Data Republican Reports

The Fourth Founding: How the unelecteds plan to rewrite the Constitution. (Part I) 

If people keep adding "national treasure" after her pseudonym, maybe it will become a formal title.

In 2013, 9 Foundations responded to a speech made at the Independent Sector Annual Conference, "Our Common Purpose." The goal: citizens’ dialogues that would produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities” by 2016. They didn't do that.  They talked a lot to each other but produced no report. 

In 2018 a Republican billionaire asked the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a question and funded a foundation to answer it. “The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century.” 

You will notice these two things are not the same. "An agenda of national priorities" is not "what it means to be a good citizen." But the foundations kept giving each other money and people and in 2020 and renamed the commission "Our Common Purpose." 

What came out was not a civics pamphlet. The commission produced 31 recommendations including proposed constitutional amendments, expansion of the U.S. House by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, ranked-choice voting nationwide, and a universal expectation of national service. The question about good citizenship had become a structural blueprint for a different republic. 

A lot of people like one or more of these 31 recommendations, but they cannot in any way be called a broadly shared agenda of national priorities - especially as there had been no "citizen dialogues" to produce it. Rockerfeller Brothers Fund president Stephen Heinitz, who had made the original "Our Common Purpose" speech, was by now president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and saying that "the nation-state system and representative democracy are showing signs of of being obsolete." 

Well, maybe so, but who died and made you king? I find this deeply concerning.