Stand Up Citizen Patrick Moore

Broken norms and bad faith are interfering with the proper functioning of our government.  How can we tolerate this in a time of pandemic and economic calamity?  

Using several sources, we explore the kinds of actions and trends that should alarm us about the advance of tyranny.  Both recent books such as How Democracies Die and On Tyranny, and works a few decades old are used to inform us on how to be vigilant.

In our current political and cultural climate we need citizenship education more than ever.  We look at what our founders had to say about the need for informed, educated citizens in the republic they created for us

We review the founders design for the electoral college method of electing the president.  Selections from Hamilton's presentation of the electoral college give us insight into how the process fit in the entire Constitutional scheme.  I hope this will allow us to look critically at how our process, installed and influenced by political parties, compares and whether it constitutes an example of operator error on our part.

We explore the effect of bad faith actions by our political officials and candidates on the health of our body politic, and ask the question whether the candidate who wins their election, but resorts to bad faith, deceit, misstatements, has properly received citizen consent.  Is their election legitimate if citizen consent has been given in error, influenced by their bad faith.

Using the principles that informed and directed the founding generation, we analyze the Citizens United ruling that led to far more corporate money in campaigns.  By applying the Madison's concerns about factions, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the conflicts inherent in corporate structure, the case against the Supreme Court's decision is convincing.