Gary Swing, 2026 Green Party candidate for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District drafted this statement on the foundational illegitimacy of the United States for a conversation he had with Cynthia Pooler on her Focus on the Candidates podcast. It begs the question, should the United States be fundamentally altered, or altogether abolished? Read the full statement below, and see the video of him delivering it below the text.
250 is Enough
The Pledge of Allegiance is a uniquely American phenomenon. The Pledge is routinely recited by schoolchildren. It is also commonly recited at many public events. This is a form of ritualized political indoctrination. I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in fifth grade. By the age of eleven, I understood that the Pledge is a form of propaganda based on lies and logical fallacies. People in a free society would not take oaths of loyalty to a government. The government should serve the people. People don’t serve the government.
People in the United States are indoctrinated to believe that the United States is the cradle of democracy and the leader of the free world. There is a cult of the Constitution and a cult of the Founding Fathers. The US Constitution is commonly viewed as something sacred, The Founding Slaveholders are worshipped as geniuses who designed the greatest system of government in human history. The reality is that the United States is stuck in the dark ages politically, still operating under the framework of an 18th Century constitution that was created in secret and designed to exclude 94% of the population from representation in government.
A legitimate government would be one that is based on the consent of the governed. The US government and its constitution were built on a foundation of slavery. A government built on a foundation of slavery can never be legitimate.
In 1772, the King’s Court ruled in the Somerset versus Stewart case that there was no legal basis for allowing slavery to exist in England and Wales. Four years later, 56 white men signed a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Forty-one of those white men were slaveholders – 73%. They established what historians Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen called a “Slave Nation” – in the name of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington were three of the biggest slaveholders in colonial America. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, kept 600 people in slavery. James Madison, the primary architect of the US Constitution, had about 100 slaves. The first US President, George Washington, had 123 slaves. Only 1.8 percent of the population voted for George Washington for President. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were all from Virginia, where 39 percent of the population was enslaved. Andrew Jackson was Donald Trump’s second favorite president – after himself, of course. Andrew Jackson had 200 slaves. Ten of the first twelve US Presidents had slaves.
Fifty-five delegates attended the US Constitutional Convention, Twenty-five of them held slaves – or 45 percent. Eighteen percent of the US population was enslaved at the time. The US Constitution was signed by 39 of the 55 white men at the constitutional convention. There were about 3.9 million people living in the United States in 1790. Today, there are about 340 million people living in the United States under a Constitution that was designed to preserve slavery. No person living today ever voted to ratify the US Constitution. Abolitionist Lysander Spooner was correct when he called it a “Constitution of No Authority.”
Representation by state rather than by population in the US Senate and the Electoral College gave inflated representation to slave states. So did the “three fifths compromise,” which counted slaves as three fifths of a person. That gave extra voting power to slaveholders.
The United States is the only country that uses an Electoral College to select its chief executive. The Electoral College was modeled after the system that the Holy Roman Empire used to select its emperor.
The Electoral College and the US Senate should be abolished. These archaic relics of slavery institutionalize distorted representation by permanently overrepresenting less populated, rural conservative states. Each individual person should have equal voting rights. Political representation should be for people, not for “the imaginary beings called states,” as James Wilson argued.
The United States has developed an imperial presidency. The office wields far too much power, regardless of who occupies the office, or what party they represent. Power should be decentralized. The chief executive should be an administrator, not a dictator. Policy should be set by Congress, not by one unaccountable person.
I propose to abolish presidential elections and replace them with a modern parliamentary system of government. Congress should choose a prime minister with strictly limited authority who can be removed from office at any time on a vote of no confidence. Supreme Court members should have term limits, not lifetime appointments.
In 1776, John Adams wrote that “a representative assembly… should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” That’s the idea behind proportional representation voting systems.
Ninety five countries now use proportional representation to secure fair, inclusive multiparty representation in their national legislatures. It is way past time for the United States to leave the political dark ages and catch up to the election systems that modern societies implemented in the 20th Century. Members of a unicameral Congress and unicameral state legislatures should be elected by proportional representation. Each party should win seats in proportion to its share of the vote.
Electoral politics in the United States has always been dominated by white men. Proportional representation voting systems provide better representation for women and political minorities, including racial minorities.In a letter to fellow slaveholder James Madison, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wrote that: “The Earth belongs to the living generation.” Jefferson argued that a constitution could not bind future generations. He said a constitution should expire after one generation, which he estimated to be nineteen years.
Jefferson wrote: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”
He wrote that: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
I agree with Thomas Jefferson that each generation should create its own constitution. We are at least 220 years overdue to replace the Constitution designed by slaveholders with a modern system of government. Coincidentally, the 2012 Cambridge University study, “Conceptualizing Constitutions,” found that the average lifespan of national constitutions created since 1789 was 19 years, before they were replaced with new constitutions – just as Thomas Jefferson proposed.
The convention that drafted the US Constitution didn’t intend to have popular elections for the president. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention voted three times — the first time unanimously — to establish a parliamentary system with the president being appointed by Congress. However, the delegates weren’t satisfied with that proposal, so a committee proposed the creation of the Electoral College instead.
Each state legislature would appoint a number of electors equal to the state’s number of members in Congress. These electors would vote in an Electoral College to choose the President. Two days after the conference report came out, the delegates voted to establish the Electoral College, but the language they used stated that each state’s legislature would determine the method for selecting the state’s presidential electors. Within twelve years after the ratification of the US Constitution, the Electoral College changed from a system of legislative appointment to a system for the public election of a slate of presidential electors. Today, the US has the world’s most ridiculous system for choosing its chief executive, using the longest, most expensive, most meaningless, and most cumbersome election process.
The US Senate is one of the most ridiculous legislative bodies in the world. Each state has two US Senators, regardless of the state’s population. When the US Constitution was put into effect, the largest state had 11 times the population of the smallest states. Now, California has about 67 times the population of Wyoming, but each has two US Senate seats. This was not a principled decision by the framers of the US Constitution. It was “garbage in, garbage out.” At the Constitutional Convention, each state was given one vote, regardless of its population. Five and a half states voted for the creation of a Senate with equal representation for each state. Four and a half states voted against it. Three states abstained. Massachusetts split its vote evenly. The states that voted in favor of the Senate represented a minority of the states with a minority of the US population. The smaller states would not agree to form a union without equal representation in the Senate; hence it was a coerced compromise.
The US Senate has consistently created an artificial conservative bias in Congress, giving more power to sparsely populated, rural, conservative states that tended to support slavery. The slave states were even given extra power in the US House of Representatives because the Census included each slave as three fifths of a human being for the purpose of allocating each state’s number of US Representative seats. So the Constitution not only preserved slavery, but added insult to injury by using the practice of slavery to give even more representation to the slaveholders. Between 1800 and 1860, the US Senate blocked Congressional votes against slavery eight times. Even after chattel slavery was abolished, the US Senate blocked legislation to protect the human rights of black Americans for another century. In recent decades, the equal representation of small states in the US Senate has artificially inflated the conservative Republican representation in Congress and established the ability of a conservative minority to block judicial appointments.
As attorney Thomas Geoghegan [GAY-gun] wrote in his argument for abolishing the US Senate, “the Constitution itself is an illegal act: from the Continental Congress, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had only the narrower mandate of amending the Articles of Confederation, and the amending of the Articles was supposed to require a unanimous vote. Instead, the Framers went rogue, and drafted a whole Constitution to be adopted for thirteen states if just nine agreed. Our country has never been legitimate by any standard that would hold up in a court.”
The United States has one of the world’s most difficult processes for amending or replacing its constitution. A constitutional amendment requires a two thirds majority by Congress to propose and a three-fourth majority of state legislatures to ratify. Maintaining the status quo established by 18th century slaveholders doesn’t require the consent of any living person.
The US Declaration of Independence declared that people have the right to alter or abolish their form of government when it becomes destructive of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to political self-determination is fundamental.
Where does the United States stand today? The US has the most extensive military empire in human history. With 4 percent of the world’s population, it has 40% of the world’s military expenditures. It has an arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of destroying all life on Earth. The United States is the only country on Earth with more guns than it has people. It has an imperial presidency with a chief executive who acts like a dictator, unchecked by a corrupt Congress and a corrupt Supreme Court. The United States is the only major industrialized nation without a universal health care system. The United States ranks in 28th place on the Democracy Index, rated as a “flawed democracy.” The US ranks in 79th place for representation of women in its national legislature.
The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. In 1860, there were nearly four million people living under chattel slavery in the United States. Today, the United States has more people in prison than any other country – nearly two million people. Forced labor has shifted to the prison system. The Global Slavery Index estimates that about 1.1 million people still live under conditions of modern slavery in the United States.
The United States has the longest surviving constitution in the world, perhaps due to the procedural difficulty of replacing it with a modern system of government. The post-apartheid government of South Africa is widely regarded as having the most progressive constitution in the world. South Africa’s constitution is founded upon the principle of “unity in diversity.” It recognizes positive rights, including the rights to health care, education, housing, and a clean environment.
Elections in the United States are mostly predetermined by the demographics of single member districts under a winner-take-all voting system. Only two parties are represented in Congress. In South Africa, more than 98% of voters are able to elect representatives of their choice, They have eighteen parties represented in their national parliament.
One good thing that the US Constitution did was that it established the United States as the first nation to ban an establishment of religion, under the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson explained this as a “wall of separation between church and state.” Today’s Republican Party wants to tear down the wall separating church from state, and build a massive border wall as the world’s biggest monument to white supremacy.
Two hundred and fifty years after white male slaveholders declared their independence from Great Britain, should the United States government continue to exist? That government has never been legitimate. It should either be fundamentally altered or abolished. The idea of abolishing the federal government of the United States and making each state an independent nation is worth considering. Two hundred and fifty years is enough.
In the meantime, each person can take a stand to declare what kind of a government would be worthy of their respect. As a Green Party candidate for Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, I advocate for a representative democracy that respects human rights, protects the environment, and secures fundamental human needs like food, safe drinking water, health care, education, housing, and a universal basic income.
Eli Beckerman, a Green Party member from Massachusetts, is promoting the idea that the Green Party should run candidates for at least 250 seats in Congress for the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. So far, the Green Papers candidate directory shows Green Party candidates running for 15 out of 435 seats in the US House of Representatives. Three Green candidates running for US Senate out of 33 seats up for election.
I encourage other people to run for the office of their choice. In Arizona, the Green Party has ballot access for state and Congressional offices in 2026. I hope the Green Party of Arizona can field a full slate of candidates for the state’s nine Congressional seats in 2026, as well as candidates for statewide offices and for the state legislature.
Gary Swing, Green candidate for Arizona CD6
www.facebook.com/RunFromCongress
Here’s Gary sharing this overview in Conversation with Cynthia Pooler on her Focus on the Candidates podcast: