You mean those who fall for party slogans.. no, thanks, I'll pass on those folks being there..

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Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

He would be excluded. He's an elected official..

__________________
Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

You're describing the majority of the American sheeple and they won't take too kindly to not being represented. Besides, their representation is offset by the equal representation from other national parties.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Then why not gather 100 teens, give them a copy of the Constitution, let them read it, ask them what they would change about it.. have a group discussion on each issue.. and that's what we have.

Doubt you would trust their ability to come up with something.. So you can understand why I rather tell them to piss off and allow rational thinking folks address this issue instead of a bunch of folks who act like teenagers.

__________________
Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

Which is why the states would select their representatives. I suspect a significant number of the states would do a half-way decent job of picking representatives but, hey, if a particular state wants to entrust their representation to such people, that's their business. They would be offset by the larger number of states that would pick better representatives.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Sadly, society tends not to work if people don't have a say. It also sucks if they do have a say. The choice is which one sucks less and trying to balance how much stupidity vs lack of say you can tolerate.

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As well as all other powers that are necessary and proper to carryout its enumerated powers.

Such programs are necessary and proper because they regulate commerce while promoting the general welfare of the United States. They may not always be wise, but they are never unconstitutional.

Again, regulating commerce.

How so?

The President is commander-in-chief, is he not? The President is charged with enforcing federal law, is he not? How can the President act as commander-in-chief in order to enforce federal law if he has to go running to Congress every time he needs to deploy troops? If the President makes a deployment that Congress objects to, Congress has the constitutional power to withhold funding. Congress does not have the power to micro-manage how the President does his job.

That speaks volumes about you. You don’t want people who object to your pet goals to participate in something that could legally repudiate your pet goals.

I don’t know of a single internet message board that has ever lead to a mass political movement that has ever accomplished anything. Internet message boards, as they now exist, are not representative cross sections of the American population as a whole and thus they seldom accomplish anything more than hostility. A board where all segments of the political spectrum are represented and debate is conducted in an orderly and fair manner would not be conducive to bullies as most existing boards now are. We seldom accomplish anything in politics out of hostility because compromise and a fair exchange of ideas are too often needed.

Argument and hostility almost lead to the break-up of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because the issue of representation in congress was so contentious. It was only after Benjamin Franklin made a motion to have a clergyman come in and open each day’s session with prayer for divine guidance that the delegates realized that they needed to put their hostilities aside for the greater good of the country. No convention will work if it simply devolves into endless shouting matches and the delegates decide to walk out.

Are you aware that many of the delegates to the 1787 Convention were also serving in the Confederation Congress at the same time?

Define national party. And again, why do you wish to limit participation? What are you afraid of? Most Americans that are eligible to vote don’t bother to register and most that do register usually stay home on election day. I would venture anything that this is because the national parties don’t represent the views of most Americans or most Americans are too turned off by the bickering of these national parties to want to be involved. Letting the national parties re-write the Constitution would simply allow them to codify their political oligarchy; nothing would be solved.

Then why does the Constitution list so many things that the states cannot do? Have you even read the document?

Actually the laws that determine who can be elected to national office are written on a state-by-state basis. But even if independents are excluded from participating in government by laws that are written by Democrats and Republicans, independents have no more right to exclude Democrats and Republicans than Democrats and Republicans have to exclude independents.

But being an independent doesn’t exclude you from being a conservative, a liberal or an anything else.

Or you might have an independent who doesn’t have one single liberal position or one single conservative position. The way you describe independents means that they are too wishy-washy to take a consistent stand on the issues of the day. As Jim Hightower once said the only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow stripe and dead armadillos. People who can be blown this way and that by the slightest breeze are in no position to provide political leadership.

The Republican Party didn’t exist until the middle of the 18th century- some 6 decades after the Constitution was written. Furthermore, the group that morphed into the modern Democrat Party (Democrats/Jeffersonian Republicans) was the group that the modern Democrat Party was least likely to agree with.

The federal government has never taxed the states. The federal government can only tax individuals (persons and business entities). Before the 16th Amendment any tax that was levied on an individual had to be equal to the tax rate that was levied on all other individuals. The rate at which people in a given state were taxed could not be varied due to the person’s wealth or the number of persons that lived in his state. If the federal government made every person in Delaware pay $X, then every person in New York (and every other state) also had to pay $X. The states were never made responsible for collecting everybody’s $X on behalf of the federal government.

I’ve heard of it and you are wrong. The Democrat-Republican Party was known in its day as the Republican Party or the Jeffersonian Republicans. That Party had become the only national party by the time Andrew Jackson was elected President. Under Jackson it dropped the name Republican and became the Democrat Party that we have now (the oldest organized political party in history). Eventually people that grew dissatisfied with Jackson created the Whig Party. The Republican Party was created in response to the Dred Scott decision and was a fusion of the Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and a scattering of other minor parties. It has no connection to the Democrat-Republican Party and most historians don’t use the term Republican when talking about Jefferson’s party so people won’t get confused as you have.