Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge-Building to China During the Johnson Years Book

Mark Green has many valid criticisms of right-wing policies of the Bush administration and correctly criticizes connections between big business and government. That the nation's voters ousted Republican rule in the recent presidential election suggests the public is leaning left and this is a refreshing change.

Still, Mark Green needs to show why American democracy has rotted from within. He's smart, well read, an influential liberal spokesman, but his partisan approach is counter-productive in my view. Americans can no longer afford to think like liberals or conservatives, we can't align with left or right, rather, we must end pointless partisan squabbling. Green's book is a liberal prescription with worthy ideas but it won't fix America. Conservative prescriptions won't either. Rather, America needs serious reform.

Green has excellent ideas worthy of consideration but readers should also consider serious non-partisan thinking such as "The American Lie" by Benjamin Ginsberg; "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution" by Kevin R. C. Gutzman; my book; "Up To Our Eyeballs" by several authors; "Our Undemocratic Constitution" by Sanford Levinson; "Common Sense II: How to Prevent the Three Types of
Terrorism" by myself; "How America Got It Right" by Bevin Alexander (a tough critique of American foreign policy despite the positive sounding title).

America's political process is broken. Washington is corrupt. Congress is gridlocked. There's a dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch in one person -- the president -- and the system of checks and balances has come undone. The executive branch controls a slew of federal agencies which issue rulings, and as a result it has vast power to make laws which are not subject to debate or scrutiny or Congressional oversight. Presidents can effectively declare wars -- wasn't Congress supposed to have this power according to the Constitution? Federalism is broken -- ideally state governments should regulate their own economies, but Washington has usurped this power through numerous rulings (often with complicity by the Supreme Court). Ideally a federal structure combines the benefits of small-state regulatory smarts under an umbrella of protection because of its combined size. Further, the Supreme Court acts like a legislature; the Framers never intended for it to have the power to strike down any law it deemed "unconstitutional". America's foreign policy architecture is flawed since it permits only one person -- the president -- to have such vast power in a complex world; if an incompetent president is elected, then the entire nation can suffer for four, perhaps eight years, and I don't think this is acceptable in a world with dangerous stateless thugs seeking weapons of mass destruction. Symptoms of serious underlying problems abound: financial meltdown, inability to confront long term problems like social security underfunding, serious decline in political civility. A more serious, underlying problme is that people are no longer citizens, but rather apathetic and frustrated consumers who have abandoned any real role in self-government. Why has this happened? Green needs to deal with such questions (I have a theory in my book but it's untested.) Washington is like a giant crashed computer, unresponsive to keystrokes, unable to cope with serious issues.

I think the problems are so serious that a Second Constitutional Convention is needed to fix them. So I have summoned this body, using my authority as a private citizen, to convene in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, beginning July 4th, 2009, to craft a new document based on the existing one but which: (1) prevents crime, tyranny, and foreign terrorism (2) restores citizenship as an active relationship between individual and government with specific responsibilities and privileges (3) restores the federal structure in which state governments have the most authority to regulate their respective economies (4) fixes the architecture of government to permit intelligent and long-range foreign policy (5) identifies movement in public to thwart terrorism while preserving privacy with a system citizens will support (6) de-politicizes the Supreme Court (7) limits factionalism (8) restores checks and balances between the branches of government.

Losing Our Democracy has intelligent thinking from the left but Mark Green needs to see the bigger picture and consider non-partisan approaches as well as support a call for a Second Constitutional Convention.