Liz Pol 166

" What's at stake, after all, is citizens' representation in Congress. Partisan gerrymandering undermines the whole notion of a representative government.  " Congress is supposed to represent the states and its inhabitants before the US government. After all, it is composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate who are supposed to voice the needs of the people of their state. The power of congress comes from its ability to make laws and put them into action. Congress also has the ability to declare war and keep the power of the executive office in check. With gerrymandering, the whole purpose of equal representation goes out the window. If representatives are tampering with congressional boundaries and rearranging them to their benefit then they are meddling with the checks and balances system of our nation. Our founders created the  separated branches of government for a reason, to prevent the abuse of power and ensure the development of our democracy. Th...

"One obstacle, it would seem, to any argument that large and small groups operate according to fundamentally different principles, is the fact, emphasized earlier, that any group or organization, large or small, works for some collective benefit that by its very nature will benefit all of the members of the group in question. Though all of the members of the group therefore have a common interest in obtaining this collective benefit, they have no common interest in paying the cost of providing that collective good." This excerpt from Olson's article zooms into the free rider problem. When there is a large, organized group of people working toward a common goal there are bound to be some members who will attempt to reap the benefits of the group without putting in work to achieve the results. The larger the group, the easier it is for a person to "free-ride". This occurs because it takes more than a common obj...

Before the decision of Brown VS Board of Ed, Plessy VS Ferguson had legalized the concept of separate but equal. The court had ruled in favor of racial segregation and this decision was the basis for it's continuation for the next six decades. However, in 1954 the Supreme Court overturned this ruling: " We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."  In this historical decision the court deemed that the whole concept of separation in itself implied inequality and thereby violated the 14th amendment which gave equal protection to all members of the state. The class action lawsuit filed by Brown and four other families had succeeded in beginning the process of desegregation. There was major opposition from Southern states who refused to abide by the court's ruling, escalating into state vs federal confrontations such as the one in Little Rock Arkansas. Despite...

"In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well." Barack Obama  Obama's speech addressed more than the obvious racial tension occurring during his campaign. Obama spoke about the history of our nation and its failure to work past differences that prevent progress. Our country has struggled with unity and loyalties since its commencement. Even back when we were still a British colony there were still some individuals who supported the rule of the king out of convenience. Once we became independent it was necessary to adopt this position of neutrality in global affairs because there was an overwhelming amount of political matters to work throu...

Marshall’s piece exemplifies the complexity of citizenship and equality. According to his article, Marshall believes that rights can be broken down and deconstructed as civil, political and social; each one subsequently leading into the other. Civil rights in the US came first, they were understood to mean freedom in the grandest of terms and developed during the eighteenth century. This right to freedom was extended to every man and set the foundations for most philosophical work that would explore the boundaries of these implications. Slavery was deemed acceptable under the circumstances but there were questions about what every man had a right to. The political rights movement sought to expand the pool of individuals who would be considered a part of the society so that they too could voice their opinions politically. What this meant was that those who had rights as citizens pursued a way to secure these rights politically. Political power directly impacted civil lib...

“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”  ― Henry David  Thoreau,  Civil Disobedience   It has unfortunately become the norm for people to cowardly sit back and observe injustices being committed upon others because they themselves are not directly affected. People are afraid of going against the power of the majority, a fear which governments have thrived upon by enabling the spread of disunity within the nation. As we have read before in the federalist papers by Madison, the most feared faction is the faction of the poor because they are sitting on unbelievable power. If they were to realize the raucous that they could create the balance of power would forever be changed. Madison feared that such a realization would lead to a redistribution of wealth and property. What Thoreau is discussing is the idea of disobeying the law ou...