I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
It's interesting that you see it that way. From my perspective, it's something that was originally designed with fairly good intentions, that is now being abused by the minority to impose their will upon everyone.
Let's not forget that Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election this century. And that the Senate's structure has allowed the party representing a minority of Americans to reshape the federal judiciary for years to come. (And unless a rabbit gets pulled out of a hat somewhere, they'll still have outsized control over judicial confirmations for at least the next 2 years.)
I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority.
> "I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority."
The alternative is effectively disenfranchising rural areas. Remember that whole "no taxation without representation" thing a couple of centuries ago and how badly that turned out? Rural areas are where all the food, agricultural and mineral resources of the United States are produced, not to mention the source of the majority of its armed forces, so trying to disenfranchise them isn't going to end well.
And the minority isn't small either: the last time I checked, even in archetypically left-leaning California, about 1/3 of the vote went to Trump; for the other two west coast states, the tally was closer to 40%.
The answer, of course, is to focus on uniting the nation, not division, even if it means not all the changes people want happen as quickly as they would prefer. "Politics is the art of the possible" after all.
Rural areas are not disenfranchised in the House though. If anything they're still over-represented because the House hasn't been allowed to scale with population.
Translation: all votes are equal, but rural votes are more equal than others.
Therefore it's "just" for a house, senate, and president representing a minority of Americans to raise taxes on urban Americans (70% of the economy), refuse to fund our infrastructure (HSR and the gateway project), and impose their religious beliefs on us.
These self serving arguments aren't convincing anyone. What urban America has actually heard over the last four years is that "when you have the voted, you do what you want," a lesson we have taken to heart.
Weren’t the main concessions made to Southern slaveholders items like the 3/5 compromise? The senate’s distribution on the other hand would benefit states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, etc...
Slavery wasn’t the only issue that mattered at the founding of the US, and this type of framing is the is revisionism found in things like the NYT’s 1619 project. The EC was well intentioned as a mechanism for federalism and forming a coalition of states that could retain their own self determination (and continue to do so today) while also being part of the union. It spans all issues and policies. And frankly it makes a lot of sense. Otherwise you will have lots of disenfranchised places and cultures and the union would fall apart.
No, of course it wasn't, but I also didn't say that. You're reading revisionism into a statement that is very nearly too short to contain any.
You're also misreading it: my comment was about the Senate, not the electoral college. And I left out the part about how the Senate was explicitly anti-democratic, not just anti-majoritarian, in that it was originally elected by legislators and not the people.
I don’t think this is a tyrant of the minority but rather an appropriate averaging of influenced - it is federalism working healthily. Different places, with different people and cultures, need autonomy and self determination if they are willing to join a union of states. Otherwise why would they take part in the union and give up their ways of life and laws and cultures? The mechanisms for making the union palatable to all are found in how we apportion senators and in the electoral college. I think this IS moderation.
As a non american, the way people describe american judges by their partisan leanings seems really messsed up to me. I would describe that as not how a judicary should work.
Only the partisans describe judges likes that. Judges do have leanings, but it's mostly about jurisprudence, like more originalism, or believing the interpretation should consider the intent of the legislator, or lean towards where society in general is leaning.
These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.
There was literally a media freak out over the apointment of Amy Barrett because people thought trump was stacking the court in his favour. I don't know how true that is, but its clear that a significant portion of americans believe it (belief that the court is political is damaging in itself even if it wasn't true).
Most judges actually are non-partisan-decide-based-on-law type. But they simply are not favoured.
Consider that sanders made it a litmus test for his supreme court nominees to overrule an unpopular court decision. Most judges would avoid at a politician demanding this, as it defeats the purpose of a judiciary.
If that were true, there would not be such huge political fights over judges. As it stands, conservative judges tend to vote one way, liberal judges tend to vote another.
That is not the impression my reading about various cases has left me with.
I can't point you to specific cases - I can only say that what has really stood out to me is that the justices do mostly seem to have well-defined interpretive frameworks, and that they work from those.
I can think of an exception, but my experience has generally been that it's the case.
I'm not particularly familar with italy's judiciary and nothing popped out in a quick skim of the wikipedia article, but if you're saying that there are countries that are worse, i don't doubt it. Being not the worst is not the same as being good or being ok.
The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
And yet, the United States does not preach this model when helping to propagate democracy abroad. Tellingly, they don't include:
- first past the post elections,
- bicameral legislative branches, or
- electoral colleges.
We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.
I do hope that the experience of this election will build bipartisan support to nationalize federal elections. Personally, I'd love to see an end to the electoral college, but I can't see Republicans supporting that loss of leverage since their last two non-incumbent wins have lost the popular vote.
I think it would be a very bad idea to nationalize federal elections. Right now, each state chooses how they run their elections. Some states (like Maine) have chosen to use ranked choice voting while others use first past the post.
Nationalizing elections would basically cement first past the post as our permanent voting system forever since it's extremely unlikely you could convince everyone in the U.S. to change to a new one at once.
> We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.
Do you have a source for that?
Especially the point about bicameralism? I think in a federal system, having something like the US or Australian Senate's is useful in it prevents the smaller states from being dominated by the bigger ones. Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
Do you have a source for that? Proportional representation does seem to solve for it. See also: far right parties gaining seats in Germany.
Their views get heard (if not enacted), no one secedes, and the system remains stable.
There is no incompatibility between having proportional representation and having bicameralism. Federally, Australia has preferential voting (instant-runoff voting) in the House of Representatives and single transferrable vote is used to elect 12 senators for each state (only 6 in a normal election, the full 12 only get re-elected in a special "double dissolution" election, which the government is allowed to order to break a deadlock between the two houses). You mention Germany, which is a bicameral system as well (the Bundesrat).
For the benefits of federal bicameralism, consider the UK – England has almost 85% of the population, and so in a purely one-person-one-vote system will always outvote the other three constituent countries. The UK does have bicameralism, but non-federal – the House of Lords does not directly represent the constituent countries, and does not provide a mechanism to block an English majority – the majority of the House of Lords is English too. And I think this is one of the major factors driving the Scottish independence movement. If the UK had a system more like Australia – with an upper house providing equal representation to each part of the country, regardless of population, and with constitutional referendums requiring a double majority to pass (both a majority of the national population, and also a majority of the population in a majority of the states) – then I don't think the Scottish independence movement would have anywhere near as much steam as it has.
I think Trump's picks for justices are no different than what some generic Republican President would have picked. In choosing justices, he basically just followed the advice of the conservative legal establishment (Federalist Society, etc). His choices were judicial conservatives, but generic judicial conservatives not Trumpists.
It was pretty shortsighted when Democrats removed the filibuster from judicial confirmations in 2014 to try and ram through judges in Obama’s final years.
This also assume that McConnell wouldn't have just done the same. Remember that this is the same fellow that said both "no appointments in an election year" to "we're appointing with less that 30 days until the election".
McConnell is a political nihilist:
> It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”
> “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”
Remember McConnell (and the GOP) were also all about austerity during Obama's terms (when economy could have used economic stimulus). Then, when Trump got in, it was all about tax cuts which caused all sorts of deficit/debt issues—when the economy did not need any help (2017).
I don't see how anyone can argue for the electoral college as a feature in our modern times. Our Senate and the electoral college were designed in order to get support from colonies to form the new USA. It worked well for that purpose.
We have entirely different goals now. We should be aiming for fair elections in which one person's vote is equal to any other's regardless of the state they reside. The electoral college is downright repulsive once you realize how unfairly it treats citizens in more populated states compared to those in less populated states.
The electoral college now has the potential of pulling the union apart. If California and New York see a few more elections in which their citizens' votes are discounted, resulting in popular vote winners losing the presidency, then it would be logical for them to secede. They can take their massive economies and accompanying tax dollars and leave this system behind, as it should've been a long time ago.
Removing electoral college would remove all the interesting stuff about campaigning. Campaigns would focus on large urban areas and no one would set foot in sparsely populated areas.
I always feel that we are highly inclined to promote a voting system which would help the side we support.
The constitution declares that the president is elected by the states, not by the people directly. The electoral college serves to moderate the influence of dense population areas.
On a straight popular vote basis, the large urban centers in a handful of states would select the president. Their interests and motivations will necessarily be different from rural areas.
The electoral college gives populous states proportionally more influence, as they have more congressional representatives and thus more electoral votes. But it serves to balance that against the interests of less populated states, which are also part of the country and should not be considered completely irrelevant in the process.
The reality of the power balance the opposite of what you’re saying, in my opinion. Places like CA and NY have incredible influence and power even with the electoral college. The calls for one person’s vote being equal to others nationally is just a virtuous rhetorical argument to justify a power grab that would take power away from places which already have diminished influence.
The reality is that different locations have different ways of life and culture and politics, and therefore self determination must be supported through some mechanisms (like the electoral college) for a federal union to make sense and for those peoples to feel represented. If we are undoing that we need to also give states the option to secede and go their own way, since this union would simply mean the end of their way of life.
This talk of disenfranchising areas feels bizarre to me. Areas can’t be enfranchised or disenfranchised; only people can. And right now people in more populous areas are less enfranchised than people from rural areas. That has led to minority rule and should not rightly be allowed to stand.
> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.
Other countries handle it just fine with popular votes.
E.g., South Korea has a presidential election every 5 years, congressional election every 4 years, and gubernatorial(?) election every 4 years (staggered in the middle between congressional elections). In this way, a government losing popular support quickly finds itself surrounded by elected officers from opposing parties.
I'm not sure at what scale this makes a difference, but South Korea has a population somewhat larger than California in a landmass a little bigger than Indiana. The US constitution obviously wasn't designed with 300M people and 50 states in-mind, but it's larger and more diverse than South Korea, so it probably needs to be governed differently. It's like how having states in Singapore would be silly, just at a different scale. I do think what system of elected government makes the most sense for a given country based on size, population density, population concentration, and other factors is actually an interesting question.
Well last time it happened (2012) the conservative party won the congress in April 2012 and then went on to win the presidential election in December ... the elected person was Park Geun-Hye, widely considered the worst leader in decades, and was impeached among corruption scandal four years later.
Maybe that's an argument for staggering elections even more regularly, or maybe it's just one of those coincidences pundits love to talk about, I don't know. :)
