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...