Minority rule is threatening American democracy like never before
Minority rule is threatening American democracy like never before
The Founding Fathers planted a bomb in the Constitution. Donald Trump lit the fuse.
We need to reapportion the House. And make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census. That would fix most of these structural issues with voting.
That would involve convincing current house members to dilute their power, and the senate which is becoming increasingly republican/minority rule dominated to go along with it. We can't even get them to stop trading stocks. The article makes a lot of great points about how problems in the constitution are self perpetuating and prevent themselves from being fixed, somewhat by design. I'm not saying we'll have another civil war or something, but at some point the government not responding to the will of the people is going to boil over in some way unless more progress is made in making the US government more democratic (meaning democracy, not political party).
make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census
That's... the current state of affairs? New apportionments of Rep seats to states take effect on the 4th year of each decade and have done so consistently since 1933 and in particular the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It also does little for the major structural issues with voting, which are much more about voting method and the drawing of voting district lines.
The 1929 law prevents the total number of Congressmen from changing. Adjusting the number of Congressmen is called reapportionment. What you're talking about is just redistricting.
I think the person above you is trying to talk about the number of house representatives being frozen but just phrased it a little vaguely. You're right that reapportionment happens every ten years, but the number of reps got capped at 435 in the early 20th century. It used to grow with population.
Because a state gets a minimum of one house vote, this means that states with at large representatives like Wyoming or Montana are often representing less people than bigger states. If we allowed the number of reps to grow again, it could be made more proportional to actual population and lessen the distortion from having a minimum of one representative creates. It would also lessen the electoral college advantage that small states currently have, since the electoral votes for larger states would go up while for smaller states they would stay the same. Giving Washington DC and Puerto Rico proper representation would help too. All of this would get closer to one person one vote for president, though still with the winner take all system causing issues as you point out. There's a lot to fix.
I don’t know where you put the line to qualify as a democracy but America certainly wasn’t over it before the Civil Rights Act; before that, we were an apartheid state. And if there was a time when Congress was responsive to the will of the people, it ended with Citizens United.
I would classify America as more of a hybrid kleptocracy/democracy. Local elections are mostly democratic. State level? Sometimes. At the federal level, government is not responsive to the will of the people at all.
America certainly wasn’t over it before the Civil Rights Act; before that, we were an apartheid state.
i think it's fascinating that we're going back in that direction. Texas, for example, has a majority non-white and democrat registered state per the last census; but neither group are represented proportionally in the state's government.
and i think the bigger indictment of our system is that there are are MANY "get out and vote" initiatives/groups to help increase voting (especially in texas and georgia); but they all seem to pretend that gerrymandering and voter suppression are either not a thing or not definitive enough to take action even though the last census confirmed (and previous censuses suggested) that it this trend of lack of representation for non-white/democrats is increasing.