The gratitude is mine.

This is why I am such a fan of Fishkin’s approach. I think that much of the fear of “capture” dissipates if the convention is made up of fellow citizens chosen at random.

In addition, one virtue of discussions about structure is that we really have no idea who will be benefitted or burdened so long as the changes don’t go into effect immediately. Thus, we can talk about the merits or demerits of allowing any president elected in 2020 or even 2016 to have the veto power without its simply being a proxy for our political sympathies. I think that could be true for a fair number, even if not all, of the structural issues.

I didn’t respond adequately to an earlier posting by Aziz that raised the specter or Robert Michels and the “iron law or oligarchy.” That’s certainly something to be concerned about, especially given the ever more important role of big–really big–money in politics. Michels was writing primarily about leaders of ostensibly “democratic” institutions like labor unions, suggesting they’d ultimately be dominated by their leaders. I don’t know to what extent he was suggesting that the entiree political system would ultimately be available for purchase by a classic economic oligarchy. But surely we should do what we can to avoid going down the road of Berlusconi’s Italy or modern Russia. (I presume that Aziz agrees!)

The answer to the last part of this comment is, of course, “very few.” I suppose that I have become sometning of a crank on this issue, because I am so frustrated that neither national leaders nor even very good pundits–I discuss Tom Friedman in my book–”connect the dots” between what they often call the “dysfunctional” American political system and the decisions made in Philadelphia long ago.

As one might expect with a constitution drafted in 1787, it has nothing at all to say about the modern administrative state. There is an esoteric debate among some professors about the constituitonality of the Federal Reserve Board, given its (relative) independence of the allegedly “unitary executive,” but even Scalia has conceded, without explanation, that the modern administrative state is here to stay. Many foreign constitutions have provisions concerning their central banks, or the broader administrative state. I don’t have firm views on this; it’s simply another topic I’d like to see brought up on C-Span in a new convention.

This is another great question. I have a long chapter on “federalism” in the book, and I conclude that remarkably little about federalism is “settled,” even in terms of what Madison might have termed “parchment barriers” of assignments of power. Thus a number of constitutions abroad very explicitly guarantee states the right to make final decisions on matters of language, religion, education, or the disposal of certain natural resources (which are rarely distributed equally throughout a country’s territory). Our Constitution, on the other hand, says nothing at all about such matters. Any protected realms for state decisionmaking basically have to be imferred from the ostensible “assignment of powers” in Article I, Section 8, and one might paraphrase Sarah Palin to say that we know how well (or not) that has worked out over our history, beginning with McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and its endorsement of a very powerful national government indeed.

It may be that the Constitution does a “good enough” job, but that should be the conclusion of an extended inquiry (what is the metric, for example, by which we’re measuring the “enough”?). New Hampshire is interesting in this regard: That state’s constitution invites the electorate to vote every 10 years on whether or not to hold a constitutional convention, and there have been, I think, around 17 such state constitutional conventions. Yet New Hampshire continues to operate under its 1784 constitution (as amended), whereas most states have had multiple constitutions over the past 200 years. So it’s perfectly acceptablel to have a constitution that concludes, “we’re lucky to have this constitution.” The problem is that we’re not having any national conversation at all about constitutional adequacy. We’re assuming what should be the conclusion, that it is “good enough.” And, of course, I don’t think it is.

It’s interesting to look at the extent to which the United Kingdom, unfettered with a classic “written constitution,” has been able to engage in genine reform of their “unwriten constitution,” nowhere more obviously than with regard to the House of Lords.

You’re absolutely right that the original Senate was created for “despicable” reasons, i.e., to give small states equal representation. Madison also hated this feature of the Senate, and he defended it only as a “lesser evil” against the “greater evil” of having no Constitution (and new national government) at all. But, for him, it was basically like the compromise over slavery was for others, a “rotten compromise” that had to be paid. (Consider the US alliance with Stalin during World War II.)

This is also a response to Peter: I think that whether we’re really a “single country” is ultimately a matter of social identity. It’s worth taking a look, for example, at Federalist 46, where Madison spells out his belief that what will preserve federalism and state autonomy is the fact, and for him it was a fact, that most people had as their primary political identity state, and not national, membership. And, of course, Robert E. Lee demonstrated the validity of Madison’s observation, with terrible consequences about 70 years later.

I think that what the modern Republican Party has done/is doing is fundamentally delegitimating the national governmkent, save for its national security aspect. We see this clearly with Rick Perry here in Texas, who did allow himself briefly publicly to flirt with secessionist sentiment.

Impeachment has proved a failure, not least because it’s been monopolized by lawyers who are interested only in what counts as a “high crime and misdemeanor.” I strongly believe that we should be able to fire presidents in whom we lose confidence, with regard to basic issues of war and peace, life and death, by, say, a 2/3 vote of the two Houses of Congress assembled together. (If we had such a procedure, I’d be more open to frequent suggestions that we’d be better off with a president who had a single term of 6 to 8 years and was not, therefore, engaged in the “permament campaign” of fundraising and pandering.)

I also confess to having mixed feelings about “recall” procedures, which we saw played out in Wisconsin last month. On a number of these issues, I do not have at all settled views. I do believe strongly that they should be the subject of a national debate, and that is what I think is so lacking in today’s US. Instead, we are fixated on the merits or demerits of particular “leaders” or political parties, and not at all on the institutional structures within which they operate and that generate the incentives and disincentives for their behavior.

I despise the Senate because of the patent malapportionment that gives Wyoming the same voting power as California, which has approximately 70 times the population (or, if you’re a Republican who likes that offset, then consider that Pat Leahy and Bernie Sanders from Vermont offset Texas’s two senators). But that isn’t the same thing as criticizing bicameralism per se. There may be a good reason to have a “second house,” especially if it is truly interestingly different from the “first house” with regard to how its members are chosen. The current Senate is different with regard to having longer terms, but it basically shares with the House a deep parochialism inasmuch as every single senators has no incentive to think of any group larger than his/her own state. And, for what it is worth, the modern Senate has nothing at all to do with safeguarding “federalism,” which is a theory of state autonomy. That disappeared with the 17th Amendment, which changed selection from state legislatures to popular vote. So today the Senate is nothing more than a dreadful affirmative action program for the residents of small states.

So I would want any national convention to debate long and hard about how best to design a second house that would play a genuinely valuable role as a potential “balance” to the House of Representatives.

I hope this is responsive to your question.

The basic problem with a national initiative and referendum process is that, as demonstrated in California, it is not at all clear that it genuinely promotes democratic discussion. It takes about $3 million to get any proposition on the California ballot, and that’s obviously before all the advertising, etc. A convention, on the other hand, which would obviously be covered intensively by C-Span would offer an opportunity observe “ordinary Americans” (if chosen at random) engaging in serious discussion with one another, asking pointed questions of “experts” who would come speak, etc., and it would have a quite different valence from the modern process in California. Now, it’s possible that California ia an extreme example, and that we’d be better off looking at the experiences in, say, Oregon or Washington.

I would, incidentally, welcome a national referendum following the proposal of amendments by a national convention, just as I would have preferred a national referendum on “Obamacare” over the spectacle of the Supreme Court’s opining about its constitutionality.

Lutz works with focus groups, and he is, to put it mildly, a “motivated” pollster who wants to figure out only how best to sell his pre-existing point of view. He has no interest as such in making us a more truly democratic political system, which is Fishkin’s concern.

You ask an interesting question about the preamble (or close to lack of same) in the Articles. What is absolutely key, though, is that there’s no mistaking in it that we’re a “confederation” of basically separate states. The preamble to the US Constitution elides that by referring only to the “United States of America.” The original draft that went to the Committee on Detail in August 1787 named each of the states, but that was, of course, omitted in the final version. The basic question ever since is whether we’re really and truly one country or, instead, a collection of states who are only uncertainly connected with one another in a truly common enterprise.

One of the most important lessons produced by looking at the “other 50 constitutions” within the United States is to realize that only Delaware among them joins the US Constitution in rejecting any and all “direct democracy” in favor of an exclusive reliance on “representative democracy.” 49 of the fifty states, for example, require popular ratification of proposed constitutional amendments. More important, I suspect, is the ability of voters in, say, Maine or Ohio to put legislatioon passed by a legislature and signed by the governor on the ballot for popular review, as has recently happened in both states. California, like many other western states especially, makes vigorous use of the “initiative and referendum.”

One of the major themes of my book is that i’s simply fallacious to view “the American constitutional tradition” as captured exclusively in the US Constitution. What’s interesting about the state constitutions is how much of the national model they have in effect rejected. Yet we never ask ourselves which provide better models of government in the 21st century. One possible answer, of course, is that a given state constitution is perfect for that state, and the US constitution is perfect for the nation as a whole. That’s a possible answer, but I’d like to hear the arguments as to why that’s the case. And that’s the argument we’re simply not having in this country.

I strongly urge you to track down Fishkin’s most recent book, published a couple of years ago by Oxford (and whose title I am obviously not now remembering). Basically, what he does is to select a random sample of people–and, as I said, he’s done this all over the world, including China, Australia, Bulgaria, as well as within the US–and bring them together to a given locality for a weekend. During that time they attend “briefings” on given issues from people carefully selected to protect various points of view. At the end of the time together, they are polled (as they have been when they arrive). What is interesting is to see to what degree they change their views after they’ve become considerably better informed about the complexities of given issues. Jim’s objection to most polling is that they are simply snapshots at a given instant of people who in fact may never have though more than a moment about the issue they’re being polled on. That’s not the case with the people who participate in his “deliberative polls.” And the mechanism of their selection assures that they are a good cross-section of the population.

Aziz asks the crucial question: How important are constitutional structures anyway. Are they really “superstructural,” built on top of what’s “really important,” whether it’s political culture, social homogeneity, or the state of the economy? I don’t want to overestimate the importance of constitutions. It may well be the case that, at the end of the day, they explain less about a given society than these other factors. But “less” is not the equivalent of “nothing,” and I think it is a major mistake to ignore the extent that the United States Constitution, and certain state constitutions like California’s, make their own contributions to our current malaise. I compare this to drug interactions. One might be able to take a number of drugs, separately, and some, of course, might be more important than others. But even aspirin can, under some circumstances, interact with other drugs in highly deleterious ways. So that is really the heart of my argument about the Constitution. Unless one thinks it’s of NO importance, then we should be far more attentive than we are as to how it is ineracting with other features of American society in order to create a potentially disastrous situation.

One other point about a “more modest” model of reform. The fact is that Congress has proved incapable of any kind of consideration at all of structural changes. I have a discussion in my book of a proposed constitutional amendment, drafted by a joint commission organized by Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute, on creating “continuity in government” should a terrorist attack, for example, kill hundreds of representatives or disable dozens of senators. (Dead senators can easily be replace, which is not the case with dead representatives or disabled senators.) Although Sen. John Cornyn actually introduced the amendment in 2004, it has gone absolutely nowhere, because it’s not viewed as a sexy issue that plays to “the base.” Instead, we get idiotic proposals for amendments on flag burning or same-sex marriage, which not only are not going to go anywhere, practically speaking, but are also entirely irrelevant to the basic problem of contemporary national government, which is the inability of Congress effectively to respond to almost any of the basic challenges facing the country. This is the “crisis of governance” I allude to in my title.

As noted above, I would “identify the delegates” by picking them basically at random, creating a national “citizen jury.” I discuss the work of Stanford political theorist Jim Fishkin at some length in my book; he has held what he calls “deliberative polls” around the world, and they could, I think, serve as an extremely useful model for a convention.