shut down when the last of the 187 aircraft is completed. Nevertheless, the House Armed Services Committee has voted to appropriate $300 million in the current budget cycle as a down payment to purchase 12 more F-22s after 2011. Whether Congress wants more aircraft beyond these additional twelve is unclear.

This appropriation for additional F-22s is a needless waste of money and the effort should be defeated. President Obama has rightly threatened to veto it, and several key Democrats in the House bucked their party's leadership by voting against a debating rule that would bar any amendment to kill the F-22 funding. But because the production of the F-22 is spread across more than forty different states, there will be intense opposition within Congress to killing the funding.

Since the Cold War ended in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, it may fairly be asked what the actual mission of the F-22 is. While we have occasional tensions with Russia and China, the idea of an all-out war with those states seems remote (and, it must be admitted, much of the tension that exists is the result of our own meddling in their neighborhoods). In the unlikely event of a major conflict between America and either Russia or China, our current level of air power is more than sufficient to defeat them, and the coming deployment of the much-more affordable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will greatly add to our security. Besides which, we will have nearly 200 F-22s as it is.

In the kinds of conflicts the United States is likely to fight during the next several decades, the F-22 is essentially useless. It's air-to-ground capability is no better than the much less expensive F-35, and commanders will probably be extremely reluctant to risk the aircraft in a war zone anyway. It is worth pointing out that we have been fighting a war in Afghanistan since 2001 and a war in Iraq since 2003, and yet the F-22 has yet to make a single combat sortie since entering service in 2005.

Jefferson believed in a military that provided the necessary security for the country at the minimal cost. In our time, he would doubtless want a vastly smaller army, and a significantly reduced navy and air force. Spending vast amounts of taxpayer money on unnecessary projects like these additional F-22s would have struck him as simply ridiculous. The motivations of the members of Congress who are pushing for more aircraft are purely about securing their own political careers and are not in the best interests of the country as a whole.

Republican Hypocrisy on Moral Values

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, a Republican, has reappeared after inexplicably dropping off the map for a few days, being forced to admit to the press that he has been cheating on his wife. This comes immediately on the heels of Senator John Ensign, also a Republican, being forced to admit that he, too, has been unfaithful to his wife. Both of these politicians had been considered front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

The unfolding scandals of the last few weeks are only the most recent in a long-line of Republican sex scandals. Louisiana Senator David Vitter, it turns out, has a certain fondness for prostitutes. Senator Larry Craig, as most will recall from the immense media coverage at the time, was arrested for lewd conduct in an airport, with the subsequent disgrace preventing him from running for reelection. And, of course, we all remember Congressman Mark Foley of Florida, who was kicked out of Congress after sending emails requesting oral sex from underage boys.

This is not to say that Democrats don't have similar problems with members of their own party, as clearly demonstrated by the disgraceful actions of Senator John Edwards, Governor Eliot Spitzer, and, of course, President Bill Clinton. Clearly, the Republicans have no monopoly on the matter of political sex scandals.

However, there is the question of hypocrisy to consider. The Republicans have made a tremendous effort over the last two decades to brand themselves to the American people as the party of "family values". Republican political rhetoric during the Clinton years insinuated again and again that Democrats were more likely to be morally lax, whereas Republicans were the party that would stand up for American families and social values. Obviously, it was a complete facade, and the Republicans were living in a glass house.

Thomas Jefferson was not as priggish as John Adams, but he had very high moral standards and had nothing but contempt for people who were unfaithful to their spouses. But the idea that a political party should declare itself the guardian of moral values would have struck him as insane. Questions of morality are the business of the individual. Politics and government is about securing the rights of the people, and such mundane matters as overseeing an efficient postal service.

As Republican hypocrisy on questions of "family values" is exposed for the whole country to see, Thomas Jefferson would probably have simply said that they had it coming.

A Missing Element in the Healthcare Debate: Personal Responsibility

The healthcare debate that the Democrats have been wanting since 1994 is in full swing, and we can expect the political headlines of the next few months to be dominated by it. Unfortunately, this being modern American politics, most of the rhetoric will consist of childish ad hominum attacks and ridiculous straw man arguments rather than thoughtful discussions about public policy.

It's difficult to say what Thomas Jefferson would have thought about the current healthcare debate. In his time, a sick person would simply be cared for by other members of the household. Only in the event of a very serious illness would a doctor be summoned, and the fee would simply be negotiated between the doctor and the head of the household. The very concept of a "healthcare system" would have been confusing to Jefferson, or any person from the 18th Century.

On the one hand, he believed in small government and low taxes, so he would likely have strongly disapproved of a healthcare system run by the government. On the other hand, he would have believed that the fruits of the advances of medical science that have taken place since his time should be equally available to all citizens, irrespective of income. Let us not forget that "life" is among the natural rights to which he believed all human beings are entitled.

If a government-run healthcare system is the only means by which this natural right can be made into positive law, he may have supported it, however reluctantly. But I believe he would have wanted it limited to providing treatments for conditions that are beyond a person's ability to control.

Why? Because one thing that I think is certain is that Jefferson would have told us that we needed to focus on the issue of personal responsibility in matters of our health. How much healthier would we be if everyone took a half-hour walk every day? If we eschewed fast-food in favor of light, home-cooked meals? If we didn't smoke? If we looked to our own health with more responsibility and common sense, it would do more to improve the overall health of the American people than the creation of the best healthcare system in the world.

Jefferson himself was an extremely healthy man, which he attributed to his lifelong habit of soaking his feet in ice water every morning. Throughout his life, he was essentially his own doctor. In his time, everyone was expected to have rudimentary medical knowledge in order to take care of themselves and other members of their household. They expected to take care of themselves whenever possible, rather than putting their trust in someone else. In that regard, they were far more free than we are.

Obviously, we need a healthcare system of some form so as to provide citizens access to medical science in the event of serious illnesses and diseases, to ensure the safe delivery of babies, and to take proper advantage of the tremendous advances in medical science that have taken place since Jefferson's time. But we must face the fact that a very large proportion of our health problems stem from our own lack of responsibility.

Rather than depend entirely on the government, let's start by putting down the cheeseburger and getting a bit of exercise.