Restoring Freedom In America, Florida Style

I filled out my Florida resident voter's ballot today and was impressed by three of the ballot initiatives that are to be voted on by Florida residents in November. The first two initiatives are concerned about the historical gerrymandering of Florida state legislative districts and Florida Congressional districts that gives incumbent politicians and their respective parties unfair advantages when it comes to dividing up voter blocks and boundaries. The wording for each is identical with the only difference being whether the initiative is for intrastate state legislative districts or Congressional districts (below is the Congressional district ballot initiative):


Florida Constitutional Amendment - Article III, Section 20


Standards for legislature to follow in Congressional redistricting

"Congressional districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county, and geographical boundaries."

This initiative would help avoid some freedom-reducing, gerrymandering conditions that exist in states like New Jersey:

- In Congressional District 6 in New Jersey you have to physically cross over into another district in order to hit all parts of District 6, i.e. District 6 is not contiguous.

- District 5 is a Republican New Jersey Congressional district that starts in the upper northeast part of the state, runs along the whole northern border to the upper northwest corner of the state where it makes an abrupt left hand turn and comes down the western side of the state.

- District 12 is a Democratic district that runs from the western border of the state all the way east to the Atlantic Ocean, the eastern border, crossing five counties (almost 25% of the counties in New Jersey). Along the way from the western edge to the eastern edge of New Jersey, it meanders up and down, left and right, suiting the whims of the Democrats in order to create a Democratic dominated district.

Nowhere in most of New Jersey are the Congressional districts compact and following existing geographic borders. They follow the needs of the political class, not the voters. This results in significant disenfranchisement of American citizens. Consider a Democrat living in District 5 in New Jersey. Since the political class conspired to configure that district as predominantly Republican, that Democrat's views are likely to always be overwhelmed by his or her Republican neighbors. Thus, his or her vote will usually be useless and fruitless in a Congressional race since they are basically outnumbered and overwhelmed.

Same thing with Republican voters in District 12. Their votes will rarely matter since the Democrats have stacked that district with Democratic-like voters. Eventually, these minorities in these districts will stop voting since their votes do not matter, due to the configurations of their districts. And once people stop voting because their votes really do not matter, our democracy suffers while the political class gets more powerful and more entrenched.

Congratulations to those people in Florida that worked hard to get the two ballot initiatives on fixing the voting district problem in the state approved and on the ballot. A lot of work probably went into obtaining the necessary petition signatures required to put these issues on the ballot and they probably faced any number of legal and other challenges from incumbent Florida politicians who did not want to see these types of freedom enhancing questions get to the general voting population. In fact, according to the October, 2010 issue of the AARP Bulletin, two sitting Congressional members filed suit to stop this ballot initiative in order to keep their current Congressional districts intact. Fortunately, their suit was thrown out by the Florida Supreme Court.

While the above two ballot questions are binding and will be incorporated into the state Constitution if approved, the third ballot initiative is non-binding but is just as important:

Balancing the Federal Budget A Nonbinding Referendum Calling For An Amendment To The United


States Constitution

"In order to stop the uncontrolled growth of our national debt and prevent excessive borrowing by the Federal Government, which threatens our economy and national security, should the United States Constitution be amended to require a balanced Federal budget without raising taxes? Yes or no."

Unfortunately, this ballot question is nonbinding and even if approved and work proceeds to make the Constitutional Amendment a reality, it would take years to get it in place and operational. In the mean time, several other, short term steps could be undertaken immediately to reduce the Federal budget within the spirit and intent of this ballot question:

1) Step 1 - establish a five year program that reduces the size of the Federal government budget and expenditures by 10% a year in all departments by eliminating redundancy, waste, and fraud.

2) Step 2- start addressing the Federal entitlement problems we know we already have with Federal pensions and Social Security including the elimination of a traditional pension option for all new Federal hires (most private sector workers no longer receive a traditional pension) and raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 or 72 but couple it with a needs based test for those that cannot afford to wait that long.

3) Step 3 - greatly increase the amount of investigations into fraud that occur within the income tax process and the Medicare/Medicaid processes, fraud that likely costs the Federal government hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

4) Step 4 - bring back almost all foreign deployed U.S. troops and start trimming our defense budget. Our stationing of 50,000 or so U.S. troops in Germany, 50,000 in Japan and 30,000 in South Korea are from another world and another time, they all need to be brought home and the savings cashed in. Also, President Obama needs to fulfill his campaign promise to bring ALL the U.S. troops home from Iraq, not leave 50,000 or so there indefinitely.

5) Step 5 - eliminate all Congressional earmarks, savings upwards of $20 billion a year.

These intermediate steps are what we could start doing now while the process to change the Constitution to require a balanced Federal government budget is underway to solve the problem permanently.

All three of these Florida initiatives would go a long way to restoring freedom in America. Eliminating the gerrymandering of voting districts would re-empower those voters whose previous votes never mattered since they were placed into bogus and biased voting districts. Getting Federal spending under control would reduce the power over our lives that the political class currently has and should eventually keep more of our earnings and wealth in our pockets and out of the clutches of the Federal government budget. With more money in our pocket, our freedom to live where and how we want, how we educate our kids, how much we contribute to charities, whether or not we start a new business, and how much we spend to expand the economy is greatly enhanced. More freedom in our life, more money in our pockets. Thank you Florida for getting the process started.