Millions of Americans within the Make America Great Again Movement are fed up with unresponsive, self-serving representatives and activist judges who routinely violate our national Constitution and public laws while engaging in policies and practices that are undermining our country’s political and economic wellbeing.
In the following presentation we will learn about a new way of dealing the problems of public corruption, unconstitutional policies, and representatives who ignore our public will.
My name is Randall White. I am a legal analyst and the author of County Constitutions, which is an innovative civics textbook about reforming government.
This is my second book about reforming government, which I had to write because my first book, American Popular Sovereignty, went over people’s heads. I made the mistake of assuming that ordinary intelligent citizens had at least some basic civics education. So it became necessary to write a second book that would serve as an introduction to the more advanced civics education presented in my first book. Both books are worth reading, but please start with County Constitutions before reading American Popular Sovereignty.
In County Constitutions, I explain how and why we the people can establish citizen policymakingand enforce representative accountability through county participatory government. This is where we encounter the concept of Rule By Resolution.
We the people inherently possess political authority to make public policies for our representatives to follow. This is due to our political history, and the nature of our government. The first three words in our national Constitution are “We the People”. The Preamble to our Constitution is written this way because we the people are the creators of our government, and because we are the political sovereign, which means that we are the top authority to which all of our elected and appointed political officers and agents must answer to. Accordingly, we are properly the ultimate policymakers guiding our government and controlling its outcomes.
The Constitution does not contain any mechanism for holding public representatives accountable to our public will. This is because our authority to hold representatives accountable already existed within the jurisdiction of county government, which is protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
Prior to creating the United States, the American colonists governed themselves democratically for over 150 years through county government in the form of traditional English common law participatory governmental institutions consisting of citizen committees, ballot initiatives, public militias, grand juries, and petit or trial juries.
These institutions are vitally important to us because they embody essentially all of our public powers and civil rights. In fact, the whole purpose of the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution was to protect the civil rights embodied in these institutions. The flaw in our national Bill of Rights—and in all of our state constitutions as well—is the failure to articulate and protect the participatory governmental institutions themselves.
Over a century ago, unscrupulous public representatives effectively disabled the functionality of participatory government, which precipitated a dramatic rise in unconstitutional policies, public corruption, and organized crime. Read County Constitutions to learn the specifics.
How the process of Rule by Resolution works is that we as citizens exercise our right to vote on local county ballot initiatives for the purpose of establishing the public policies that we want our government to follow. Each policy issue is stated on the ballot as a county resolution. All we really have to do participate in public policymaking, is be informed, and vote.
A resolution is a course of action determined or decided on.
All governments, whether democratic or oligarchic, rule primarily on the basis of policy, not law. Policy is prudence or wisdom in the management of affairs. Law is a rule or standard for conduct. For example, we may have a routine practice of eating three meals per day. This is our rule or standard for conduct. What we choose to eat at these meals may vary. Our choice of what to eat reflects our desire or will, which is a policy decision. Public policies or decisions are usually stated in an executive order or in a legislative body bill or resolution. The U.S. Congress, for example, typically governs just as much by passing resolutions as it does by passing bills or statutes.
The ballot initiative resolution process is how we the people can vote to make public policy that eventually becomes enacted as public law.
When the majority of citizens in a county vote to adopt a resolution through the ballot initiative process, the county supervisors, who comprise our first level of public representation, are obligated to honor the resolution. These supervisors have a corresponding duty to drive the public resolution upwards to the second and third levels of representation in our state and national legislatures. These legislators have a known legal duty to honor our public will by passing relevant statutes conforming to the policies stated in our public resolutions. The key to making this chain of representation work properly is enforcing representative accountability, which we will come to in a moment.
Eighty-to-eighty-five percent of our over 3,000 counties are rural, conservative, and underrepresented in their state legislatures. These facts naturally motivate the citizens in a large majority of our counties to embrace the ballot initiative resolution process as an effective means to establishing our political voice and regaining control over our government and country.
I have provided a Declaration of Political Rights template in County Constitutions for amending our county charters, which will turn these charters into county constitutions that effectively correct the deficiencies in our state and national constitutions, while achieving the main objective, which is restoring and modernizing fully-functioning county participatory government.
Declaring our political rights on the county level of government will formally establish the ballot initiative resolution process, backed up by jury enforcement, as the mainstay of county government. In this context, we the people will start acting properly as the creators of our constitutional republic, who inherently possess full and complete public powers, and stop behaving as the subjects of an oligarchy.
Amending our county charters in this manner opens the door to new political avenues for due process of law and justice, which are explained in both County Constitutions and American Popular Sovereignty.
To support your understanding of what I just said, we will review a few definitions. A constitution is a public charter forming a government corporation, which also states the political purpose of the organization. A republic is a representative form of democracy. Democracy means “people rule”. In America’s democratic form of government, the we the people are citizens, who possess inherent political authority and natural rights, as stated in our national Declaration of Independence. Oligarchy means government by a few. In an oligarchic form of government, the people are subjects who lack recognized authority or rights beyond those granted to them by the oligarchs. In County Constitutions, you will find a full glossary of the pertinent definitions.
When our state and national representatives properly comply with a county resolution by enacting the proposed policy as state and/or national statutes, then county government has a duty to enforce the public law. This is how our government is supposed to work, because the normal role of our counties is administering state laws and relevant national programs. County courts and state courts, for example, are one and the same. The primary role of the county sheriff and his deputies is enforcing state laws while serving and protecting the rights and interests of the county residents.
If any of our representatives disregard our public will as stated in a public resolution, then we as citizens are naturally authorized to report this dereliction of duty to our county grand jury. The jury will conduct an investigation, and if the inquiry reveals probable cause, then it will draft and file articles of impeachment with the court. The court will enter the impeachment case on the docket and automatically set a date for a trial by jury, which should be in about 30-to-60 days.
At trial, the accused representative will have an opportunity to present evidence showing good cause for disregarding the county resolution. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury either acquits or impeaches the representative based on their opinion of the facts and the law of the case.
If the jury impeaches the representative, then we as citizens naturally possess the right to elect a new representative or judge, as the matter may be.
This kind of political process amounts to fair and reasonable, efficient, economical, and speedy justice for we the people, instead of the present agonizingly slow and cumbersome state election recall process, expensive lawsuits, or no political remedy at all, that we are presently stuck with concerning the problems of corrupt, self-serving, or incompetent legislative, executive, and judicial actors.
Establishing citizen policymaking and representative accountability through county participatory government is a proper political remedy that we the people have the ability to create, without having to ask anyone for permission. It is a viable political remedy that we have overlooked for way too long.
This approach to governing is how we the people can empower ourselves to be done with public corruption and political insanity, including self-serving career politicians and their institutionalized unconstitutional policies, waste, fraud, and abuse.
By wisely exercising our inherent full and complete political powers through county participatory government, we can make our representative government truly serve and protect our rights and interests, as it was originally designed to do.
If you want to learn more, including how to get involved, go to: www.countyconstitutions.com