Brooklyn has a plan to fix democracy
The borough's proposal for a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Welcome to The.Ink, my newsletter about money and power, politics and culture. If you’re joining us for the first time, hello! Click the orange button below to get this in your inbox, free. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work.
A few months ago, I was invited to be part of a very special project. Brooklyn, never lacking for swag, had taken it upon itself to propose an amendment to the Constitution. And they wanted me to serve as one of the “framers.”
The Brooklyn Public Library was behind the project. It went to heroic efforts to solicit public opinion across the borough about what people might want in an amendment. A team of organizers helped to sort through and systematize the multitude of answers. Because our systems are so broken, there were so many ideas about fixing them.
Then it was our job, as a small handful of “framers” (Susan Herman, Kimberly Peeler-Allen, Nathaniel Rich, and me), to distill what the people of Brooklyn wanted down to one amendment. After some deliberation, we settled on a theory and then on some language.
The theory was this: A great many things the people of Brooklyn want are not forthcoming because of a more fundamental problem: minority rule in American life, through institutions such as the electoral college and two-seat-per-state Senate representation. Addressing that basic problem would in turn make a variety of other problems solvable. So we drafted an amendment that abolishes the electoral college, protects the vote and creates a holiday for it, fixes Senate representation, and more.
And then, in the second article of the proposed amendment, we decided to push toward what a revivified democracy might actually do once it could do again.
With the election eight days away and many of you already voting early, I hope, I wanted to send you into the week with the proposed amendment text — a reminder of the work that will lie ahead to reform our political system even after Trump is gone.
And if you want to join us for a live conversation to discuss the 28th Amendment, some of the other framers and I will be happy to see you tomorrow at 7 p.m. ET.
The 28th Amendment — a proposal
Whereas the government of the United States should represent all of the people of the United States equally,
Section 1. The Electoral College shall be abolished and the President selected by popular vote; Senate membership shall be reallocated to reflect more accurately the distribution of the national population, with a minimum of one seat per state; Election Day shall be a national holiday; elections shall be publicly financed. All citizens of the United States, including those living in its territories and the District of Columbia, shall have the same electoral rights and representation as residents of a State; all citizens of voting age shall have the unencumbered right to vote in federal, state, and local elections. Congress shall have the power and obligation to enforce these provisions by appropriate legislation.
Section 2. In recognition of the inherent dignity of all persons, Congress shall have the power and obligation to enact appropriate legislation to secure all rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to education, healthcare, housing, employment, food security, and a clean and healthy environment.
Thank you for reading The Ink. Your support for this newsletter allows me to do independent, truth-telling work. If you haven’t yet, consider subscribing:
Photo: Anand Giridharadas
I am a Canadian and have watched in horror, the damage that has been done to the reputation of the United States around the world. It seems obvious that your proposed addition of the 28th Amendment should have been done decades ago rather than waiting until the country was on the brink of authoritarianism. The idea that "voter suppression" is described as "antics" by the press in a democracy, is preposterous as it should be indisputably illegal. The rule of law has been undermined by pervasive conflicts of interest and political pressure created by political appointments of the AG, the head of the FBI, Judges, Inspector Generals etc. and the power of the President to fire anyone for any reason? The ability to interfere with criminal charges, pardon criminals, create unfounded investigations to discredit political opponents in plain sight with no way to stop these actions as the Senate can be controlled by the President. Now the Supreme Court may become a weapon used to bypass the legislative branches of government entirely to implement the President's demands.
I hope that every democrat goes to the polls to vote early or drops off their ballot in person early to avoid the counting controversy that seems inevitable as it has been threatened for the past few months. Not sure why every democrat would not vote early? Over 22,000 lies have been told by the current occupant of the Oval Office. What reason could there be to wait until November 3rd? The choice is crystal clear as the candidates are in no way similar so what is there to wait to hear in these last few days?
This is a very important initiative to get fundamental political reform on the agenda and keep there. There is one critically important omission. Getting rid of Buckly v Valeo. More than anything else the decision that money is speech and so can not be constrained is at the heart of the commodification of the whole electoral process in this country. Since then any effort at reform has focused on trying to control supply - which has never really worked - because the demand has turned out to be infinite. As a result, as Adam Sheingate has shown, unique among liberal democracies, the electoral "means of production" been transformed into a more than 12.6 billion political marketing industry. So every electoral crises turns into a reason to make the practitioners of that industry richer....and the greater the campaign spending the more money they make. In this way a politics based on people - always very imperfectly to be sure - has been transformed entirely into a politics based on money, augmenting, rather than moderating, the more widely acknowledged, if not addressed, radical economic equality,