Beyond the appalling fascistic Republican (but I repeat myself) assaults on democracy in recent years, there are numerous flaws that have become more and more apparent. Two of the last six presidential elections were won by the candidate who lost the popular vote. Congress has become a bastion of do-nothingism. Knowingly false claims of “voter fraud” have led to knowingly unjustified attempts at voter suppression. Irresponsible demagogues preach disunifying racial and religious prejudices. Gerrymandering has led in too many cases to elected officials choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Money has assumed a bigger and bigger role, and efforts to track who is buying whom have foundered on adverse Supreme Court decisions, social media obfuscation, and major, industrial scale, disinformation.
This has become a tangled mess of interlocking and mutually supporting inimical forces. Dark money sustains disinformation and gerrymandering efforts, demagogues thrive by preaching more and more divisive messages to ever more partisan splinters. Republicans are more worried about primary challenges from candidates to their right than they are from general elections. Wealthy interests pay attorneys to lobby candidates through campaign contributions in order to avoid taxes and regulations. Well-financed right wing “think tanks” push ever more extremist judicial nominees to make ever more unpopular rulings.
How do you fix any single issue without fixing all of the problems? HOW do you fix ANYTHING, given the intentional gridlock that has been visited on the entire country? Is American democracy doomed?
Maybe not. Republican extremism did not fare as well in the 2022 elections as its proponents hoped. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in particular energized progressive voters, and vile Republican candidates all but defeated themselves. But that just keeps things from getting worse. How do we make them better?
First, I have to concede that Republicans will resist even the most basic reforms (not all; there’s a small group of conservatives who would accept at least some fixes). Whether they actually believe their “voter fraud” nonsense or not, voter suppression is just too useful for them to abandon. Over the next few election cycles, it may be their only way of avoiding electoral extinction. Yes, they could change their policies to appeal to more voters, but if that was going to happen, it would have by now. There’s just too much money to be made from rich rightwing donors and too much short-term primary success to gain from racist voters for the Republican Party as a whole to undergo a real stocktaking process.
Political scientists point out that people whose livelihood depends on their success at backing one single thing are far more fanatically devoted to it than people who have strong feelings on a variety of issues. If your business is prospering due to a government program or tax break, you will do almost anything imaginable to keep that benefit alive—regardless of its effects on everyone else. I may want to close that loophole, but I also want to accomplish other, equally beneficial things. Building coalitions requires trade-offs, log-rolling, etc. So it’s not going to be possible to fix everything immediately. Reformers must prioritize.
My proposals below are not necessarily in any kind of order of importance. I think I’ve ranked them by how likely to achieve they might be. I’d love feedback on this question as well as on everything else.
The House of Representatives
Progressives from the big Blue states frequently complain about the unfair composition of the US Senate, which grossly over-represents rural states with dwindling populations. California has no more senators than Wyoming despite dwarfing the Cowboy State (not just in people but also in different types of people).
However, the US Constitution guarantees each state two members of the upper house, and that’s never going to change. The states that would lose power if somehow the constitution were amended would never agree to any changes.
Which is not to say nothing can be done to rebalance things. The House of Representatives is supposed to be “the People’s House.” So, make it more representative. The overall size of the House has not been increased since 1913. (The population then was 92 million; it is now 331 million.)
A proportional increase would bring the House to 1565 Representatives; if you think it’s unwieldy NOW…
But that’s no excuse for keeping a static House that fails to adequately represent the people. An easy fix would be to set the population of each district at 500,000 residents, with the proviso that every state, no matter how small its population, must have at least one. California, for example, with 39 million people currently, would go from 53 to 78 Representatives; Texas from 38 to 57; Florida from 28 to 43, etc.
As you can see, this would benefit not just Democrats. We would end up with a House of at least 662 members. (Lest you think that would be unwieldy, keep in mind that, for example, the current House of Commons of the British Parliament has 650 MPs.)
There are two advantages of this change. The House would no longer be a static body with the same number endlessly reshuffled every ten years, with states gaining and losing Representatives based on the decennial Census (itself, for this very reason, a constant political fracas). The zero-sum tabulation would be replaced with a dynamic process truly representing the people. States would gain influence based on their populations, with no one state’s gain coming at any other state’s loss.
The Senate is already apportioned equally; there’s no reason that the House must defer to the states as well.
The second advantage is, this would go a long way toward equalizing the popular and electoral votes in presidential elections. California would have 8o Electoral Votes, for example, a major bump in its potential influence. And, of course, Texas would have 59, Florida 45, etc. Again, no particular partisan bias for Blue states.
Obviously, the best reform here would be to simply abolish the Electoral College; but that’s unlikely to happen for the same reason that nothing is going to change the bias in the Senate towards rural states with small populations. But it sure would alter the current situation where candidates take certain states for granted and spend most of their time and efforts in a handful of so-called “battlefield” states. Advocates of the current system say that the Electoral College is vital to defend the interests of small states that would otherwise be overlooked. But those states are overlooked now! Who really campaigns in North Dakota or Idaho? Republican Presidential candidates go into their races counting those states’ electoral votes as theirs and pay them no attention. Nobody campaigns in New York or California—they visit those states only to raise money.
You could award electoral votes proportionally, based on each candidate’s popular vote within the state. You could implement the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact, where each state by law awards its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. Neither of these changes requires a Constitutional amendment; individual state law could mandate either. The NIPVC model law says it will take effect only when enough states have passed it to give the national popular vote winner an Electoral College victory. So far, not enough states have endorsed it. In any case, either change might dilute the power of smaller states in the Electoral College more than they would countenance (although doing either would not take an amendment, you can just see well-funded conservative groups challenging such changes all the way up to the Supreme Court).
Increasing the size of the House would be much easier, since Congress has already it, so there can’t be any legal challenge to doing it again. It would entail a number of technical, even physical alterations. The current House chamber probably isn’t large enough for a minimum of 660 Representatives; the House office buildings aren’t large enough. You’d need more staff, etc.
The idea of making the government LARGER probably wouldn’t sit well with many Americans, who like to complain that they’re oppressed by “Big Government” and the “Deep State” NOW. But democracy is messy, and many people don’t understand the details of how the system is currently functioning (or failing to).
(You can argue that an alternative would be to devolve more and more power to the states, but that would multiply the gridlock by at least fifty-fold. It’s not like state legislatures are models of Athenian democracy. In any case, deconcentration is a topic for another day. And another writer.)
Democracy has many meanings, and people talking about it unrigorously tend to confuse and conflate those meanings. Is democracy a form of government? Is it a process, is it a state of mind? Can people maintain a democracy if they have lost belief in, say, equality or rule of law? If they are willing to win by the rules but not to lose by the rules? If they see themselves as other people’s victims, invidiously shoved aside by those whose right to primacy in the republic is somehow unearned and unjust? We are seeing the results of such fallbacks among some sections of the people, too frequently demagogued into those feelings by wealthy interests and politicians fearful of losing power to demographic change.
Increasing the size of the House, altering the dynamics of the Electoral College, can not and will not address the moral issues affecting American democracy. The sense of everything being at stake in every election, that electoral defeat means personal catastrophe, which is present on both sides, on every side, is something that I can’t address, since I’m not any kind of leader. It does say something minimally positive about our democracy that so many people see it as so vital, so important; imagine a country where indifference was the norm rather than passionate (even if unruly and unreasonable) disagreement!
I believe in MORE democracy, not less. In MORE people voting, not fewer. In MORE voices being heard, in MORE Americans welcomed into the polity. I have other changes in mind that may not be as easy to accomplish even as this one. I’ll get into them in future articles.
Very well written, well reasoned, very persuasive indeed. I love that these are common sense fixes to an ailing system. Because it is ailing, to the point of implosion; I fully expect 2024 to be the year of blood-sport races almost everywhere. More and more I look to the British and Canadian systems as inspiration for reform. You makes good points and I look forward to Part Two.