A Congress is a Private Impeachment Forum

     The Objectivist position on government is that it should be limited to five functions.  They are: Military, Police, Judiciary, Diplomacy, and Treasury.  Nowhere in our philosophy is there room for a congress or state legislature.  The way a proper government is supposed to work is for the Judiciary to uphold an objective, non-contradictory body of law.  If the law does change, it happens when a judge fixes a contradiction, or rules on an issue that only breaks new ground when a novel case is presented.

So, compare the above philosophy to how the federal congress has been conducting itself.  One party launches a crusade to tackle an issue and generates a 2,000 page law treatise that no congressman reads or can read in time.  It is riddled in pork--including all kinds of pet projects that trample on individual rights in unpredictable ways--and, when a judge is presented with the expectation that the law should be upheld, there is no rational way to do it; so, anything goes in the decision.

Since legislatures do not exist in a moral government, they should not be included.  However, there is one function, the power of which was being historically delegated, that being impeachment.  Note that this can only exist in a private way.  A Congress is a Private Impeachment Forum.

Any individual or business who wants to sponsor a Private Congress could be legitimized by having at least 100 congressional members voted for evenly throughout a state.  There is no law that there can only be one or two Congresses in each state.  There can be as many as there are funders willing to sponsor them.

The Representatives of a Private Congress: make speeches, present evidence and testimony, debate, and have one vote each to impeach anyone in government (except the Supreme Court Judges of a state, including federal).  The ability of a Congress is to vote for or against impeaching individuals in government.  Technically this institution has no political power because even if the impeachment goes through, the Congress has no means to force a political position holder to leave.  It is just that if a political position holder does not resign then Congress is commonly sanctioned to shift from the voting phase to the embarrassment campaign, and that it is socially accepted that intellectually anything goes until the political position is vacated.

In creating a standard design for a country's Private Congresses, I think that one should draw from The Constitution of The United States of America where one can.  The following is my proposal:

(1)  To impeach any individual in government, two Private Congresses that represent a state must attain at least a two-thirds vote.

(2)  If the impeachment is aimed at the Military Head of State, the Private Congress to impeach second, must be presided over by the Chief Federal Supreme Court Justice, as it presents evidence and debates the issue.  If the Governor of a state within a state, such as Illinois, is the individual in question, then the Chief Illinois Supreme Court Justice must have presided over and legitimized the second Private Congress to impeach, whose membership is drawn from Illinois votes.

Paul Wharton

American Galileo