After the declaration of independence, Pennsylvania produced a state government that was an experiment in as close to pure democracy as anything we’ve ever seen. The ex-colony created something like an absolute parliamentary system with no single executive but rather something like an executive committee with daily rotation of the primary executive chair . . . In other words, “the buck (or Continental Congress dollar equivalent) stopped . . . “ nowhere with no one to ever take responsibility for anything. This democratic assembly pushed Rousseau’s “general will” idea to its extreme disenfranchising any citizen who would not swear an oath to defend the State of Pennsylvania by force of arms if necessary - in a State founded by non-oath-swearing Quakers and inhabited by a large number of pacifist Amish. In other words Pennsylvania turned into the very sort of mobocracy that Aristotle warned against in his Politics. The future framers took note of that failed experiment and no doubt had it in mind when they penned Federalist No. 10 warning against the potential tyranny of the majority inherent in democracy. Modern Democrats don’t read No. 10, or any other of the Federalist Papers today, probably because, after having taken “whole word” reading lessons that shunned the use of phonetics, they can’t read at all.
Yet in the stupidly crafted Amendment in the event of a Senate seat being vacated the State was yet left empowered to select the interim replacement Senator.
After the declaration of independence, Pennsylvania produced a state government that was an experiment in as close to pure democracy as anything we’ve ever seen. The ex-colony created something like an absolute parliamentary system with no single executive but rather something like an executive committee with daily rotation of the primary executive chair . . . In other words, “the buck (or Continental Congress dollar equivalent) stopped . . . “ nowhere with no one to ever take responsibility for anything. This democratic assembly pushed Rousseau’s “general will” idea to its extreme disenfranchising any citizen who would not swear an oath to defend the State of Pennsylvania by force of arms if necessary - in a State founded by non-oath-swearing Quakers and inhabited by a large number of pacifist Amish. In other words Pennsylvania turned into the very sort of mobocracy that Aristotle warned against in his Politics. The future framers took note of that failed experiment and no doubt had it in mind when they penned Federalist No. 10 warning against the potential tyranny of the majority inherent in democracy. Modern Democrats don’t read No. 10, or any other of the Federalist Papers today, probably because, after having taken “whole word” reading lessons that shunned the use of phonetics, they can’t read at all.
Too bad Senators are directly elected.
Yet in the stupidly crafted Amendment in the event of a Senate seat being vacated the State was yet left empowered to select the interim replacement Senator.