Keith

“Whatever the question up for discussion as to wrongs, injustice, inequality, maladministration of the law, Miss Anthony would always say, 'Well, now when women get the ballot all that will be changed.' So I asked her one day, 'Miss Anthony, do you really believe that the millennium is going to come when women get the ballot? Knowing women as I do, and their petty outlook on life, although I believe that it is right that they should have the vote, I do not believe that the exercise of the vote is going to change women's nature nor the political situation.' Miss Anthony seemed a little bit startled, but she did not make any contention on that point.”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

“We have developed a need that we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most dificult situations speak well and at length; we are delighted when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and altogether intellectual brightness, where life approaches abysses and me in reality usually lose their heads and certainly linguistic felicity. This kind of deviation from nature is perhaps the most agreeable repast for human pride: for its sake man loves art as the expression of a lofty, heroic unnaturalness and convention. We rightly reproach a dramatic poet if he does not transmute everything into reason and words but always retains in his hands a residue of silence—just as we are dissatisfied with the operatic composer who cannot find melodies for the highest sentiments but only a sentimental "natural" stammering and screaming. At this point nature is supposed to be contradicted. Here the vulgar attraction of illusion is supposed to give way to a higher attraction.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The sovereignty of "We the People of the United States" is admittedly an abstraction—an idea. But abstractions often have legal consequences. And the single idea of popular sovereignty generates a powerful set of legal implications covering a vast range of constitutional issues from limited government and judicial review to federalism and separation of powers to nullification and constitutional amendment. In one vital area of contemporary jurisprudence, however, the Supreme Court has fashioned doctrine wholly antithetical to the Constitution's organizing principle of popular sovereignty. By allowing both federal and state governments to invoke "sovereign immunity" from liability for constitutional violations, the Court has misinterpreted the Federalist Constitution's text, warped its unifying structure, and betrayed the intellectual history of the American Revolution that gave it birth. In effect, the Court has transformed "sovereignty" into the very tool of government supremacy that our Revolutionary forebears wielded pen and sword to destroy.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, Of Sovereignty and Federalism

“Why was it sensible for Americans to transubstantiate a convention into the virtual embodiment of the People? After all, as with an ordinary legislative assembly, a convention assembly may improve the ultimate quality of public deliberation, see, e.g., THE FEDERALIST No. 55, at 342 (J. Madison), but only by excluding most citizens, thereby raising fiduciary/agency problems. An answer based on organization theory/incentive analysis might focus on how a ratification convention is structured differently from an ordinary legislature in ways that enhance monitoring and improve public accountability. First, the People select convention delegates in a special election. Second, delegates are generally convened to consider a single issue (ratification). Third and related, the basic choice set is binary (yes-no), reducing agenda manipulation problems and decreasing the monitoring problems that exist in an ordinary legislature with virtually infinite possibilities of side deals and vote trading. Fourth, conventions immediately disband and disperse among the People, reducing the problem of legislators entrenching themselves and developing their own institutional perspectives. Finally, a convention enhances a sense of public-spiritedness and individual moral responsibility among both voters and delegates. Calling a "convention" signals to all concerned that the polity is entering a high-stakes moment when basic ground rules will be hammered out. Interestingly, criminal juries (deciding the single issue of individual guilt or innocence) possess many more convention attributes than do ordinary legislatures.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, Of Sovereignty and Federalism