To be brief and this deserves to be fully unpacked, authority has developed an accountability problem. Up and down the line, it has become increasingly difficult to hold authority to account. When authority sees criticism or attempts to hold it to account as an existential threat and treats it accordingly, and manages to dismantle or evade the levers and chain-of-command of accountability, this is what we get.
The peaceful means of redress are all broken. Elections are subject to manipulation, Congress is dysfunctional and state legislatures are worse, Federalism went away in 1861,and the courts are in a state of insurrection. As for petition, there is this:
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain
The recent and still ongoing cancel culture shows the wisdom of Twain.
While we have a problem with federal overreach, a vast amount of that comes from state abdication of their sovereignty. And a lot of that came because of the 16th Amendment - when the national gov't taxes the people directly, they are no longer citizens of a state, really, and the states can hand off all responsibility to the national gov't and suck the money for their state from the other 49's pockets. When they handed the responsibility to the formerly federal gov't, the Constitution became nothing more than an org chart. The states have to want to be their own governments for federalism to work. Or they become nothing more than administrative sections of a single national gov't.
EDIT: Should add that the states demanding to take back their authority right now is really a sham. They don't really want it except as a way to stop Trump. If a Progressive globalist gets back into the Oval Office, the states (blue ones, anyway) will go right back to bowing before the national government.
Prior to the 16th amendment the federal government could tax the people directly (article I section 9): "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
Such a tax had to be "in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." I'm not a legal scholar, but I think that it means that the tax had to be the same per person. That means people with no income or wealth would be unable to pay. If everyone is supposed to pay the same, but some can't, how do you tell the people who ARE paying that those who can't pay have no penalty for not paying? And what do you do with those who can't pay? Forced labor to pay the debt? If all are not paying, is the tax then in violation of the constitution? Meaning if you CAN'T collect from everyone, you can't collect from anyone? Congress did try to implement an income tax before the 16th, but it was ruled unconstitutional. But this is all speculation on my part, based on my possibly flawed understanding of what the "unless" clause in that paragraph means.
Per-person fixed-fee is what I think we should have. With one caveat: if an adult can't pay, they either serve a prison term (community service/forced labor) to pay the debt, OR let them sell their vote to another person in their voting area (same congressional district). We'd have to allow 2 votes per person (1 for each tax year) for the House of Representatives, so if you can't afford 1 year's worth of taxes, you can sell that vote but can cast the other one yourself. We could allow the buyer of the vote to designate someone to cast the vote (so a working spouse can pay the non-working spouse's tax bill, and allow them to cast their vote), as long as that person is eligible to vote in the same district. This way, only people who pay the cost of government are allowed to choose who can run the government. That's why we're in the mess we're in now: people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living at the polls.
As long as there is no meaningful penalty for violating the people's rights, politicians will continue to do it because there are voters who approve. For example, during the "gay marriage" debate, I met at least one person who specifically said that the government's job was to impose his sense of morality on everyone. People who approve of a particular form of oppression don't see it as oppression, they see it as "how it should be", and others are wrong for disagreeing. Politicians violate our rights because their voters approve of the violation. Supposedly, our recourse is to vote them out of office. But that doesn't work. When you have majorities in numerous districts that approve of government stealing your money so it can be given to them as "welfare", or who want certain speech/published works banned, etc. they'll never vote them out. We need a change in the Constitution that voting for a bill later found to be unconstitutional means the politician violated their oath of office, and they are automatically removed from office and barred from holding any federal office of any kind ever again (and kill their pension, etc.). They should be terrified of being left destitute every time they vote.
As things stand now, politicians vote a bill into law that violates the people's rights. The people have to pay for lawyers to fight against it for a decade or so to get the case before SCOTUS, while the politicians use taxes to pay the lawyers that fight to uphold it. SCOTUS rules that law unconstitutional and to be stricken from the books and no longer enforced. The politicians then change the name on the original bill, and pass it again with the text unchanged (IIRC, New York did this back in the early 1980s). And the cycle repeats. I'm in favor of the death penalty for politicians who violate their oaths of office like this, but I'll settle for their immediate removal from office, becoming ineligible to hold office (elected, appointed, hired, consulted, or volunteered), and loss of further government benefits (no payments of any kind, no security, nothing).
To be brief and this deserves to be fully unpacked, authority has developed an accountability problem. Up and down the line, it has become increasingly difficult to hold authority to account. When authority sees criticism or attempts to hold it to account as an existential threat and treats it accordingly, and manages to dismantle or evade the levers and chain-of-command of accountability, this is what we get.
The peaceful means of redress are all broken. Elections are subject to manipulation, Congress is dysfunctional and state legislatures are worse, Federalism went away in 1861,and the courts are in a state of insurrection. As for petition, there is this:
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain
The recent and still ongoing cancel culture shows the wisdom of Twain.
While we have a problem with federal overreach, a vast amount of that comes from state abdication of their sovereignty. And a lot of that came because of the 16th Amendment - when the national gov't taxes the people directly, they are no longer citizens of a state, really, and the states can hand off all responsibility to the national gov't and suck the money for their state from the other 49's pockets. When they handed the responsibility to the formerly federal gov't, the Constitution became nothing more than an org chart. The states have to want to be their own governments for federalism to work. Or they become nothing more than administrative sections of a single national gov't.
EDIT: Should add that the states demanding to take back their authority right now is really a sham. They don't really want it except as a way to stop Trump. If a Progressive globalist gets back into the Oval Office, the states (blue ones, anyway) will go right back to bowing before the national government.
Prior to the 16th amendment the federal government could tax the people directly (article I section 9): "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
Such a tax had to be "in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." I'm not a legal scholar, but I think that it means that the tax had to be the same per person. That means people with no income or wealth would be unable to pay. If everyone is supposed to pay the same, but some can't, how do you tell the people who ARE paying that those who can't pay have no penalty for not paying? And what do you do with those who can't pay? Forced labor to pay the debt? If all are not paying, is the tax then in violation of the constitution? Meaning if you CAN'T collect from everyone, you can't collect from anyone? Congress did try to implement an income tax before the 16th, but it was ruled unconstitutional. But this is all speculation on my part, based on my possibly flawed understanding of what the "unless" clause in that paragraph means.
Per-person fixed-fee is what I think we should have. With one caveat: if an adult can't pay, they either serve a prison term (community service/forced labor) to pay the debt, OR let them sell their vote to another person in their voting area (same congressional district). We'd have to allow 2 votes per person (1 for each tax year) for the House of Representatives, so if you can't afford 1 year's worth of taxes, you can sell that vote but can cast the other one yourself. We could allow the buyer of the vote to designate someone to cast the vote (so a working spouse can pay the non-working spouse's tax bill, and allow them to cast their vote), as long as that person is eligible to vote in the same district. This way, only people who pay the cost of government are allowed to choose who can run the government. That's why we're in the mess we're in now: people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living at the polls.
As long as there is no meaningful penalty for violating the people's rights, politicians will continue to do it because there are voters who approve. For example, during the "gay marriage" debate, I met at least one person who specifically said that the government's job was to impose his sense of morality on everyone. People who approve of a particular form of oppression don't see it as oppression, they see it as "how it should be", and others are wrong for disagreeing. Politicians violate our rights because their voters approve of the violation. Supposedly, our recourse is to vote them out of office. But that doesn't work. When you have majorities in numerous districts that approve of government stealing your money so it can be given to them as "welfare", or who want certain speech/published works banned, etc. they'll never vote them out. We need a change in the Constitution that voting for a bill later found to be unconstitutional means the politician violated their oath of office, and they are automatically removed from office and barred from holding any federal office of any kind ever again (and kill their pension, etc.). They should be terrified of being left destitute every time they vote.
As things stand now, politicians vote a bill into law that violates the people's rights. The people have to pay for lawyers to fight against it for a decade or so to get the case before SCOTUS, while the politicians use taxes to pay the lawyers that fight to uphold it. SCOTUS rules that law unconstitutional and to be stricken from the books and no longer enforced. The politicians then change the name on the original bill, and pass it again with the text unchanged (IIRC, New York did this back in the early 1980s). And the cycle repeats. I'm in favor of the death penalty for politicians who violate their oaths of office like this, but I'll settle for their immediate removal from office, becoming ineligible to hold office (elected, appointed, hired, consulted, or volunteered), and loss of further government benefits (no payments of any kind, no security, nothing).