It’s been a hell of a month for the land of my birth. Not in a good way, either, what with the death of RBG, Trump’s disastrous debate performance, the utter hypocrisy of the GOP’s stand on a Supreme Court nominee – coupled with the nomination of an unqualified religious freak to the position -followed by Trump getting karma to smack him in the face with COVID.
Then followed by more cases than in all of Taiwan in a month – all due to a super-spreader event at the White House.
Followed by …..and followed by….and followed by….. events that can only be described as insane.
And if they are saying that ( which I doubt) they have a good reason for it.
It is not exactly the level of stability one wants to see in a man who has release authority over nuclear weapons. Trump’s mental stability has always been in question, but never more so than now.
It’s easy to blame all of this on Trump. I know because I succumb to the temptation almost every day. However, if one steps back a bit and looks at the broader view, it becomes apparent that Trump is a serious symptom of a greater problem.
The major components of the American democratic republic are broken and have been for quite some time. The result was that a system that was designed to prevent an abomination like Donald Trump from ever becoming President, failed miserably. It’s worth taking a little time to examine how the vision of the founding fathers became so terribly corrupted and dysfunctional.
Even worse, it appears a certain segment of Americans are just fine with the machinery of government being broken. Guys like Utah Senator Mike Lee:
And after that major fuck up – noted “constitoooooshnal” scholar Mike Lee decided to dig even deeper:
Seriously. Fuck. This. Guy.
“Republic” is a structural description. “Democracy” is a procedural description. They are not mutually exclusive. The US IS a democracy- a democratic Republic. A representative democracy- poorly represented by teabagger jerks like you, Mr. Lee.
One of my biggest pet peeves is idiots like the guys over here, who say stupid stuff like, “We are a Republic, not a democracy” and assume that ends the argument. Because it doesn’t.
But it does bring us back to why the United States is a dysfunctional democracy and why guys like Lee want to keep it that way.
Lee is articulating a view that has long been in vogue on the American right but which Republican politicians were generally hesitant to express openly. The premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the far-right does not merely view progressive taxation, regulation, and the welfare state as impediments to growth, but as fundamentally oppressive. A political system that truly secured freedom would not allow the majority to gang up on the minority and redistribute their income for themselves.
It’s a viewpoint that makes most Trump-loving conservatives the 21st century Afrikaners I believe them to be – and why they love a minority government to exercise rule over the unwashed majority.
Which is currently what is makes the machinery of American democracy broken. Specifically, the following institutions of our democratic republic have stopped working as intended a long time ago:
1. The Electoral College. This system, developed by the Founding Fathers was created due to the fact that during the first few presidential elections, allowing each vote to count towards the election was impractical. But that was in the 18th century. In actual practice, the Electoral College has been a disaster resulting in disputed elections in 1824, 1877, 1888, 2000, and 2016. In each of those elections, a presidential candidate has won the election, despite losing the popular vote. And in 2016 – it was not even close; Trump lost by almost 3 million votes. Rural regions are over-represented in the Electoral College and more populous metropolitan regions are under-represented. For instance, each individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each individual vote in Texas. The value of a vote is therefore dependent on where an individual lives. To say that this is undemocratic is an understatement. It also has allowed Presidential candidates to “game” the system which is how we got Donald Trump in 2016 even though his margin on the popular votes in crucial states in the Electoral College was razor-thin. And he still lost the popular vote by a significant margin.
For Republicans, that’s just fine especially since it plays right into a larger strategy they have of disenfranchising large blocks of voters to ensure their preferred brand of extremist ( guys like Tom Cotton) remains in office. They argue that it keeps the “elites” from dictating the results to so-called “real America”. Actually, it does just the opposite and ensures that Republicans don’t have to moderate their positions in order to appeal to a broader cross-section of the electorate. The Electoral College has allowed Trump to be the first President in history to not even bother to pretend he was President of the entire country – only the people who voted for him.
The bottom line is, the sytem allows a President to be elected with less than 30% of the actual population voting for him. In the right combination it could be as low as 21 %. This makes no sense in the interconnected world of the 21st century. With the Electoral College, the voting power of the people has been diluted and unequally distributed across our nation. It’s time that we begin to amend our broken process.
2. The United States Senate – The Senate is clearly broken and has strayed far from the intent of the founding fathers when they wrote the Constitution. Mitch McConnell has demonstrated just how effective a minority government can be at frustrating the overall will of the American people.
The founding fathers were far sighted people to be sure – but not even they could forsee the way the United States developed past the Mississippi River. ( Which was the western boundary of the US at that time).
Back in 1790, about 748,000 people — nearly 40 percent of whom were enslaved — lived in Virginia. The smallest state, Delaware, had 59,000 residents, of whom about 3 percent were enslaved. The largest state, in other words, was about 12.6 times as big as the smallest state, and the ratio was even lower among free people. Today, the smallest state is Wyoming, and the state of Washington has about 12.6 times as many people. Of course, Washington isn’t the largest state. Indeed, it’s not even particularly close — 12 states are bigger. Illinois has 22 times Wyoming’s population. Texas is nearly 50 times as big (and growing fast). And California is a stunning 68 times as large. These are enormous disparities to live with as essentially a matter of historical happenstance. Not only was the Connecticut Compromise defining Senate representation a hard-nosed plan that didn’t reflect any clear larger principle, but the boundaries of the states themselves also were not drawn the way they are today for any particularly far-sighted reason.
34 senators representing the 17 least-populous states with just 7 percent of the country’s population. So, just like in the Electoral College, individual voters in Wyoming have far more influence over the Senate than voters in California or New York. When you couple this with how House districts have been hopelessly gerrymandered – it is a springboard to one party minority rule. In many house districts – the Congressmen are picking their voters, not the other way around. The result is gridlock – or even worse, one branch like the Senate using its special powers of confirmation to destroy the federal judiciary effectively.
It’s also worth emphasizing that though the current GOP majority in the Senate is of recent vintage, it’s also built on a remarkably thin electoral base. In 2014, Republican candidates won 52 percent of the vote and gained nine Senate seats. Two years later, Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and gained only two seats. And in 2018, even if you ignore the California race (where both candidates were Democrats because no Republican did well enough in the first round to qualify for round two), Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and lost two seats.
Rather than the country’s growing diversity offering a path out of this bind, it only underscores the fact that the skew is likely to grow as well, with the non-college-educated white share of key Midwestern swing states remaining higher than the national average.
And then there is the overall “whiteness” of the Senate.
3. The Supreme Court – The last three nominations to the Court have vividly shown us how broken it has become. This has been a slowly developing problem starting back in the 1980s when people you never heard of, decided that they were not content just to win the war of ideas at the ballot box – they wanted to use the power of the courts to impose their twisted agenda on the majority of the people. Guys like Leonard Leo and the hacks at The Federalist Society to be exact. The mantra of “No More Souters” was their rallying cry. ( Justice Souter was appointed as a conservative – but in the minds of hacks like Leo – developing a conscience and voting it, were unforgivable sins.)
whoever he chooses will have been vetted by the Federalist Society, the same people who will shepherd her through the confirmation process. But that’s nothing new, the only Supreme Court nominee put forward by a Republican president since the 1990s who wasn’t tied to the Federalist Society was Harriet Miers, and we all know what happened to her. There were many things that upended the Miers nomination, but the fact that she didn’t have the Federalist Society in her corner when the criticisms started meant that she was on her own and doomed from the start.
The man at the Federalist Society who has helped shepherd the confirmation process for Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh is Leonard Leo. In other words, he has already played a major role in giving conservatives their majority on the Supreme Court. So it is important to know what drives his commitment to remake the courts.
It is the Federalist Society’s focus on limiting the role of government via lower taxes and deregulation that funnels the flow of dark money into the network of nonprofits Leo has created to run public relations campaigns in support of the judges he puts forward. Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg documented that process extensively in an expose titled, “A conservative activist’s behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts.”
Thanks to the polarizing and overblown abortion issue, we don’t get the best caliber of judges on the Court these days. Justice Barrett has only been on the bench for 2 years and 8 months. She certainly lacks the depth of experience of say, Merrick Garland.
But in the eyes of wild-eyed Trump-supporting hacks – Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are dream candidates who will be…..wait for it…..reliable votes. Trump especially wants that since he has already publicly stated that he is counting on the court to help him overturn the results of a popular election.
Moreover – when you couple it with the activist agenda of walking conflict of interest Justices Thomas and Alito, it has the potential to destroy the moral authority for at least a generation.
Why you ask? It has to do with Thomas’ vendetta against the doctrine of Stare Decisis. Constitutional Scholar Garrett Epps has written extensively on this topic, and I strongly recommend you take a while and read what he has to say.
A Justice Barrett seems to me likely to be more, not less, of a danger to democratic self-government than was Scalia. The reason is that—from her writings– her view of precedent seems tailor-made to allow a conservative majority to slash and burn its way through important precedents.
The judicial doctrine of stare decisis cautions judges to follow their courts’ precedents unless there is a good reason to depart from it. In the minds of a contemporary judge, a previous decision may be a “wrong” interpretation of the law. But there are often good reasons not to disturb it. For example, generations of litigants and judges may have relied on it, or the present-day conclusion that it is “wrong” may be almost as doubtful an earlier court’s judgment that is correct. Courts can and sometimes should overturn precedent (think, for example, of Brown v. Board of Education) but they should have a good reason and a persuasive explanation.
Scalia, who did more than any jurist to popularize the ide of “originalism,” embraced stare decisis even if, at some points, a precedent conflicted with his preferred view of the issue. In that, he implicitly contrasted himself with Justice Clarence Thomas. “I am a textualist, I am an originalist,” he said in 2008. “I am not a nut.”
A judge who does not acknowledge stare decisis is a nut, and, worse, a nut with a hammer. Thomas is one, and he has set his sights on overturning precedents in areas like freedom of the press and the right to counsel in criminal cases. And Amy Coney Barrett may very well provide another vote for Thomas-style radicalism. That is reason enough to oppose her.
When you fail to choose the best qualified – this is what you get.
4. The Voters Themselves – If there is one thing that 2016 clearly demonstrated, it is the innate selfish and stupidity of a large section of the American people. Stated bluntly – they suck. 108 million of them sat on their fat, Wal-Mart shopping asses and could not be bothered to perform their civic duty. Others showed themselves unable to process facts and data – thus allowing them to be easily manipulated by foreign actors.
As much as I hold the teabaggers in contempt, and shout out repeatedly to how dangerous they are – for the last 11 years – at least they vote. My other real contempt goes to the lazy folks who cannot be bothered to perform their civic duty.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. For Trump supporters and Republicans in general this is something they cannot tolerate. Which is why we get assholes like Louie Gohmert and Dan Crenshaw. Keep turnout low and your voters stupid and Mitch McConnell and the rest can get really, really, rich.
“Approximately 70 years ago, Republicans hit upon a winning formula: if the data disagree with your worldview, kill the data. Then, with no problematic data, claim that there is no definitive proof of the reality and, in the words of Karl Rove, create your own reality.“
Of course, I have to be fair here and point out that it is not all laziness on the part of voters. Many do try to vote – and they get kicked to the curb through organized voter suppression. John Oliver explained this in great detail a couple of weeks ago.
Whoever you wish to blame – the US voter participation rate is terrible. And it makes American elections ripe for exploitation. As Oliver noted, the current GOP fears a large turnout since as the number of votes rises, the chances of the real extremists fades. I did a post on this phenomenon back when Eric Cantor was turned out of office in 2014. Out of a district of 740000 people, only 67000 voted. And it only took 35,000 to replace Cantor with someone even crazier than he was and is. Such events happen over the country – which is how you get some horrible people in office. ( See: Crenshaw, Dan).
There are other issues, many of them stemming from the breaking of political and legal norms by this traitorous abomination of President. But I would have to rank these four at the top – since if you were to fix all of these, many of the norm / rule-breaking would stop. There are many solutions to each of these problems – each one of which requires a post as long as this one is right now. My point remains; however – it’s going to take more than just some tweaks to fix our broken democracy. If it even can be fixed.
And if it can’t. Then read up on Zionism because it’s going to get unbearable in the whining states of America.
Skippy, you never fail to amuse. If you think the machinery is broken, then I have to laugh and say that’s a goof thing. Anyone that thinks Trump is a totalitarian thug needs to be in a rubber room for his own protection. You’re still a hoot after all these years.
And I would point out that there is nothing funny whatsoever about an attitude that accepts the gross violations of Constitutional norms by Trump and the hacks who serve him.
The election and its aftermath have proven me correct in the statements made in this post – written almost a month before the election. Trump literally tried to execute a coup against American democracy. Had it been a sneaky little shit like Tom Cotton or Dan Crenshaw, it might have succeeded. There is still a risk some worthless soul on the GOP side will find a way to gum up the works.
I really thought a pandemic would wake our 21st century Afrikaners from their selfish ways. I was wrong- if anything they doubled down on their vision of a one party, apartheid state – a minority government – in America. They are the ones who belong in an institution, not me.
To quote Tom Nichols: ” But more to the point, why is it always a plea for us to understand them? Why is it always one way? Why is there never a plea – or demand – to people in rural Indiana to say: “Listen, you better start understanding the 100 million Americans who aren’t like you.”