charles i. letbetter

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Let’s get real for a few minutes: The United States today holds little resemblance to those scrappy 13 colonies responsible for founding a new country. We’re no longer a nation of gentrified farmers; landowners who held slaves so that they had time to sit and write about what was necessary to form a country that held rights in high esteem without actually giving rights to anyone who didn’t already have them. We’ve moved beyond that by quite a bit, to the point that any comparison between us and them pretty much has to end at the fact that, presumably, we’re all human. We’ve evolved as a country and as a society. Therefore, it is my solemn belief, that we need to evolve electorally as well.

We tend to hold our founding fathers as something close to saints, but there were plenty of people who were lacking and some of them almost cost us the war. Of course, you most likely are familiar with the traitor, Benedict Arnold, whose name some have tried, in vane, to rescue. There was also Major General Philippe du Coudray who was so fucking stubborn that he drowned while crossing the Schuylkill River because he wouldn’t listen to advice. Also to be considered was Major General Charles Lee, who everyone initially thought was going to be a great addition to the Continental Army. Wrong. First, he went and got himself captured by the British. Then, he started collaborating with the British. Those are just a couple of examples of early losers who proved that not everyone in 1776 was a brilliant politician or philosopher.

Let us also not lose sight of the fact that it was largely a group of teenagers and young men in their 20s that were dominating the Revolutionary War. What, you didn’t already know that? Okay, here’s a short list of the ages people were on July 4, 1776:

• Andrew Jackson, 9
• Marquis de Lafayette, 18
• James Monroe, 18
• Aaron Burr, 20
• Nathan Hale, 21
• Alexander Hamilton, 21
• Benjamin Tallmadge, 22
• Betsy Ross, 24
• James Madison, 25
• Henry Knox, 25
• John Paul Jones, 28
• John Jay, 30
• Abigail Adams, 31
• Thomas Jefferson, 33
• Ethan Allen, 38
• John Hancock, 39
• Thomas Paine, 39
• Patrick Henry, 40
• John Adams, 40
• Daniel Boone, 41
• Button Gwinete, 41
• Paul Revere, 41
• George Washington, 44

A few things about that list are specifically applicable to this discussion. First, if you don’t recognize all the names on that list and their contribution, you need to look them up and educate yourself. Not knowing who these people were should automatically disqualify you from holding any elected office in the United States. Second, not all these people signed the Declaration of Independence (which you should know). The youngest person to sign, Thomas Lynch, Jr., was 26. The oldest person to sign, Benjamin Franklin, was 70. The average age of the Declaration’s signators was 44. George Washington did not sign the Declaration.

Why is this important? Because you’ll find that, with many of them being as young and idealistic as they were, opinions changed as they grew older. The “truths we hold to be self-evident” were not as obvious for all of these people as they grew older. Had they been given the opportunity, they would likely have changed both the Declaration and the Constitution of 1787 considerably by the time they died. Thinking that the “originalists” were somehow infallible is ignorant. Many of them didn’t even consider their own work that impressive.

For example, on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson read the following speech from Benjamin Franklin (the elder stateman being too ill to deliver the speech himself).

“I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve…. [But] the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others…. In these sentiments…I agree with this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us…[and] I doubt…whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me…to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does…. Thus I consent…to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best…. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it…we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from a real or apparent unanimity…. On the whole…I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity put his name to this instrument.”

If Franklin, the most experienced and perhaps most intelligent of the Framers, had doubts about the efficacy of the Constitution in its original form, then we cannot sit here over 200 years later and think anything differently.

Taking things even further, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison that the Constitution should expire every 19 years. Here’s his reasoning:

“The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water… (But) between society and society, or generation and generation there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another…

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation…

Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”

This is why I see red every time someone, especially a member of the Supreme Court, tries to interpret “the original meaning of the Framers.” The Framers did not see their Constitution being adequate this far into the future. Their expectation was that not merely would it change, but that it would be replaced by something more appropriate as both society and the country developed.

The Constitution of 1787 was unquestionably better than the first version, the Articles of Confederation delivered by the first Constitutional Convention in 1777. There were several reasons why those Articles were never ratified by the states, but chief among them was the fact that the Articles were practically impossible to amend, a problem that came to the forefront almost immediately.

We need to latch onto the idea that the Constitution is not infallible. In fact, the Constitution has always been flawed and in need of updating. Our reluctance to do so not only demonstrates our ignorance of how the document was developed but also the severe degree to which parties have utilized its shortcomings to cement their power within the federal government. In changing the Constitution as we should have been doing all along, we take the power away from career politicians and put it back in the hands of the people.

The problem with that idea is that “the people” are stupid. Don’t believe me? Of course, you don’t. I wouldn’t expect you to believe this claim without evidence and that evidence is critical to my ultimate thesis. Let’s start with the topic of IQ comparison.

On an individual-to-individual basis, I don’t like IQ scores as a measurement tool because they fail to adequately measure what a person actually knows. However, as a comparative diagnostic, it works because IQ tests are administered the same regardless of the country of origin or its educational methods. Therefore, when we compare countries based on IQ, income, education spending per participant, and average temperature (which affects one’s ability to learn), we end up with a table looking something like this:

Rank	Country/Region	IQ	Ø Income	Education expenditure per inhabitant	Ø Daily maximum temperature
1	Hong Kong *	106	35,304 $	1,283 $	26.2 °C
2	Japan	106	40,964 $	1,340 $	19.3 °C
3	Singapore	106	41,100 $	1,427 $	31.5 °C
4	Taiwan *	106			26.9 °C
5	China	104	4,654 $	182 $	18.5 °C
6	South Korea	103	22,804 $	1,024 $	18.4 °C
7	Netherlands	101	45,337 $	2,386 $	14.6 °C
8	Finland	101	42,706 $	2,725 $	8.0 °C
9	Canada	100	40,207 $	2,052 $	7.4 °C
10	North Korea	100			15.3 °C
11	Luxembourg	100	71,380 $	3,659 $	14.1 °C
12	Macao *	100	44,051 $	1,448 $	26.0 °C
13	Germany	100	39,920 $	1,883 $	14.0 °C
14	Switzerland	100	70,399 $	3,556 $	15.5 °C
15	Estonia	100	13,777 $	749 $	10.3 °C
16	Australia	99	42,959 $	2,344 $	24.3 °C
17	United Kingdom	99	40,670 $	2,079 $	12.9 °C
18	Greenland *	99	24,486 $	4,518 $	0.3 °C
19	Iceland	99	47,106 $	3,814 $	8.0 °C
20	Austria	99	42,634 $	2,341 $	13.8 °C
21	Hungary	99	11,391 $	585 $	16.9 °C
22	New Zealand	99	30,141 $	2,024 $	17.5 °C
23	Belarus	99	4,661 $	251 $	11.9 °C
24	Belgium	98	40,525 $	2,507 $	14.8 °C
25	Norway	98	75,130 $	5,425 $	9.6 °C
26	Sweden	98	49,535 $	3,419 $	10.0 °C
27	Denmark	98	53,149 $	4,122 $	12.5 °C
28	Cambodia	97	776 $	16 $	33.2 °C
29	France	97	37,610 $	2,042 $	17.2 °C
30	United States	97	49,861 $	2,609 $	19.0 °C
31	Poland	96	10,505 $	545 $	13.5 °C
32	Czechia	96	15,552 $	712 $	13.5 °C
33	Russia	96	8,241 $	338 $	8.9 °C
34	Spain	95	26,463 $	1,176 $	21.4 °C
35	Ireland	95	43,914 $	2,501 $	13.0 °C
36	Italy	95	32,103 $	1,380 $	19.0 °C
37	Croatia	95	11,649 $	508 $	18.3 °C
38	Latvia	95	11,243 $	585 $	11.0 °C
39	Lithuania	95	11,331 $	550 $	11.7 °C
40	Israel	93	28,975 $	1,807 $	26.7 °C
41	Mongolia	93	2,241 $	128 $	8.6 °C
42	Portugal	93	19,253 $	1,005 $	21.6 °C
43	Bermuda *	92	108,349 $	1,748 $	24.5 °C
44	Bulgaria	91	5,702 $	224 $	18.4 °C
45	Greece	91	21,101 $	782 $	22.6 °C
46	Ukraine	91	2,375 $	143 $	15.3 °C
47	Vietnam	91	1,446 $	70 $	29.5 °C
48	Kazakhstan	89	6,380 $	225 $	13.5 °C
49	Malaysia	89	7,665 $	443 $	32.0 °C
50	Myanmar	89	667 $	14 $	32.8 °C
51	Thailand	89	4,260 $	182 $	33.0 °C
52	Serbia	89	4,876 $	208 $	18.4 °C
53	Barbados	88	14,602 $	822 $	30.2 °C
54	Brunei	88	29,737 $	1,020 $	32.1 °C
55	Chile	88	10,195 $	482 $	19.0 °C
56	Costa Rica	88	7,480 $	487 $	28.8 °C
57	Iraq	88	3,757 $	193 $	32.4 °C
58	Romania	88	7,109 $	249 $	15.5 °C
59	Uzbekistan	88	1,445 $	85 $	21.8 °C
60	Argentina	87	8,795 $	454 $	21.5 °C
61	Bosnia and Herzegovina	87	4,118 $		18.7 °C
62	Mexico	87	8,898 $	440 $	30.4 °C
63	Turkey	87	8,879 $	335 $	21.4 °C
64	Georgia	86	2,901 $	84 $	20.6 °C
65	Azerbaijan	85	3,763 $	121 $	22.7 °C
66	Sri Lanka	85	2,442 $	53 $	27.2 °C
67	Montenegro	85	6,056 $		20.4 °C
68	Bahamas	84	28,639 $	753 $	29.7 °C
69	Fiji	84	3,914 $	212 $	29.6 °C
70	Cuba	84	5,538 $	486 $	30.1 °C
71	North Macedonia	84	4,018 $	138 $	17.9 °C
72	Brazil	83	7,586 $	427 $	30.8 °C
73	Philippines	83	2,330 $	67 $	31.9 °C
74	Iran	83	4,545 $	173 $	27.0 °C
75	Colombia	83	5,037 $	231 $	30.4 °C
76	Laos	83	1,157 $	32 $	32.2 °C
77	Venezuela	83	8,025 $	273 $	32.4 °C
78	Albania	82	3,513 $	118 $	22.9 °C
79	United Arab Emirates	82	38,644 $	805 $	34.4 °C
80	Dominican Republic	82	4,964 $	157 $	31.8 °C
81	Lebanon	82	6,428 $	157 $	23.9 °C
82	Afghanistan	81	473 $	16 $	25.6 °C
83	Jordan	81	3,091 $	114 $	27.8 °C
84	Libya	81	9,089 $		28.7 °C
85	Pakistan	81	992 $	25 $	31.0 °C
86	Peru	81	4,311 $	150 $	24.7 °C
87	Indonesia	80	2,355 $	79 $	31.6 °C
88	Oman	80	15,332 $	798 $	34.1 °C
89	Qatar	80	58,614 $	2,331 $	33.7 °C
90	Palestine	80	2,614 $	132 $	27.4 °C
91	Bolivia	79	1,912 $	153 $	26.3 °C
92	Ecuador	79	4,159 $	199 $	27.9 °C
93	Egypt	78	2,175 $	92 $	30.1 °C
94	Algeria	77	3,684 $	255 $	27.6 °C
95	India	77	1,164 $	47 $	31.5 °C
96	Madagascar	77	420 $	13 $	28.7 °C
97	Saudi Arabia	77	17,468 $	1,265 $	33.6 °C
98	Sudan	77	1,168 $	25 $	36.5 °C
99	Syria	76	4,532 $	252 $	25.5 °C
100	Bangladesh	75	936 $	19 $	31.0 °C
101	Chad	75	630 $	16 $	36.0 °C
102	East Timor	74	2,090 $	54 $	30.9 °C
103	Jamaica	74	4,356 $	251 $	31.9 °C
104	Kenya	74	939 $	62 $	28.8 °C
105	Tanzania	74	702 $	29 $	29.1 °C
106	Zimbabwe	74	843 $	48 $	28.4 °C
107	Senegal	73	1,135 $	56 $	35.6 °C
108	Angola	72	2,396 $	83 $	27.6 °C
109	El Salvador	72	2,912 $	113 $	27.9 °C
110	Morocco	71	2,567 $	139 $	24.4 °C
111	South Africa	69	5,941 $	336 $	26.1 °C
112	Somalia	69	514 $	1 $	33.3 °C
113	Nigeria	68	1,758 $		33.6 °C
114	Belize	67	4,209 $	275 $	31.1 °C
115	Ethiopia	67	379 $	21 $	27.7 °C
116	Honduras	67	1,665 $	115 $	31.8 °C
117	Yemen	67	919 $	84 $	30.3 °C
118	Cameroon	67	1,234 $	36 $	31.0 °C
119	Congo (Dem. Republic)	64	316 $	7 $	30.3 °C
120	Central Africa	63	388 $	6 $	32.6 °C
121	Ghana	61	1,166 $	74 $	31.8 °C
122	Ivory Coast	61	1,289 $	68 $	32.1 °C
123	Guinea	56	598 $	15 $	31.3 °C
124	Equatorial Guinea	56	7,625 $		29.7 °C
125	Gambia	55	648 $	14 $	33.3 °C
126	Guatemala	55	2,830 $	92 $	35.0 °C
127	Sierra Leone	52	412 $	16 $	29.9 °C
128	Nepal	51	595 $	22 $	25.6 °C

I hope you’ll notice that on this list, which looks at data ending in 2019, the United States comes in thirtieth despite a significantly higher personal income level. Being richer than everyone else doesn’t make us smarter. You’ll also likely notice that per capita spending on education in the US, $2, 609 per person, is significantly less than many of the countries that rank above us. Yet, the GOP wants to eliminate the Department of Education and give more funds to private Charter schools rather than providing better funding for public education.

But wait, there’s more!

Quoting results from Pew Research Center in 2017 (the most recent year for which this data was compiled by the firm): One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

Feeling stupid yet? You should be.

Based on such educational information, there is every reason to amend the Constitution to require a competency exam for anyone running for public office. Why? Because being led by a bunch of unintelligent idiots leads us to … uhm… exactly where we are now: At the bottom of almost every list that matters. We are not happy people. We are not high-achieving people. We are not well-governed people. We are not free people. Instead, we are people with big mouths and empty heads who don’t even understand the difference between a Democracy and a Republic, nor how that difference matters.

Socrates, that esteemed philosopher of Western Thought, found pure Democracy to be a vile thing. In The Republic, the general principles of which are ultimately what our Constitution upon, Socrates called for, among other things, the rule of Philosopher Kings. In explaining himself, he asked this question:

If you were going on a sea voyage, “who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel, just anyone, or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring?”

I disagree that only the elite educated people among us should have a vote. Every person needs to have a say in how they are governed. That should be, by now, an established fact, though there are certainly plenty of people in the US who would challenge that notion.

However, when it comes to who should be elected to a position of authority, the people we choose to lead us forward as intelligently and appropriately as possible, Socrates has a point. We need the leadership of people who know what the fuck they’re doing, not some random big mouth who says things that sounds nice to those who failed 8th-grade civics. The best way I can find to establish who is fit to serve in any electoral capacity is to administer a test. Not an especially difficult test, either. A simple, ten-question test on the relevant issue. How about it?

First, let’s look at that good ole’ flawed Constitution of ours. What does it say are the qualifications for running for office?

Article I, Section 2, Clause 2:

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty-five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Almost immediately, I need to point out that those rules have been suspended by the House of Representatives on numerous occasions when it suited them. See, e.g., 1 Hinds’ Precedents of the House of Representatives § 418 (1907) (discussing John Young Brown of Kentucky, who waited over a year from the time of his election before taking the oath of office on account of the age qualification requirement); 79 Cong. Rec. 9841–42 (1935) (same); cf. 1 Hinds, supra note 7, at § 429 (discussing the case of James Shields of Illinois who was disqualified from his Senate seat on account of not having met the citizenship requirement at the time he took the oath of office). The House has a bad history of making shit up as they go to maintain the party power they want. It would take another extremely long discussion to resolve the matter of corruption within Congress.

As much as the qualifications for Congress may need to be reconsidered, however, they cannot legally do so themselves. Proof? the Supreme Court held in Powell v. McCormack (1969) and U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995) that neither Congress nor the states, respectively, can add to the qualifications stipulated in the Constitution. A new Constitutional Amendment would be necessary to change the qualifications for office and Constitutional Amendments are not easy to come by because, in case I wasn’t clear earlier, we stupidly think that the Constitution is infallible. In fact, there are too many people of the opinion that the Constitution was ordained by God. Again, explaining why that sentiment is false would take another very long article.

If we’re going to dream, though, we might as well follow that dream all the way to its conclusion. If we’re going to test whether or not one is fit to serve, what would such a test look like? My first thought was that a simple ten-question competency test would be sufficient. I looked around and had difficulty finding such a test that wasn’t biased by other education factors, so I asked ChatGPT 4 to come up with something. This is what it gave me:

1. Simplify the expression: 3x + 2y – 5x + 4y
2. Solve the equation: 2(x + 3) = 10
3. Factor the expression: x^2 – 4
4. Find the slope of the line passing through the points (2, 4) and (6, 10)
5. Solve the system of equations:
   2x + 3y = 11
   4x – y = 5
6. Calculate the area of a triangle with base 6 cm and height 8 cm
7. Identify the vertex and axis of symmetry of the quadratic function: f(x) = x^2 – 4x + 3
8. Solve the inequality: 2x + 5 < 3x – 1
9. Find the value of x in the equation: 2^(x-1) = 8
10. Determine the value of sin(60°)

That won’t work because it’s exclusively math-based and we need a person to know more than how to calculate the area of a triangle. I tried re-framing the question in different ways and didn’t come up with anything more usable. There’s still a lot of issues that AI is not ready to address and this is definitely one of them.

After looking around and considering several different sources, here’s a short exam that anyone running for Congress (or President) should be able to pass.

1. Who has the ability to put a potential law before Congress?
2. How many votes are required to override a presidential veto?
3. What portion of the Constitution is Congress (or the President) required to uphold?
4. Who is responsible for the content and appropriation of the federal budget?
5. What is the largest single source of revenue for the federal government?
6. When does Congress first convene?
7. What day(s) of the week is Congress generally not in session?
8. Who is the current Premiere of China?
9. What Department is responsible for the implementation and management of foreign policy?
10. What is the oldest territory of the US?

Those really are such basic, fundamental questions that I would be severely disappointed in anyone who can’t correctly answer at least eight of the ten questions. You should be able to answer all ten. Just in case you’re not certain, here are the answers:

1. Only sitting members of Congress can submit a law, though anyone can write one.
2. Overriding a presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate.
3. The whole thing. No exceptions.
4. Congress is tasked with producing a budget resolution and 12 appropriations bills for each federal fiscal year, which begins on October 1.
5. Individual income taxes comprise 52% of federal revenue.
6. Congress first convenes on the third of January the year after elections are held.
7. Generally, Congress is not in session on Saturday or Sunday, though there are exceptions for important legislative matters.
8. Li Qiang
9. Department of State
10. Puerto Rico

How did you do? Do you consider yourself smart enough to run for Congress? Here’s the catch: I’d be willing to bet that at least a third of sitting members of the House and perhaps ten percent of the Senate would score less than 80% on such an exam. Wishful thinking is responsible for much of the error.

Of course, one can’t and shouldn’t apply the same exam to all office holders. For example, what questions should we be asking of people who are running for your local school board? After all, that is an extremely important position as we’ve seen in recent years. When a school board is overtaken by stupid people, education comes to a grinding halt. If I’m writing the exam, it’s going to look something like this:

1. Who was Piaget and what was their contribution to education?
2. What are the four dominant philosophies of education?
3. By what age should children be able to read chapter books?
4. At what grade level should multiplication be introduced?
5. How does hunger factor into education?
6. What are the two most important classes for eighth grade?
7. Does STEM education replace Arts education?
8. What is the minimal passing score for any 10th-grade class?
9. Do studies indicate that children learn better in a bilingual environment?
10. Should every school start and end at the same time? Explain.

This test is arguably more difficult than the one given to prospective members of Congress because it assumes that one has a minimal amount of teaching education. Every question on this test is covered in Education 101. If anyone can’t pass it, they have absolutely no business telling professional teachers a damn thing other than Thank You. Here are the answers:

1. Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study of how children learn.
2. Perennialism, Essentialism, Romanticism and Progressivism
3. Depending on a child’s rate of learning, most children should be ready to read chapter books by age 7-8, but many will be ready much earlier.
4. Multiplication should be introduced between grades 2-3 in most cases.
5. Some variation of: “Longitudinal data suggest that children’s learning outcomes suffer when they regularly experience hunger and that nearly every aspect of physical and mental function is hurt as well. Food insecurity affects concentration, memory, mood, and motor skills, all of which a child needs to be able to be successful in school.” [No Kid Hungry]
6. Language Arts (specifically, writing) and Math (specifically basic Algebra)
7. No.
8. Generally, 65 percent or higher.
9. As of April, 2024: “The National Library of Medicine has published multiple studies that confirmed the academic advantages of bilingualism, with bilingual children consistently outperforming their monolingual peers in test scores, their proficiency in navigating abstract concepts across languages fosters a multifaceted approach to problem-solving, deepening their understanding of complex ideas.” [PIQE]
10. No. According to the NEA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, Middle Schools and High Schools should start later to give teens the chance to get the sleep they need.

I dare anyone to copy/paste those questions into an email and send them to their current school board members. I’m willing to bet you won’t like the results. Perhaps you’ll vote differently next time.

Conclusion: Intelligence is too important an issue to disregard it completely when considering whether a person is fit for any type of elected office. The Constitution should be amended and both state and local bodies should implement appropriate tests at every level of elected office. Continuing to vote for people because they’re nice or because they say pretty words is the height of stupidity. Everyone is not the same. We can’t keep electing people who’ve never seen a boat and expect them to not run the boat aground.

The time has come for a severe change and it’s one I’m willing to champion. How about you?