Madison's Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

read a petition from twenty-two slaves seeking freedom. The petition movement crested in 1837 and 1838, when more than 130,000 petitions challenging slavery were lodged with Congress. The proslavery forces responded by enacting a House rule formally excluding the abolitionist petitions, overriding Adams’s argument that the First Amendment required Congress to consider them. That in turn triggered a popular response, sweeping the antislavery Whigs into power for the first time. In 1844, Adams was successful in persuading Congress to abolish the gag rule, leading to intense legislative engagement that culminated in the Missouri Compromise banning slavery in the territories but allowing it to flourish in the South. The ban on slavery in the territories as part of a grand compromise seeking to avoid civil war was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1857 in the infamous Dred Scott case, ending efforts to deal with slavery through democratic means and rendering the Civil War inevitable.
    Under a Madisonian reading of the First Amendment, once the Petition Clause placed an item on the legislative agenda, Congress would be obliged to confront it. Properly understood, therefore, the clause is much more than just a colony of the imperial Free Speech Clause. Read as an integral part of the first stanza of Madison’s poem, it could loosen the current gridlock in both houses of Congress. The Senate, grossly malapportioned by design, operates under a filibuster rule permitting forty-one senators representingabout 11 percent of the population to prevent a vote on the merits of legislation favored by representatives of 89 percent of the population. The House of Representatives currently operates under a self-imposed rule forbidding a vote on any legislation that has not been preapproved by a caucus of the majority party’s members, currently allowing 118 House Republicans, many elected from gerrymandered districts, to prevent the 435-member House from voting on crucial legislation. Properly read, Madison’s Petition Clause might well provide a popular mechanism to force up-and-down votes in both Houses, presenting the electorate with a clear voting record on which to judge their representatives at the next (contestable) election.
    A MODEST NONCONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL FOR A SINGLE-TIER DEMOCRACY
    We don’t have to wait for a fifth Supreme Court vote to do something about our three-tier democracy. We can dance to a version of Madison’s democratic music without the permission of judges. American democracy currently is dominated by the top 1 percent of the economic tree, those who privately fund the electoral process. We could eliminate the first tier tomorrow by publicly funding our elections. It costs money to buy access to the voters. It costs money to organize supporters. It costs money to run a campaign staff. Most of the time, we offload the expense to rich volunteers (individual and corporate) who are only too happy to cover the costs of democracy off the books because in return they get strings to pull like puppeteers. For many in the first tier, political spending is just another investment—with the chance of a massive economic return. Until we acknowledge that the cost of democracy should be an on-the-books expense requiring public funding of the campaign process, the first tier will continue to dominate our politics.
    Although the Supreme Court has slammed the door on the most efficient public funding approach—matching funds geared to the amounts raised by privately funded candidates—it has left openat least two approaches. First, we could provide a dollar-for-dollar electoral tax credit up to $250. That would give most people a free $250 to put into the democratic process without a government bureaucracy to collect or distribute the money. Imagine campaigns geared to persuading ordinary people to commit some or all of their tax-subsidized $250 to a candidate who promises to respond