How Did Behar Pass 7th Grade Civics?

Some of you who read my column probably wonder why I so often write about our U.S. Constitution.

I do so simply because so many people in places of influence who should be thoroughly conversant with our Constitution all too often display a woeful ignorance as to what it says, and why it says it.

On Nov. 7, Matthew Dowd, an ABC political analyst, appeared on The View, to give his analysis of the just-completed 2018 mid-term election.


Dowd: “In 2016 we had a split decision. Trump takes the Electoral College — geography; Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote. Last night was an even bigger example of that. Democrats won the popular vote last night by eight million votes. They lose U.S. Senate races in “red” areas because ...”


Joy Behar: “(Interrupting) Gerrymandering ...”


Now, if you don’t realize that Behar’s interruption displayed abject ignorance as to how U.S. senators are elected, you need to take a remedial class in U.S. government or civics.

Sister Pancratia taught us civics during the second semester of seventh grade. She taught us that the U.S Constitution divided our national government into three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judicial, and that our legislative branch was bicameral, consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

She also taught us that each state’s representation in the senate was equal. Each state had two senators. Representation in the senate was not based on population.

In the House, on the other hand, each state’s number of representatives was based on population.

The arrangement is known as the “Great Compromise.”

When the convention was called to amend the Articles of Confederation, Edmond Randolph of Virginia, proposed a two-house legislature with membership in both houses set in proportion to its population.

The Virginia Plan was favored by the states with large populations. The less populous states feared the Virginia Plan. They feared that if voting was based on population, big states would control the new government, and the votes of all the smaller states would be irrelevant and meaningless.

To protect small-state interests, William Patterson of New Jersey put forth the New Jersey Plan, which called for a unicameral legislature, with each state having an equal vote.That, of course, would have allowed the little states to out-vote the bigger states, and was unacceptable to the bigger states.

The deadlock was finally broken when Roger Sherman and Oliver Elsworth, both of Connecticut, proposed the Great Compromise.

It called for a bicameral legislature, with representation in the House to be based on proportional representation according to the number of free inhabitants in each states, and with each state having equal representation (one) in the Senate.

The Great Compromise essentially blended Randolph’s Virginia Plan and Patterson’s New Jersey Plan. In further discussion, the Sherman/Elsworth plan was modified to provide that each state would have two senators (rather than one), and that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person to determine population for the purpose of representation in the House.


This compromise, together with a second compromise that left the issue of slavery to the states, made possible the adoption of the new proposed Constitution. Without these compromises, it is likely that the North and South would have gone their separate ways.


It is also certain that the large states would never have agreed to each state having an equal number of votes in Congress, and the small states would never have agreed to proportional representation.

Behar’s notion that Democrats lost Senate races in red states due to gerrymandering is evidence of an utter lack of understanding as to how U.S. senators are elected.

Senators are elected statewide. They are  not elected from "districts" that are susceptible to gerrymandering. It is only possible to gerrymander "districts" within a state. Where the election is statewide it can’t be gerrymandered.


Two other points:


— Article V of the Constitution says “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”


— The Electoral College, Dowd to the contrary not withstanding, plays no part in electing U.S senators or representatives.




John Donald O’Shea of Moline is a retired circuit court judge.

Posted: QCOline.com   November, 29, 2018

Copyright 2018, John Donald O'Shea

This Thanksgiving, Be Thankful the US Isn't Socialist -- Yet

Can socialism work in the United States? I suppose your answer will depend on how you define work.

If you mean it will work as well as it did in the USSR, or as it is presently doing in Venezuela, then you can fairly say it will work in the United States. But do you really want to live in a 21st century USSR? Venezuela?


The Union of Soviet Social Republics came into being in December 1922, and lasted nearly 70 years, until December 1991. The USSR had its beginning in the 1917 revolution when Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government.

The country became a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party. Following Vladamir Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power.

Stalin committed the USSR to socialism (communism), a planned economy, the abolition of private ownership, rapid industrialization and forced collective farming. Famine followed; millions died.

Those landowners who survived were sent to forced labor camps. Under Stalin, communism became totalitarianism. The “Great Purge” followed.

According to declassified secret police records, more than 1.5 million people were arbitrarily arrested in 1937 and 1938; some 600,000 of them were shot.

Atheism became the state religion. Church property was confiscated. Personal professions of religion were not officially banned, but participation was stigmatized by the government and its controlled press. Certain professions were closed to religious believers.

The government undertook to control and use the Russian Orthodox Church. During the first decade of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed some 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled.

Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open while 54,000 where open prior to World War I. For 68 years, the communists (socialists) ruled without opposition. In 1991, the USSR collapsed.

If the one-party socialist government couldn’t succeed in the USSR where all opposition (churches, unions, opposing political parties, capitalists) had been crushed, why is there any reason to believe that the socialists will succeed here?


In 1999, oil-rich Venezuela elected Hugo Chavez, a communist-socialist to power. His successor is Nicolas Maduro. When the opposition won control of the National Assembly, Maduro caused its abolition. Constitutional rights have been suspended.

Chronic shortages of food, medicine and even toilet paper are rampant. For 2018, the inflation rate is projected at 1,000,000 percent. Savings of $100,000 on Jan. 1, 2018 will be worth 10 cents on Jan. 1, 2019.


Why do U.S. socialist believe they can do any better than USSR or Venezuelan socialists? Are things so dire in the U.S. that we are willing to entrust our economy (and perhaps our rights) to “economic experts,” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?



In the Acts of the apostles, we find that the early church adopted socialism. The faithful placed all their property into the hands of the Apostles. Squabbles ensued almost immediately over the use of the donations.

The Greek Christians complained their widows were getting less than was given to the Hebrew Christian widows. A committee (the deacons) was appointed to fix the inequality. Suddenly, we hear no more of the early Christian socialist experiment.


The Pilgrim’s tried socialism at Plymouth Plantation. They nearly starved. “Communal stewardship” failed. It was only after each man was allowed to plant corn on his own parcel of land that the colony began to prosper.

Gov. William Bradford tells us that prior to allowing each man to have his own plot of land, the community was afflicted by an unwillingness to work, by discontent, by a loss of mutual respect, and by a prevailing sense of injustice. And this among “godly and sober men”!

The industrious were forced to subsidize the slackers. The strong “had no more in division of victuals and clothes” than the weak. In other words, the productive members of the Plymouth Plantation objected to being plundered by the less productive.

They objected to sharing the hard-earned fruits of their labors with those who failed to make equal effort. The 2017 Gross Domestic Product per capita in the capitalist United States, after adjustment for “purchasing power parity,” was 54,225 US dollars — 305 percent of the world average. Adjusted in comparable dollars: “Germany: $45,229; France: $38,606; United Kingdom: $39,753.


In the USSR, the workers told a bitter joke: “The government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.”

Posted: QCOline.com   November, 20, 2018

Copyright 2018, John Donald O'Shea

When Righteousness Gave Way to Cannon Fire

In May 1856, Sen. Charles Sumner, a Republican and abolitionist from Massachusetts, delivered an impassioned speech in the U.S. Senate, entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” It denounced Southern efforts to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state.

The historians Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg write that Sumner’s speech “contained some unpalatable truths, much that was neither truthful nor in good taste, and some disgraceful political invective against Senator Andrew Butler (D) of South Carolina.”

During the course of his speech, Sumner criticized two fellow U.S. senators, Andrew Pickens Butler and Stephen A. Douglas, D-Illinois. Both were principle authors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

That act organized the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and adopted the rule of “popular sovereignty,” which left the people of each territory to decide whether it should enter the Union as a slave or free state.

That latter provision repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which barred slavery in the territories north of 36º 30’. The anti-slavery forces regarded the Missouri Compromise as settled law, and its repeal as betrayal.


Sumner began by claiming that the goal of the slave-holding South was to extend slavery throughout the free states.

“But the wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. ... It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government. ... When the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, ... here in our Republic, ... FORCE ... has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power.”

Sumner excoriated Butler, saying,

“The senator from South Carolina has ... chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean the harlot, slavery. ... Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea ... is all surpassed.

“The asserted rights of slavery ... are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the slave States cannot enjoy ... full power in the national Territories to compel fellow men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block — then ... the chivalric senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted senator! A Second Moses come for a second exodus! “

Sumner accused Butler of labeling abolitionists as fanatics when, in fact, he and his fellow Southerners in their embrace of the crime of slavery were the true fanatics.

Sen. Douglas, shocked by Sumner’s words, turned to a colleague and said, “this damn fool Sumner is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.”


Abolitionists understood Sumner’s remarks as attacking Butler’s position on the immorality of slavery. But Rep. Preston Brooks construed Sumner’s remarks as a personal attack upon his cousin.
Three days later, as Sumner sat at his desk in the nearly empty Senate chamber, Brooks assailed Sumner with a gold-headed cane, nearly beating him to death.

The episode exposed the growing polarization in America. Abolitionists viewed Sumner as a martyr; the South hailed Brooks as a hero.

The Cincinnati Gazette wrote, “The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder.”

The New York Evening Post asked, “Has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? ... Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?”

The Richmond Enquirer expressed the Southern view that Sumner should be caned “every morning,” praising the attack as “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences” and denouncing “these vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” who “have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.”

Sumner and the abolitionists were right. Slavery was an unconscionable moral wrong. The South was right. The Constitution had been born of a compromise without which there would have been no Union — a compromise that left to each state whether it would be slave or free.

The voices of “righteousness” on each side became more shrill, until they were drowned out by roar of muskets and cannons.

Posted: QCOline.com   November, 8, 2018

Copyright 2018, John Donald O'Shea