The following is the first installment in a TPM series, “Not Safe At Home: Solutions For Our Democratic Crisis.” As America battles the coronavirus, this series takes a look at fixes the next Congress and President should consider to how our democracy works — ideas that predate the coronavirus, and that will resurface after it has passed.
Can’t fix this unless Dems win and win big. So our work is cut out for us.
Vote, but don’t just vote…do whatever you can…phone bank, social media, volunteer in whatever ways we will be able to this season in order to get our candidates in office all across the board.
Thank you for writing and publishing this.
The Constitution was written by wealthy white men, most of whom were slaveholders, to keep wealthy white men in power. It has accomplished that mission for its duration. The government is neither a democracy nor a representative republic.
A Senate majority of 26 states represents only about 19% of the population. Arcane Senate rules make the Senate majority leader almost as powerful as the President. The requirement that a Constitutional amendment be approved by 3/4 of the states means that 13 states representing ~4.9% of the total population have veto power over the other 95% of the population.
Mass propagandizing by the state, such as daily recitations of the “Pledge of Allegiance” and total reverance of the “Founding Fathers” work to ensure a perpetuation of the fake democracy and the domination of control by wealthy white males. And that domination is prevalent and perpetuated in both parties.
Even many thoughtful smart progressive people can’t acknowledge the fraud that is “American democracy” because we have been so heavily propagandized from a very early age to believe the lie of “liberty and justice for all,” which is impossible under this Constitution.
Our Constitution is a suicide pact.
No democracy, no justice.
Data:
No system can long survive the attention of bad-faith actors who have the power to tinker with it.
The Constitution is not the problem. The modern Republican Party is the problem.
Agreed.
How? Name a single Democratic leader that is even talking about addressing the flaws in the Constitution. In fact, it is exactly the opposite.
They are the beneficiaries of the current system, and they are not going to change the rules. Furthermore, they perpetuate the propaganda and myth of American Democracy.
In truth, the constitution hasn’t work for a large segment of the population since its inception. Between black people constituting 3/5 of a person, women without the right to vote and an electoral college that allowed for a minority of voters to take control of the government, when this constitution actually worked is open for discussion.
Big Follow Up to this thread.
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.
Special Preview: June 2020 Issue
How we got here,from article.
“Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.”
Three very bad actors trashed some of the stopgaps that hitherto restrained evil:
McConnell
Barr
Roberts
It’s about time someone pointed this out. On the other hand, imaging what we’d get if we had a constitution convention today.
You do know that we’ve fixed most of your list, don’t you?
We can, with incredible work and perseverence, also abolish the Electoral College, go to direct popular vote (and don’t give me the snakeoil of the “national electoral vote compact”). This is something clearly “do-able” and must be done. Abolishing the Senate is another crucial step.
A little New Mexico story: in 1912 when NM became a state, its legislature was patterned on the US Constitution: representatives elected from districts of approximately equal population, and senators from each county. In less than half a century, the differential growth of counties caused a lawsuit in which the Federal government imposed actual districting and redistricting for the senate. So the NM senate is just a smaller house of reps with longer terms. Yeah, it’s stupidly redundant. Something similar could be done for the US Senate – but it seems smarter just to dump the whole thing.
Oh, the old “both parties” schtick. That’s been way past its “sell by” date for decades now. Dems have been left in the dust because they haven’t descended into the depths like Repubs.
(I’m not criticizing you personally, just the Atlantic writer.)
This, 100%. The problem is that the Constitution was created for an 18th century world and included a number of policy preferences hard-coded as technical implementation: your code/technical implementation should be policy-agnostic, so it can be flexible enough to allow for policy changes. The glaring issue has been - and yes, it’s 100% an artifact of slavery - the minority veto: a minority can effectively completely thwart the majority. The need for a Super-majority to accomplish anything is a recipe for entirely broken government. In the 18th century world when the constitution was written, with a more distributed federated system, where different actors were much more isolated from one another (and free to go their own way without harming others), this was fine. However, it’s clear - at least since Industrialization - that a deeply economically interconnected system requires an effective centralized control.
I mean: this is all New Deal Commerce Clause stuff. The Civil War should have really resolved all of this - the 13th, 14th and 15th, if they’d been properly upheld by the SCOTUS, would have solved this nicely. The 16th and 19th also.
But the Electoral College - 100% a slave-state compromise - and the Senate remain major impediments…and they need to go. The whole idea that a state in aggregate needs separate representation as a distinct entity is bogus. It made more sense in a Federation (pre-CW) than it does in a world where, because of our economic intertwining - our national citizenship is really what matters.
But yeah, to get this stuff through, we’d need a massive super-majority, and even if we got that, honestly I don’t know how we’d ever get an amendment that would reduce the power of places like SD,ND, Montana, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware. How many small states would ratify? And although we tend to bemoan the small states because we perceive them as “red” places, if you look at the list, it really isn’t immediately obvious this is so - in other words, small vs large isn’t a clear partisan divide. The small Blue states tend to be small geographically in addition to demographics, so they more closely resemble denser states politically, but they still have that disproportionate vote in the Senate.
On the other hand, we should probably be glad that our constitution/way of government has been so hard to change during some recent periods. Think of how much damage was done during 2001-2006, and how much more could have been done with easier abolition of basic rules. Or 2016-18.
I think decisive action is needed, and yet…
To further elaborate: I don’t think the Senate (unlike the EC) is entirely a vestigal tail - there’s some real structure value in the bicameral system (there was more, before McTurtle tossed all the norms out) - but it is getting more and more disproportional every year. The artificial caps on the House seat count are a similar nod to empowering a minority (because nobody gets less than one Rep).
What we really ought to do is increase the size of both bodies, enough to return to a more proportional representation, and differentiate the Senate from the House by term length. Contrary to the Populist (anti-government) standard hue and cry, we ought to extend the Senate Term limits, I’d go for a decade. The most outrageous behavior on the part of all Senators comes in craven election year posturing. They are most immune to lobbying, special interests and “base” activists when they don’t have to run - or right after running. The house just needs to get a heck of a lot bigger.
Yes, rural/small state folks will bleat about losing power because yes, they will be losing power. However, it’s not credible in the long run to talk about living in a democracy while being effectively ruled by or vetoed by tiny minorities.
“I do not think,” [Washington] wrote, “we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us.”
“[the American people] have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” - Madison
So the founding fathers themselves put the lie to the inane “original intent” doctrine spewed by Scalia and his fellow travelers when they want to contort the Constitution to fit their own political or ideological views. Governing a 21st Century country under your interpretation of an 18th Century document is a disaster unto itself, which only exacerbates the structural problems of the Constitution that are being manipulated by a self serving minority.
I reflect on that quite often, because Shrub is who radicalized me politically, but the reality is that McConnell has effectively tossed all the norms that restrained the GOP via the Senate in that period. Bill Frist was a kind of turd in a lot of ways, but never as deeply craven as McConnell. It would have been much worse from 2001-2006 under McConnell than it was, and that old Senate, which guarded Senate prerogative against the executive is now gone.
"Bill Frist was a kind of turd in a lot of ways, but never as deeply craven as McConnell.
Touche !
It should be observed that this supposed veneration of “what the framers thought” is a recent invention of the right-wing, which they now openly admit they never seriously believed.
“Originalism” - which they never appealed to consistently - was only ever a weapon to impose their own current policy preferences on everybody, and now that it has largely achieved its original aims they are ejecting it because now it constrains their achievement of further goals.
Our Constitution Is No Longer Working For Us
Really? You don’t say…
The Truth is that the Constitution is a fine document. It’s the Republicans in government who have sworn to uphold the Constitution that are the problem because they are not keeping their oaths. They ignore the Constitution and our laws. We are now in a time where our “Chief Executive” is lawless, where he has removed qualified ethical people and replaced them with political appointees who are lawless hacks, and we have elected Republican Senators and Republican Congressmen who refuse to perform oversight, thereby enabling lawlessness to their advantage and the advantage of their well-monied backers. This is the most corrupt government I have witnessed during my lifetime. Every endeavor in history is limited by the quality of people who run it.
The “Chief Executive” has called on idiots to not respect the power of the states to administer quarantine orders during a pandemic. And for this there will be hell to pay.
(You can replace “Chief Executive” with Don the Con or Mob Boss or Mango Mussolini or Toadglans Trumplethinskin or whatever descriptors provide you some release, because they are all accurate.)