Engineering Permanent Single Party Rule Through Constitutional Loophole Abuse

Or: Why We Should Rewrite the Thing

A thought occurred to me this morning:

Suppose I was a party of utterly amoral and ambitious politicians with no commitment to democracy beyond what was necessary to obtain control of the Presidency, and a majority (but not a supermajority) in both Houses of Congress. How could I use this position to permanently cement complete control over the federal government, without violating the letter of the Constitution? While utterly disregarding its spirit of course...

Here is one plan:
Find a sizable state where your party is overwhelming dominant and the legislature is compliant. Second, divide the state into extremely small jurisdictions which your party is sure to win. Using Kansas, (a fairly small state) as an example, (Pop:2.9 Million) one could divide the state into 29 100,000 member districts each with two Senators and one Representative, giving "formerly Kansas" a fifth of all Senators and a House delegation as big as New York's.

But why stop at 100,000? Why not divide Kansas into 290 10,000 member districts, giving it an absolute majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives. Then "ex-Kansas" can pack the Supreme Court with loyal "ex-Kansans", and amend the Constitution (by calling a convention) without a single vote from anybody else.

This works because the Constitution itself doesn't set a minimum population for statehood. There are some statutory requirements for new states being admitted but those can be changed by Congress, and I'm not sure if those even apply for new states being created in the jurisdictions of existing states.

The point of this exercise is not to recommend a course of action (if you read the introduction and thought that sounded like you...), to lay out any plausible series of events, or to warn you of some secret plot. If such a scheme were attempted it would probably result in civil war, the collapse of the United States, or (least plausibly) rapid coordinated action by existing states to amend the Constitution to specify a minimum population.   Rather it is to show the weakness of the Constitution as written and the vulnerability of our system to "Constitutional Hardball" driven by partisanship uber alles.

If  the commitment to political victory trumps a commitment to majority rule -that basic principle of democracy- then the protections the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution in an attempt to prevent the "tyranny of the majority" can be used instead to create a "tyranny of the minority", i.e. tyranny.

Privatization, Raising the Retirement Age, and Milking Social Security.

Working through the 2016 Trustee's Report on Social Security for a paper on various reform proposals, I was suddenly struck with a vision for the optimal reform platform from the perspective of plutocrats. First, privatize the trust fund. It doesn't matter how you do it, as long as Wall Street types can take a cut, say .5% (which considering the size the trust fund would be ludicrously overpriced, but I'm a pessimist too), of the current trust fund which stands at about $2.3 trillion dollars right now, all in T-bills.

Next, (I suppose you could do this in any order, but it might be an easier sell to try and "save Social Security" by privatizing the trust fund, and then when that fails be forced to - reluctantly- make benefit cuts.) raise the retirement age to 66 or 67. The same end could be accomplished by making the checks smaller, but for some reason telling 65-year-olds with back pain, arthritis, and a physically stressful job to tough it out for two more years is more politically feasible. Anyway, the real trick is this: make sure that whatever reform program you adopt, you keep the trust fund intact and growing.

So instead of serving its intended purpose - as a cushion so retiring boomers wouldn't have to suffer benefit cuts- the trust fund becomes another big pile of money for Wall Street to manage. Some back-of-the-envelope math suggests that raising the retirement age to 67 would put the program in surplus for the next few decades at least. That's decades where Wall Street would get an extra $11.5 billion a year, growing with the trust fund.

Of course that would really be a drop in the bucket compared to the total profits of America's financial sector, and while 2.3 trillion dollars is a lot of money, there's ten times that much in US pension funds already. So this is hardly a must-have for the financial sector. And if the wizards of Wall Street manage to raise the revenues of the program enough to cover the cost of their management and deliver a profit to the taxpayers, then its a win-win. Except for all of those people who got shafted with benefit cuts.