Democracy in peril. . . maybe the fix is to amend the constitution. . .
The one thing, and seemingly right now the only thing, that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that democracy in the United States is in extreme peril, although not for the same reasons. Democrats have looked out stunned at the Republican failure to defend democracy in the wake of a Trumpist coup attempt and wonder what happened to the Grand Old Party. Republicans, or at least many of them, seemingly not aware that they are a minority party whose membership erodes daily, have accepted the lie that it simply can't be possible that they lost, and are further revealed to basically hold Democrats in deep, deep suspicion if not outright alien enemies. To some degree, that's a Republican response to a Democratic belief that Republicans are basically stupid, a view reinforced by the public face of the insurrectionist and the stunning acceptance of a patently false lie.
Now, it seems that Republican populist are set to attempt a second coup and the Republican establishment won't stand in the way of it, and Democrats have demonstrated themselves to once again be legislatively incompetent. While I don't think we'll get there, lots of Americans believe we're about to drive democracy right over a cliff.
So what can be done?
Well, the Democrats do have a proposal, or actually two, in front of Congress to address this, one being The Freedom To Vote Act and the other being The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I don't know that either actually are aimed to address the problems we're now facing, however. What would address them is taking on and amending The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which everyone agrees is a sloppy statute to start with, and which the hold out Democrats want to amend. Mitch McConnell has hinted he'd like to take a look at it. Of course, Chuck Shumer, for inexplicable reasons, doesn't, a typical boneheaded Democratic leadership position.
So let's start there, but let's get a little background.
The founding fathers, . . . they didn't always get things right.
Our Original System.
Whenever we get into this, we tend to get the American version of ancestor worship, with people sooner or later dragging out the Founding Fathers as if they took a break from giving recommendations to the Oracle at Delphi to draft the Constitution. They didn't, and were just men, and therefore there's no reason to endow them with perfection, but nonetheless, let's take a look at the system they created, so we can get a grasp of the structure that we largely still hold
This is how it worked.
The House of Representatives was based on the British House of Commons, and was directly elected by the citizenry. The British system is based on ridings, where the voters reside, and ours was based on districts organized in states. It's a modified and actually somewhat less democratic variant of the House of Commons, as the Commons aren't organized into political subdivisions such as states. But the Constitution was heavy on states, as we are after all the United States.
We still have that system.
The Senate was elected by the State legislatures and was to represent the states as states. It was not directly elected.
The President was elected by the Electoral College. This was as compromise between those who wanted the President elected by the state legislatures, directly elected, or elected by the Congress. The first President of the United States, who was not George Washington, was elected by the Senate. Nobody liked that system much, and the Constitution proposed to give the Executive branch grater powers than he had under the Articles of the Confederation. The question was how to pick him. Radical democrats wanted the people to elect him. Reluctant aristocrats weren't so keen on that, and after all we already had the House of Representatives. But then, we also had the Senate.
So the Electoral College was come up with, with the original concept being that the people would vote for electors who were to vote for the winning candidate, with the second place person getting the Vice President slot, but with there being some room to say now if the people voted for a dud.
What we have now
The electoral college system proved to be problematic right from the onset, as did having the runner up end up Vice President. That just meant the runner up could spend four years throwing rocks as the President, so the system was modified to make the VP a slot that was tied to the President.
By the time of the Compromise of 1877 (that again) it was clear that the Electoral College didn't make very much sense any longer as the President had been an office directly campaigned for nearly the entire time. Moves existed to abolish it but Reconstruction made that problematic and instead the system was modified statutorily in 1887 to attempt to prevent a Constitutional crisis. Early inklings that the nation was headed into a crisis over the College resulted in the House voting to approve an amendment to the Constitution in 1969 to abolish the Electoral College. It passed overwhelmingly in the House in 1969 but failed in the Senate in 1970.
So its still around.
In 1913 the Constitution was amended to make Senators directly elected.
So what's that all mean?
Well, what it all means is that we retain an Electoral College that's subject to influence of outside forces and which sets up a system in which a President can be elected after having lost the popular vote. This was regarded as being nearly impossible up until George Bush won over Al Gore, but now it's repeating. In each instance, it's been in the case of very close elections, hence Trump's efforts to frustrate the mail-in vote and to "find" votes in Georgia.
It also means that the system which imagined the voice of the people coming through the House of Representatives and the voice of state governments coming though the Senate is completely torpedoed. Frankly, all Senators are, really, is long serving Commons members from giant ridings.
So what?
Well, this system has slowly evolved to where the government isn't really functioning except through its long serving beurocrats. Gerrymandering of districts has made most districts safe, so things don't change much. Like it or not, the House is ineffective even though the Democratic Party outnumbers the Republican Party, as it splits pretty evenly most of the time anymore. The Senate does the same. There's not much change, and Senate rules designed for a collegial body operate to prevent any action in one that's pretty divided.
And with the Imperial Presidency first brought in by Theodore Roosevelt, an outsized Executive has powers far beyond that imagined by the framers, a fact that's aided by a Congress that hasn't been governing for nearly twenty years.
Can that be fixed?
Oh yes, it can.
Fix No. 1. Abolish the Electoral College.
If this was done, the entire crisis that we're now in, regarding the Oval Office, would not exist or at least it'd make it much harder to come about.
I used to support the Electoral College as, at one point, as George F. Will used to point out, it amplified the popular vote giving the illusion of a mandate in an election that's typically pretty evenly divided. Now its not doing that at all,, but that frankly is its only remaining purpose.
The Presidency is the one office that is supposed to represent the opinion of everyone. The Electoral College only existed as plutocrats feared that the people wouldn't install plutocrats. We don't want to install plutocrats, however.
We should do what Congress attempted to do in 1969, abolish the Electoral College. There's no excuse not to, even though Republicans right now come out against it. The real reason they do that is they fear they can't win the Oval Office if it's abolish, and in fact they would not have elected a President since George Bush I if it didn't exist. That, however, is a Republican problem they should fix. As they win state elections easily enough in spite of being a minority party, nationally, they can fix it.
The overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of abolishing the Electoral College. Abolishing it might not fix anything else, but if we are going to continue to have an outsized Presidency, we ought to at least make it one in which election mischief can't develop into a coup.
Fix No. 2. Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment
Eh? Have Senators elected by legislatures?
Yes.
Now, at first blush this would appear to flying the face of Fix No. 1, which I'd do at the same time. But it doesn't.
The Senate was always intended to be the voice of states, not of the people. If it is a directly elected office, it actually serves no point whatsoever and should be abolished (which will be fix no. 3). All the Senate is right now is a place for really long serving members of a Commons district with state boundaries. Why bother?
Indeed, because the Senate has retained rules from an earlier era, and because its nearly evenly split liek the House, it can't get anything done. Right now, it's divided 50/50.
If Senators were chosen by legislatures, however, it wouldn't be.
This is a little tricky, but basically (but not really quite) the GOP controls 30 legislatures our of 50, or 60%. If this was reflected in the US Senate, which it would not be perfectly, the Senate would be 60% Republican.
It'd likely be a little higher or lower than that, but the point is that the Senate would be cleanly the house of one party, the Republicans, reflecting its original purpose of representing the states. And with those numbers, it could actually do something.
Yes, this is less democratic than the existing system, but it was intended to be. That was the point of the Senate. And it would ironically function much better this way.
But if we don't like that, then;
Fix No. 3. Abolish the Senate
If all the Senate is, is a giant House of Representatives, which is exactly what it is right now, just do away with it. We don't need it.
Indeed, right now, it's hard to see what the Senate actually does. It has some Constitutional roles, to be sure, but they can simply be transferred to the House if it is just a big House with huge ridings.
This may sound radical, but this is how Nebraska's legislature works right now, and Nebraska has not descended into left wing anarchy. If we really want a democratic senate, well, let's just not have one. The House reflects the vote of the people better and in a more cogent fashion.
That of course means that we'd be creeping up on a modified parliamentary system. Well, so what. The British, who over the years have more and more sidelined the House of Lords, and most other democratic nations, work just this way.
Indeed, if we did this, once again, much of the current drama wouldn't be there, as the Senate, which is serving as the blocker of things right now, wouldn't be in the way. Yes, Republicans would be upset, but if the Electoral College was also gone, they'd be working hard to appeal to the voters directly, rather than being mired in conspiracy theories.
Now, am I really in favor of this? No, I'm not. I'm in favor of the Senate functioning the way it was originally supposed to, but in the absence of that, this would be the next best thing.
Fix No. 4. Do away with the quasi official nature of the parties.
Listen to any political discussion, and sooner or later you'll hear the falsehood that "the United States has a two party system".
It does not, at least not existentially.
It has a two party system as we became lazy and let the parties create one, and because of the operation of Duverger's Law which holds that plurality based deliberative institutions devolve into two parties, whereas as proportional institutions evolve into multi party institutions.
It nearly goes without saying that multi party institution are of course more democratic than two party systems.
The two party nature of our political culture has become so ingrained that Congress itself has organized itself accordingly, and in many state laws things have evolved to where boards are supposed to be made up of members of both parties. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, therefore, while vying for control of the government, become, to some extent, arms of it.
This could, and should, be addressed by wiping out the aspects of our system which favor this.
The first thing to do would be to make all elections non-partisan. The 49 member Nebraska legislature provides an example here again. It's non-partisan. Nebraska's Senators, which is what they are termed, are elected in a single non-partisan election. Get the top vote, and you are it.
That's the way the elections for every elective office should work. Yes, you could be a member of a party, and yes, you could let everyone know that, but there'd be no primary and whoever the top vote getter would be, would be the winner.
Taking that a step further, not only should that be how the larger US elections work, but in the national legislature itself the practice of having caucuses and Majority and Minority Speakers and Leaders should be abolished as official practices. If the Republicans and Democrats, when they are out of power, want to gather in a basketball court somewhere and vote somebody their spokesman, have at it, but that person ought to get no special cred in the chambers of Congress itself. The Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader are real positions, to an extent, so they'd stick around, but no more organizing on party lines officially.
Would that make a difference? I think it would.
For one thing, you'll hear around here that Harriet Hageman came in third when she ran for Governor behind Gordon and Freiss. But not really. Mary Throne, the Democrat, came in second. If the race had actually been come all and come in, how would that have looked? I suspect that Gordon would still have one, but I strongly suspect that probably Throne would have been second or third, giving the current reflection back on the state's Governor a considerably different one than we now have. Indeed, in Wyoming politics, nearly every election would be pulled toward the center as the Democrats and the middle of the road Republicans would have more of a voice, which they should as they are part of the population. The primary system silences those voices.
And wiping out the party organizations inside of Congress itself would definitely have an impact on government. Minority leaders could run around trying to martial opposition or support for something, but their impact would be much smaller. Without the ability to control committee membership and the like by party, at least openly, a greater emphasis would develop on getting things done and getting along, rather than getting in the way.
Taking this to the Oval Office itself, if the Presidential election was the top vote getter, in one single election, there's no earthly way we'd have had the last several Presidents. Trump would not have been President at all. Nor would have Barrack Obama. Nor would have George Bush II. Only a long primary system lead to their rise. One election, in November, would have no open winnowing system and now way to weed out people's real views.
Yes, that would mean that a President might frequently get in with only 30% of the vote. But that President would also be less imperial by default.
And yet?
Any of this stuff likely to happen?
Probably not.
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