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America’s democratic process is broken

To the editor:

There is little to doubt concerning the chaos our current political system is in. No matter to which party one belongs, the entire process is now being corrupted by money and factions threatening to destroy our representative democracy as it has functioned since the Constitution was first ratified in 1789.

From the beginning, the synthesis of our Constitution and its checks and balances was an art of compromise. The colonies were made of varied interests, including mercantile and agricultural. The formation of the government was from the beginning less noble than our history books often tell us. Southern colonies were heavily dependent on slaves for cheap labor to supply the energy to plant their crops and pick their product. This led to the completely irrational corruption in our democracy of slaves not being able to vote and yet being counted and added as three-fifths of a man in the distribution of representatives in the House of Representatives. Not until the 15th Amendment in 1870 were blacks allowed to vote, although the battle raged on into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and still today. Likewise, women were unable to vote until 1920 and the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

It is easy to be self-congratulatory and say these injustices our Constitution allowed against equal representation were corrected through the amendment process. Doing such ignores the reality that for a dozen decades and more, both blacks and women were denied basic access to the ballot box. This is still under attack today.

Today, we continue to experience assault on the integrity of representation and the ballot by a multitude of laws and structures. Gerrymandering, Interstate Crosscheck, the treatment of unlimited money as speech all threaten to diminish the meaning of the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” Lincoln proclaimed at Gettysburg.

Instead of fighting for democracy, we now fight about democracy and we treat politics like sports where as long as our team wins, we are happy no matter how badly they rule and govern. As so we now fulfill the fears of John Adams who wrote, “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

William N. Esborn

Mifflintown

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