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Resolution To Impeach VP Cheney Submitted
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has submitted a resolution, HR 333, to impeach VP Dick Cheney on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The charges were submitted on 24 April 2007. Congressman Kucinich has posted his supporting documents online, including a brief summary of the impeachment procedure (PDF), a synopsis (PDF), and the full text (PDF) of the impeachment resolution.
A change to the voting method might be a good idea, but not instant runoff.
It's easy to demonstrate mathematically, and easy to see in the places that have implemented IRV, that IRV doesn't reduce the political value of parties, nor does it effectively enable more than two parties to compete or allow voters to safely choose their preferred party rather than one of the big two. As soon as a third party gains enough votes to threaten one of the major parties, voters risk putting the major party candidate they hate most in office if they vote for the the third-party candidate.
To see intuitively how that happens, you just need to note that the rising third party will draw its support from the ranks of the major party that is most similar to it, thus effectively strengthening the major party that is most different from it. Yes, voters who vote will the third party will rank the closer major party as their second choice, but if the third party gains enough power, it will knock this major party out of the running in the first round, then lose in the instant runoff to the other major party.
What IRV does do is allow third parties to rise in power and prominence to the point that they can have a say in the debate, even though it doesn't allow them to actually win. That's a good thing, but the effect is limited by the fact that the third party is unlikely ever to win unless it can so thoroughly defeat the more similar of the major parties that it effectively becomes one of the two top parties. And during the transition era, from third party to major party, it strengthens the major party most different from it.
But assuming we could muster the political will to change the system, there are options other than IRV that don't suffer these weaknesses. The best known voting methods use the Condorcet pairwise evaluation method, and it can be shown mathematically that those methods do an excellent job of reflecting voter will in elections. Condorcet methods can even satisfy a slightly-weakened form of Arrow's Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives axiom, which means that if you can accept that weakening of IIA, they're perfect voting systems.
The downside to pairwise evaluation is that while it's actually straightforward to understand and implement (simpler, in fact, than IRV!), it's conceptually complex. IMO, the best of all possible options is also the very simplest: Approval voting. In approval voting, you have a list of candidates and you mark all you find acceptable. Whoever gets the most marks wins. In some formulations if no candidate gets at least 50% approval then the election must be run again with a new slate, but that's optional. The weakness of approval voting is that it doesn't allow voters to rank their preferences, so there's information that is lost. The strengths are that approval voting does a perfect job of reflecting the information it is given, without any ambiguities or paradoxes; does not support a two-party system; does not penalize individuals for supporting other parties; and is dead simple to understand.
The other approach that seems to work reasonably well for empowering more parties is the proportional representation system. The downside to that is that it means you are truly voting for a party rather than for a person, and I and many other Americans prefer to vote for the man, not the party (excepting where they both suck, which is increasingly the norm).
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To crib from Sorkin, there are times when we're fifty states, and there are times when we're one country solving problems that require the pooling of resources.
Your passport says "The United States of America."
You're talking about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, first published in 1950, and there are five axioms, not seven. One of them is the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion that I mentioned in my previous post, and it's the only one that pairwise evaluation fails to meet. However, many people (including me) think that IIAC is too strong, and that the Local Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion is adequate. This local version basically says that the method is still immune to changes in outcome when new candidates are added that don't end up creating or modifying a cyclical preference (where more people like A than B, and more like B than C, and more like C than A). Condorcet methods satisfy LIIAC.
Until someone comes up with a new idea, our basic choice is which of the desired properties do we want to violate.That also assumes that the specified desired properties are in fact the ones we want. I think Arrow's axioms make a lot of sense, and that what his impossibility theorem points out is that there can arise situations where the populace fundamentally cannot agree, in which cases there can be no system that chooses the "correct" winner because there is no such thing. In those cases, a good method needs to have a deterministic and fair way of picking from among the cyclical preference, and that's the best you can possibly do.
Pairwise evaluation with Schwartz Sequential Dropping satisfies all of Arrow's requirements except IIAC, and satisfies LIIAC, meaning it handles perfectly all situations except the paradoxical one, and it provides a sensible heuristic for deciding in the paradoxical case. That seems to be about as good as you can possibly get, and it's vastly better than majority rules or IRV.
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Where exactly did you study the political process? Street protests are used by groups that are in the minority to bring awareness and supporters to their cause. A lack of street protests means a suppression of the minority. The abortion issue will cause street protests forever, no matter which side wins, because the other side will always be pissed. Right now the pro-life people are in a pretty sharp minority (only 30-40% of our population), notice how much they protest?
I like your summary and hope you get modded up for it. Regardless, I think the events of 1913 deserve some mention -- the passage of the 16th amendment and the creation of the Federal Reserve system.
The requirements for impeachment are not criminal. Impeachment was designed as a way to prosecute political crimes, incompetence and unethical leaders. Criminality is most certainly grounds for impeachment, but it is not required. The Federalist Papers list a number of reasons to impeach a President, included (#10) is the replacement of skilled civil servants with incompetent or corrupt ones (Ahem, "Heckuva job Brownie!" or Al "I don't recall" Gonzales). Violating the oath of office is exactly why you impeach someone. Impeachment is a political trial, not a criminal one, you're arguments have no weight.
The idea that there was a better case against Clinton is ludicrous. The Clinton impeachment was a setup funded and run entirely by dedicated professional political operatives. After 10 years of hounding the Clinton's, the best they could get was a married man lying about cheating on his wife? Whitewater, nothing, Sock's the cat's Christmas list, nothing, Travelgate, nothing, sexual harassment, nothing. The GOP congress issued over 1100 subpoenas during the Clinton administration and Clinton respected Congress' role, even allowing for a Special Prosecutor. The Bush administrations comical claims of executive privilege and the fact that Karl Rove is a walking Hatch Act violation who had a hand in leaking classified intelligence information for political purposes are grounds enough.
You are right that Kucinich won't get the job done though. This is par for the course for Kucinich, that's why I've got my bets on Waxman and Conyers in the House and Leahy in the Senate. Their investigations should provide all the proof needed for both political and criminal prosecution.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
This is not really a joking matter. Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt the U.S. government is. If you knew, you wouldn't joke.
We need to help each other educate ourselves about the corruption. Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?