I bought this book on Kindle because I thought it would be a conservative book; it is not.

It uses the history of democracies around the world to make the case many of my liberal friends have tried to make that we should not have an equal number of senators in every state and that basing a state's number of electors in the Electoral College on its number of senators (plus representatives) is also "undemocratic." It takes issue with the Supreme Court having been mostly appointed by conservatives.

It also objects to the filibuster and to the ways equally sized election districts are drawn by conservatives (as though no one reviews those districts after they are drawn).

In short, it objects to the ways in which federalism has many times given small states the same power as large states (note: I thought that was the definition of federalism--states get to do whatever is best for them unless there is a delineated federal right to make every state do something the same way).

First of all, as Speaker Johnson has been trying to say for two weeks, we are not a democracy. We are a republic. In a true democracy if 51% of the people vote to take your house and use it as a homeless shelter, you are out of luck. Pure democracy easily descends into mob rule. The authors realize that. They think we have overcorrected in the other direction.

This is a good book to read if you want to know the liberal points being made about changing our Constitution and/or our federalist system. If you don't agree with them, you will know why not.

The one observation that jumps out at me is the way that the authors use the "winner takes all" system of elections we have in all states but two and use it to imply that every person in California, New York, Illinois, etc. is a Democrat because they live in a Blue state. So they say that, in matters where senators act, like Supreme Court confirmations, the justices were voted in by senators representing far fewer people than those who voted against them. Since we know most presidential elections lately have been fairly close, it is easy to see that counting Blue states against Red states is a rough way to support their point but it overestimates the number of Democrats in the country by leaving out the minority party voices in those large states.

There may be no perfect way of counting every voice, especially since under federalism my voice should not weigh in the elections of other states. Yet people and organizations pour money into elections elsewhere in the country.

I have enjoyed this book as one of those books that made me think. We don't always have to agree. :-)