One Man One Vote - Again
Last April 29th, SCOPE wrote about “One Man One Vote. (It is available on SCOPE’s website under Briefings, Page 11). It ended saying, “…one man one vote was another constitutional aberration of the Warren Court and needs to be overturned. That would overcome the tyranny of the majority that is now the rule of law in NY State and give gun owners and Upstate NY a voice in their government that is currently denied to them”.
In his recent letter to Second Amendment for EVER members (SAFE), Ed Pettitt reiterated that issue and it is reproduced, below, with his permission. As he points out, this is a long-overlooked issue. It doesn’t get mentioned during Senate confirmations of judges, but needs to be resurrected. We need to keep reminding ourselves and our legislators about this issue if we are ever to get this changed and restore a legislative voice to rural areas.
A Direct Hit on the Republican Form of Government
by Ed Pettitt
If you are like me, you are probably frustrated by a seemingly continuous onslaught of ridiculous legislation passed by NYS that targets gun owners, small businesses, farmers and actually anything that seems to be part of life in rural areas. They all seem to be coming from legislators in the NYC area.
The floodgates opened once the NY Senate majority switched and there was no longer a means to balance the Assembly. There is more to this than Republican Party vs. Democrat Party. This is really about a change in the structure of our Republic that occurred under our noses and has been completely overlooked, in my opinion. And it is fundamentally about the rights of rural communities to have equitable representation in the making of State Law.
In 1964, US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren orchestrated a direct hit on the Republican form of government guaranteed to every state by Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution. The decision in Reynolds vs. Sims, where Warren, basically, directed every state to district their state Senates by population instead of by county.
The first step of solving any problem is to recognize and expose its cause. That is the purpose of my letter to you here. Look it up, ask your representatives about it, make your friends aware of it. In the end, the solution can only come from restoring electoral equity to our counties.
As you know, our founders built in checks and balances to the structure of our Republic and part of that was having bicameral legislatures with a Senate representing sub-governments while the House or Assembly represented "The People." Warren disregarded that balance in order to subvert the ability of rural areas to balance the representation of the urban areas. After shifting over to population-based districts, the state Senates have become controlled by urban areas. In New York State, 38 of the 63 senators are from NYC and 48 counties are controlled by 14 of the more urban counties. There really is no balance in the legislature where both houses are dominated by NYC.
