Dem introduces bills to eliminate Electoral College, stop presidents from pardon
33 replies, posted
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/423810-dem-introduces-bills-to-eliminate-electoral-college-stop-presidents-from
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a vocal critic of President Trump, on Thursday introduced two bills to eliminate the Electoral College and prevent presidents from pardoning themselves or their family members.
Someone forget this very interesting news on more related to constitutional amendments from yesterday.
Good luck passing that
The pardon one might have a chance, but the EC one will never pass.
Goddamn. Even though it's symbolic, all of these introduced bills make me really happy that democrats are taking on these issues.
It actually makes me feel just a little bit hopeful for 2019. Just a little.
2020, actually. 2019 is mostly a year for them to posture a bit. Push all these pointless-in-the-Senate bills that would do great things if they passed now, the centrists and moderates see that the Dems are trying to fix the country, Senate loses majority in 2020(And probably WH). Then we can actually start passing these sorts of bills. It's great that they're proposing these bills, but everyone knows none of them go anywhere until the other house of Congress has flipped blue as well.
It continues to amaze me that the Electoral Collage still exists.
But there semi-successful attempts of trying do so statewide, [Long before quarter of Democrats since 2016 start finally seeing EC is joke] in last decade and year ago of abolishing nor discontinued it by each state including Connecticut becoming recent state of joining such agreement. See of National Popular Vote Interstate Impact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Literally will never go away as the small states, Ohio, and Florida would lose all presidential relevance. The NPVIC mentioned above would be fought to the death by the small states if it went into effect.
That's probably a good thing. Simultaneously advocating for abolition of the EC and universal healthcare is a contradiction, you can have one or the other. Otherwise, you would simultaneously be creating dependence on a few economically powerful states that fund the government while electoral outcomes that affect all would be dictated by political machines in those same states, since people must live where the money is. This creates a more refined plutocracy, not democracy, while increasing internal tensions within the union because this would be interpreted as a power grab.
There is a reason a country as large and diverse as the US necessarily has the EC.
Yeah so Republicans can win elections. The idea that we can't have universal healthcare and a functioning democracy because diversity is fucking absurd.
Maybe they should. Why in the hell should a handful of geographical places matter more than people? The United States isn't just a bunch of states anymore, it's a federal republic with most power held in the central government. Everyone is so concerned about the majority that they forget it's very possible under this system for the tyranny of the minority to rule. You can win the presidency with only 22 percent of the vote. 22%! Granted that's rare and it's never happened, but we've had it 4 times before where a president got the minority of the vote but still got into the presidency. That's absolutely ridiculous. That's a failure rate of of 7%. 7% chance for a loser to win. That's bullshit. That's not equality, and we shouldn't tolerate it.
People who argue that the EC is necessary are basically saying that America can't function as a single country.
I'll accept the EC existing if it gets updated every 10-20 years or so instead of being 102 years out of step with demographic trends and population movement. Whatever value it was supposed to deliver in the 19th century is eclipsed by it being so out of date it's more or less gerrymandering at an instutional level.
But it'd be great if it just got thrown out the window, technology is far past the point where America doesn't need layers of abstraction separating voters from the actual democratic mechanisms they think they're voting in for the sake of maintaining structures originally build to accomodate pre-20th-century travel and communication limitations..
Abolish the electoral college?
What's his game, piss of like nearly every single rural state?
That’s because it can’t (have you seen the state of things lately?), and was never meant to function as a centralized government in the first place. In fact I’m fairly certain centralized power was one of the top things the framers of this country were trying to avoid. At one point it was more like the EU where every state had their own set of rules but were collectively bound together as a union. Today it’s the exact opposite where everyone looks to the federal government to decide local policies for 50 different states.
We’re not at all a homogeneous population between these states. Culture, policies, and circumstances all vary wildly between several states and aside from expanding people’s rights, a lot of things will simply not work in certain areas. I’m not trying to argue policy here, but the biggest example where this stands out is firearm legislation. We can’t pretend that the hands off approach New Hampshire has on guns would work in other states with heavily centralized areas, dense populations, and high crime rates. Likewise, the policies of California or Massachusetts would be seen as a heavy handed unnecessary burden on people in New Hampshire.
I think the real problem here is that the federal government’s authority is far overreaching what it was originally intended for. States with rural areas shouldn’t be dictating policy for other states with higher populations, and vice versa. Ideally all states should have equal representation, but without butting into the policies and local affairs of everyone else. The current state of the federal government has made this into a situation where several states are fighting each other just to have control over their own affairs since Washington D.C. gets to have the final say on almost everything. The problem is exactly that some people want everything centralized under the federal government when it was never intended to work that way to begin with.
IMO the federal government should only be allowed to set laws and policies to protect civil rights and liberties like immediate public safety (not implied or abstract threats like passing the Patriot Act because “TERRORISM”), gay marriage, abortions, consumer protection rights, gun rights, anti-discrimination laws, data protection, etc...
Instead this country has devolved into using the federal government to criminalize people over petty shit like weed (aka minorities), LGBTQ for simply existing, assault weapons (aka gun owners), abortions, ROMs (aka video game abandon ware), etc...
If things are going to be this way though, I can see why smaller states would want to keep the electoral college just to prevent California from having a supermajority over anything important.
Do you have any idea how many votes the electoral college pisses on? If you vote for the minority party of one of the 40-something states who are guaranteed to vote one way or the other, your vote means literal dick. You might as well have not bothered putting in the time.
Abolishing the electoral college means that every voter gets one vote, regardless of the state they live in, its political leaning, or its population density. It's simpler and prevents the travesty of democracy that was the 2016 election where the guy with less votes won.
Sure I can see why people wouldn't have people in California to have a fair proportion of the vote but I'm not seeing where that is right. You are replacing the "tyranny" of the majority (aka the way democracy works) with the actual tyranny of the minority, who gets what they want despite being outnumbered by three million people in some cases. If we are just going to decide that the popular vote doesn't matter then why bother? Why not just have a cabal or council somewhere that meets every four years to decide who is president?
With the EC, POTUS is decided by Pennsylvania and Florida. Where the fuck is my voice in the presidential election? Where the fuck are the voices of the other 46 states that aren't hot battleground states?
It's not. Mass participatory democracy does not scale and is not desirable for a country like ours if it's not accompanied by a reduction in central government. Rather than enfranchising, all you are doing is integrating our many social differences and imbalances into the state, giving them a political character that otherwise didn't exist and intensifying division in the country because now one population has the mechanisms to rule over the other in a zero-sum game. You will have failed to escape the reality of 'democracy for x instead of democracy for all', just having reshuffled the deck while also cannibalizing the civic identity in a way not possible with the EC.
You will have ended nothing in terms of the strife and division of a society of our scale, rather than putting us in a new era you would have just complicated the divisions of our existing one by bringing them to a national head through a national government, forcing them to be fought out with all the demagoguery and sectarianism that would unleash. I'm not interested in introducing Weimar-like politics into the US.
It's a contradiction since people are moving to areas politically like them, political identity is increasingly something people define themselves by, uneven recovery has been followed by uneven growth under globalization, politics is increasing plutocratic, and the state will continue to grow in response to crisis in this globalized era (remember your disdain for the Patriot Act). As it stands, these trends will already lead to a growing antagonism between the house and senate as we demographically and economically change. Your ideas will just help export this to the whole of government with the only net gain being more dysfunction, not democracy.
I honestly see no reason to have a blanket abolition of the EC given those things, it's an idea without nuance which is something its advocates don't care about since they're driven by a will to power over certain 'reactionary' parts of the country. They would like that division to be brought to a national head through national government because they want to conquer it in a semi-religious 'right side of history' spectacle, which would provoke a brand of right-wing reaction you aren't ready for.
Exactly, and that's much of the problem. The size of central government ensures that the EC or lack of it is a zero-sum game for some parts of the country. It should be diminished, not reformed to be 'democratic' which is impossible. Here I actually agree with your typical socialist hardliner on the state and democracy under capitalism.
I can tell you two understand that it's a zero-sum game, all your responses have been about injecting ideology in order to tip the balance in favor of one over the other. Instead, what we should be doing is understanding liberal-democracy is based on balance of interest groups rather than mass enfranchisement, since the latter heightens contradictions within those masses given a large society and state.
This has precedence. The expansion of the vote in the Jackson era was accompanied by the man's own populist authoritarianism and wider attacks on natives, women, and blacks. The same progressives advocating direct democracy as it relates to introducing bills into the state legislature and election of senators were also some of the biggest racists and eugenicists that believed in regimentation and state management of society.
The fact is some of the most chauvinistic, sectarian, and exported (i.e. dominating) movements in history are the radical-democratic ones that stand in contrast to the liberal-democratic status quo, and I would agree with any progressive that it's very limited. You can look no further than the hard left to see that much, their tendency to eat each other is a reflection of what would take place on a larger level.
We can see an inkling of it in you two, where there are a lot of gripes about how the current system gives inflated relevance to parts of the country you also happen to not like and would prefer had no hand that obstructs the policies you want.
Well, tyranny of the best organized and funded in the relevant states. But the main problem is what enables the 'tyranny' in the first place, not who runs it. The best we can hope for in a republic of this scale is the rational management of a large state mixed with representation that balances the interests of different parts of the country. If you want mass participatory democracy, we would need to diminish what's up for grabs (central government) because democracy doesn't exist past a local level. Past that, it's either tribalism of the masses or oligarchy of the indirectly elected.
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Bud I just want everyones vote to count the same regardless of what geographical region they happen to live in at the time they voted.
This is actually completely false because what I'm advocating for absolutely gives parts of the country, every part of the country as a matter of fact, the ability to "obstruct the policies I want". You on the other hand are advocating a system that reduces the impact of big bad coastal elites by design.
The Electoral College is complete bullshit not because it gives small states more power, but because it makes your vote literally worthless unless you live in one of the Seven States That Determine The Electoral
College.
So your radical solution is to make your vote worthless unless you live in one of the most populous states, otherwise politicians will ignore you. If your intention is to have abolition of the EC stop another Trump, that will fail since a significant part of his victory is owed to ignored voters in the blue wall in the first place. To her husband's dismay as a man popular with the blue collar, Clinton felt content to not talk about jobs or campaign in these rust belt areas that saw an uneven recovery under Obama, and in turn then yielded high rates of Obama-Trump voters which mixed with the lower turnout of black voters for Hillary to collapse the blue wall.
Your ideas would just reward this behavior. Campaigns would largely be performed in the more populous states in the union, specifically metropolitan areas, which are also the future of the country's growth and centers of investment as we globalize, and therefore the center of political machines and the state's funds for social programs. What exactly are you 'fixing' about democracy and inequality again?
It makes red votes in blue states worth it and blue votes in red states worth it. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. I am a Democrat voter in Alabama, my vote is literally worthless but without the EC it would be.
should we really increase the value of someone's vote because they live over an arbitrary line?
if the arguments of wanting the Electoral college are "It gives Rural voters a voice". That's not Democracy, that's giving a minority much larger voting power than everyone else. Its Rural Elitism.
Maybe you can just make the electoral college proportional across the board, rather than the first past the post system that is currently in place.
fuck you noncoastal elites and and you election rigging that has been around way too lonh.
If you wanted rural voters to have a voice, you shouldn't have gone with a presidential system where it's either all or nothing to begin with.
If you want to keep those communities in the union, yes. Do you know why? Because that line isn't all that arbitrary, with the EC or not it's a vehicle for local government which has its own interests and stake in the country's national government. If it was arbitrary there wouldn't be consequences for the balance between those vehicles from either instituting or abolishing the EC for them. However, since there is that line is as 'real' as it needs to be.
The divisions between city and countryside, coastal and noncoastal state, and high and low population states is as old as the country itself and its politics has always been defined by balancing them.
So long as capitalism is built on historically uneven development and our future is built on its uneven growth, then the national government will be built taking into account the social imbalances that exist accordingly. Anything short of that does not deserve the label 'democratic'.
Being forced to pay attention to other parts of the country and adjust your politics accordingly in order to benefit a whole is not elitism. On the contrary, suggesting anything short of that is. Instead, it's part of ensuring pluralism on this scale isn't a farce.
It's hard to take this accusation of elitism seriously while you whitewash, as democratic, an alternative system where regional candidates from effective one-party states, not even necessarily because of the state itself but because of an archipelago of cities, should dominate the whole of a national government. And if this this couldn't get any more comical on your part, this is perversely your answer to the victory of a candidate who lost the popular vote. A guy who won anyway because his opponent ignored a key region, took it for granted, and didn't expect their frustrations with the uneven recovery to cause its loss.
So your effective answer to the loss is to incentivize the behavior that caused it in the first place.
What you are taking issue with is a bargain we made because otherwise these parts of the country would be freer if they were independent. It's not as if you're radically altering the paradigm here. In one case, mine, for us to be equal we must be unequal. In another case, yours, for us to be equal we must be unequal. This speaks to the contradictions of the large society we are dealing with, and apparently we are to run roughshod over them because some people are angry about an upset presidential election that was the capstone for a gradual loss of power in many other offices leading up to that point.
You can be angry that one side lost despite winning the popular vote, but while you fool yourself about this being a travesty of democracy you can expect to be accosted by the reality that the sitting president won the popular vote absent one state. That kind of mathematical division alone, forget everything else we know about this country's divisions, suggests there is quite a bit more to expanding democracy than the blanket proportional representation some people are fooling themselves is part of democratic beliefs instead of one side's sheer will to power.
Democracy aside, a republic (especially one as large as this) has checks and balances that include such on the people themselves, and we can include the EC. If you want a more direct democracy, you can think about seceding and governing yourself or you can accept the possibility of others contemplating similar. Otherwise, you are asking for your cake and to eat it too. You will not earn a (false) mandate to rule over other regions that also happen to be culturally and politically unlike you, at that point their own 50+1 yields more freedom for themselves than the rule of another's 50+1, one that is only relevant because of a large central government connecting the two.
That republican check on the people is a key justification of civil rights, by the way.
Also I missed this
It was. Their success has been mixed, largely owing to things that came well after their time, however our immediate explosion into party politics in the 1790s was reflective of unequal stake in centralized power that existed even then. The lessons start on day one.
Jefferson was very much an admirable in his variety of liberalism, the one that idealized the petty-bourgeois yeoman farmer, and believed in using the constraints of the Constitution to protect the liberty they engendered. In contrast, Hamilton was interested in the federalism of the wealthy and the cities they inhabited as key to national development and therefore independence. Their conflict over the central bank alone was so profound because it was the meeting point of two contradictory interpretations of liberalism, democracy, and our founding document. One line of it in particular.
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