The People's Convention
It's Time to Upgrade the Constitution
The Politician Exit Ramp
Elections are fundamentally inconsistent with democracy.
That sounds crazy, but consider it for a moment. Are politicians good stand-ins for We the People? This isn't just to bash on politicians. Some are earnestly fighting for what they believe will be a better world. Despite this, government approval and trust in politicians is famously low around the world.
A commonly proposed path to address the dysfunction and corruption present in electoral democracies is to get more everyday people to run for office.
But how many people do you know could stop their working or caregiving responsibilities to run or serve? Of those, how many would want to expose their lives to public scrutiny and sell themselves as “the best” in order to control public affairs? Of that group, who has access to enough money to make themselves known to the public and be seen as “viable?”
The people who meet these criteria aren’t representative of the vast majority of Americans.
Elections systematically weed out a lot of humble people, modest people, working people, and caregivers—and attract a disproportionate number of sociopaths, narcissists, and people with special interests.
Expensive housing, dysfunctional healthcare, dangerous food, and unjust taxation, banking, and employment are all consequences of having our political decisions made by middlemen who disproportionately benefit from those problems.
When we consider how this dynamic is fueling potentially dangerous technologies and damage to our environment, it becomes clear that elections are pushing us off a cliff.
But how can We the People rule ourselves without politicians when there are so many of us and so many decisions to be made?
The answer is sortition. We can take short-term, representative samples of the public—give them the resources they need—and then let them decide. It's what we have used for our juries for centuries. It's what ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, used. And it's been used by citizens' assemblies around the world. Sortition has been tried and it consistently produces evidence-based decisions to achieve stability and general wellbeing, just like we would expect a coherent democracy would. The trouble, most of us agree, is figuring out how to actually replace elections with sortition in government.
Why Greece Was Great
Two Septembers ago, the Roman Empire broke the Internet. A cascade of clips went viral over several weeks in which women asked their boyfriends and husbands how often they think about the Land of Romulus & Remus. The answers, to their surprise, in many cases ranged from once a week to once a day. Suc…
In The Trouble With Elections, Terry Bouricius suggests that we could transition to a sortition-based democracy using a “peeling strategy” where policy areas that are neglected or avoided by politicians could be reassigned to sortition bodies (such as citizens' assemblies) in order to build experience and comfort with sortition and gradually expand its use, without directly threatening or having to compete with the entrenched power of socially savvy politicians.
The neglected, avoided, time-sensitive issue that we should peel away from politicians right now is constitutional reform.
When fundamental changes to a government are needed, who should get to make them? Elites and politicians who benefit from keeping things as they are? Privileged revolutionaries willing to cause some collateral damage? Or We the People?
Thomas Jefferson expressed that every new generation should have the right to redesign their government - the living shouldn't be bound by the contracts of the dead.
But the mechanisms that the founders built in to change the government are only accessible to people who already hold power within the current system. King George wasn't going to fix the fundamental problems with his government on his own and we are stuck in a similar situation.
Observers of US politics across the political spectrum have declared that our constitution is in crisis, but the political gatekeepers of constitutional reform, unsurprisingly, have yet to act.
We appear to be on the brink of potentially catastrophic environmental, social, and financial crises that demand swift, coherent action. But our politicians, as the beneficiaries of the status quo, continue to watch and wait.
Assemble America is working to call The People's Convention: an Article V US constitutional convention that would give short-term, representative samples of people the power to shape our system of government and bypass politicians on a recurring basis.
Why Call a Constitutional Convention?
Article V is the part of the US Constitution that deals with constitutional change. The Constitution indicates that if 2/3 of state legislatures ask for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one to propose changes to the Constitution. Those proposals would then need to be approved by 3/4 of the states in order to become part of the constitution.
Calling an Article V Convention has never been done and there's a lot of uncertainty about how one would work. That's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity: we can use the state legislation calling for a convention to define the process based on a carefully considered, sortition-based design. This won't be easy, but it is a concrete way forward. With such a difficult path before us, it makes sense to consider alternatives, so, here are some responses to common questions about this strategy…
Why work within the US political system?
The US has the largest single economy in the world. Its currency, technology, media, and military are all dominant. A lot of currently powerful individuals and groups depend on maintaining the US political system. We shouldn't base our strategy on a near-term, complete collapse of the US, because We the People probably wouldn't end up with the power in that situation and a ton of us would probably die or have our lives destroyed.
Why not focus on taxing billionaires first?
We believe sortition is the reform that makes all other worthwhile reforms possible because it would actually deliver the promise of the US: a government of, by, and for us. Examples across history demonstrate that even massive shifts towards economic equality are temporary: class divisions quickly re-emerge among the political elite. True political equality has not been achieved in modern history. We believe that sortition is the solution that will bring about lasting justice because no political elite can entrench itself with random selection.
Why a constitutional convention? Why not work through the usual amendment process?
The convention approach only requires us to demand action from state legislators, who are easier to unseat than members of Congress and are more likely to share our position that the federal government needs an overhaul. In addition, because Article V gives every state legislature an equal say in calling a constitutional convention, people don’t need to go to DC or a swing state to participate in direct, meaningful national action. They can stay right where they are, working in their own communities.
Isn't this plan risky?
So is doing nothing and leaving politicians as the middlemen between us and our government. We don't think there’s any group we could trust more to make the changes we need than samples of everyday people given the resources to make informed decisions and incentivized to reach the greatest consensus possible. As it stands, proposals from an Article V Convention would need to be ratified by 3/4 of the states to become part of the constitution: we don't think harmful amendments are likely to make it through that process.
Shouldn't we leave changing our constitution to experts?
Politicians aren't necessarily experts in anything other than campaigning. We think samples of regular people will be better at choosing unbiased experts than politicians. Experts should be on tap, not on top. People hire pilots for expertise in getting them where they want to go, not to pick the destination for them.
Why not try this locally or start smaller with a ballot initiative reform bill or a House of the Citizens?
Although we welcome any plan to thoughtfully use sortition to empower people at any level of government, we don't see any advantages in delaying work on our ultimate goal: putting the people in charge of their own government and bypassing politicians. The 14th Amendment provides a blueprint for how the US Constitution can change the relationships that states have with the people who live under them. We believe The People’s Convention will give us the best chance to win a stable democracy for all of us with the least duplication of effort.
That first section "The Politician Exit Ramp" might be the best concise readily-digestible summary of the concept of Sortition that I've seen. Triffic.