As we all breathe a collective sigh of relief over the ending of the government shutdown and our backing away from economic Armageddon, one might think that we have been saved from our own collective folly. The radical, anti-government Tea Party has been faced down, President Obama and the Democrats have been strengthened, and the worst, it seems, is over.
At least, that is, until next time – which by terms of the agreement struck in the Senate will be early next year when, once again, Congress will be asked to once again fund the government and raise the federal limit on borrowing if that proves to be necessary. So, what has resulted from this latest farce known as governance in the U.S. is yet another kicking of the can down the road and the setting up of another potential crisis in just a few months – setting the stage for the 2014 mid-term elections.
Most folks watching political events here in the United States mostly assume that the ultimate source of our current political dysfunction lies in ‘corrupt’ politicians. Vote them all out, goes the argument, and somehow, as if by magic, a new crop of shiny, uncorrupted politicians will appear who will then be able to work together and solve our problems through a heartfelt rendition of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill.”
More than just bills
Unfortunately, people who believe in such childish fantasies are only going to be disappointed following such a strategy. The reality is that politicians, like sausages, are made in the ugliest manner possible via an electoral equivalent of meat-packing plant. This system, part law, part custom, part constitutional mandate, shapes every politician going through it and, by so doing, turns the voters’ wishes into the politicians we see in Washington today.
Thus, without reforming the system as it is presently constructed, we will inevitably get the same disastrous political outcome. Anyone who thinks different is fooling themselves. Indeed, one has to only look at the growing dysfunction in our system of governance to understand that. The politicians we have today didn’t just appear out of the blue, they are the result of voters’ choices as they are funneled through a political system to ever greater, more powerful political offices.
To get a different result one therefore has to either change the voters or the system that translates votes into elected officials. Radical conservatives of the likes which now control the Republican Party understand this intimately. Demographically, the GOP is dying as its older, White, rural base is being swamped by a younger, browner, liberal-leaning cohort of voters who are quickly coming of political age, and to stave off this demographic collapse without ruffling the feathers of their current electoral base the GOP has, in turn, manipulated everything — campaign finance rules, Congressional election districts and voter eligibility requirements — to effectively game the system so as to ensure their side wins.
Change the system
Indeed, so successful have they been that the GOP has a solid lock on the U.S. House – given they don’t do something stupid like shut down the government (oops) – until the next census in 2020. The lesson for progressives is very clear: change the rules and laws governing elections – e.g. how the system translates voters’ collective preferences into elected officials – and you change who gets elected, often to the benefit of one’s own side.
For some reason, progressives have been reluctant to push for electoral reform of the type that the GOP has propagated wherever it has taken power. Aside from jeremiads against out-of-control campaign spending and mild pushes for laws that make it easier to register to vote, the American left has more or less seen fit to cede the field on electoral reform to conservative activists. This has been a catastrophe as it has effectively left the field of electoral engineering totally in the hands of their conservative enemies.
In many respects, of course, the U.S. Constitution itself is an impediment to the American left as it struggles for electoral victory over conservatives. The Senate is biased in favor of more conservative, rural backwaters while the House, in turn, is comprised of gerrymandered districts that produce Representatives tilted much farther to the right or the left than their state, or the nation, as a whole. Combined with the constitutionally mandated separation of powers between the legislature and the executive, chaos of the type we experienced over the past two weeks is a given.
The Constitution therefore allows tiny, radical minorities – presently conservative ones – to wreak untold damage on the United States from inside the very heart of the federal government. Any electoral reform embarked upon by progressives should, therefore, be aimed at reducing the amount of power tiny minorities can wield on the national stage. This can be done in a number of ways, some through legislation and some through amending the Constitution, but all are aimed at changing the system by which we elect officials to more accurately reflect and empower the liberal-progressive majority – clearly demonstrated on election day in 2008 and 2012 – that exists in the U.S. electorate.
Everyone votes
First and most easily done, elections should be federally regulated so as to ensure that everyone gets the opportunity to vote. Long-lines that dissuade voters, typically minorities, students and the poor and working classes, from casting ballots should be relegated to the same dustbin of history as the poll tax and the literacy test. Voting machines and election resources should be allocated on a per-capita basis and distributed in such a way as to reduce the time it takes to vote as much as possible. Long-lines due to limited numbers of machines and poll workers should be prosecuted by the Department of Justice for exactly what it usually is – a deliberate attempt to keep certain voter populations from voting.
Second, also easily done, there is no reason why our elections should occur on a single day for a set amount of hours. Instead, it would be far better to vastly expand, through federal legislation via a new voting rights act, the time in which people are able to vote. Citizens should be able to vote at least a week or possibly two weeks before an election, they should be allowed to mail in their ballots if they so choose – as is done in Washington state – while on Election Day itself the polls should be open for 24 hours. What’s more, Election Day should be a national holiday so no one has to be kept from voting because they have to work.
Third, another easy reform to enact is that voter registration should be taken out of the hands of local officials and put into the hands of an independent national agency tasked with overseeing U.S. elections. Registration should be easy and be able to be done whenever and wherever a citizen encounters the federal or state government – such as filing one’s taxes, filing for social security or welfare assistance, or getting a driver’s license. It should be able to be done in a safe, secure manner online.
The hard part
All of the above reforms would allow more people to vote and therefore allow more members of America’s current left-leaning majority to express their will through the ballot box. The next set of reforms, in turn, would aim at making the system that takes those ballots and turns them into elected officials more reflective of that majority. While harder to do than voting reforms of the type described above, they should be part of any electoral reform strategy being pushed by Progressives.
First, the way in which House members are chosen clearly needs reform. Gerrymandering has made the body an unrepresentative shambles while single-member districts – districts that only send one member to Congress – all but ensure that we have a relatively unrepresentative, two-party system. So, how would we change this?
One way in which this could be done would be to simply increase the number of House Districts that exist – meaning more congressmen and women would be sent to Washington every two years. Presently, the U.S. House membership is frozen at 435 seats, and has been since 1929. At the time, there were as few as 33,000 voters for each House member – a number which has since ballooned to over 700,000 on average as the U.S. population has grown.
More seats would push that ratio down and make members much, much more representative of their district than they are today. It would also make running for Congress a much less expensive thing to do as huge resources wouldn’t have to be spent in order to reach fewer people. It would, however, also increase the amount of resources special interests might have to spend in order to buy up elections as there would obviously be many, many more elections to buy.
Furthermore, more House seats would naturally benefit liberal-leaning metropolitan areas since they are so jam-packed with voters. Gerrymandering might be still be able to engineer safe seats for many politicians, but if the ratio of House members to voters was pushed way down – say to 100,000 or 75,000 voters for each member – then many, many more seats would be created in our much more populous cities than in more conservative rural and exurban areas.
Second, this reapportionment of the House could also be done in a manner that allows in more parties to the system. We could, for instance, keep having 435 seats, but simply do away with single-member districts by allowing more than one congressman or woman to be elected from a district. Voters could be asked to list their top four or five choices and those choices could then be aggregated so as to ensure the top-three choices, aggregated from all the voters, would get a seat in Congress. This is done in many countries, most of which benefit from multi-party systems. Such a reform would allow Libertarians, Greens, Socialists, and other minor parties to have seats – and therefore some power – in Congress.
Why stop at 50?
Reforming the Senate to make it more representative is much harder to do given that the two-member-per-state rule is enshrined in the Constitution. However, Senate minorities could be made much less powerful by diluting the power of the filibuster and so doing away with the need for super-majorities to pass legislation in that body. Moreover, while the two-Senator-per-state rule is sacrosanct, there is no injunction against adding states, and thus Senators, to our current roster.
The District of Columbia, with a population of 632,000 individuals, is the 24th largest city in the nation and has a larger population than either Vermont or Wyoming. Similarly, Puerto Rico, with a population of just over 3.6 million, has more people than Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Washington D.C., Vermont or Wyoming. Both would be good candidates for statehood, and both would likely vote Democrat for demographic reasons.
Taken as a package, these reforms could be a way progressives could counteract reactionary forces and populations deeply entrenched in our traditionally right-wing states. While not exactly guaranteeing victory, they could be an important way to engineer more significant victories for left-leaning causes and voters at the national level. It would allow the left to more effectively mobilize voters by making it easier to vote, undermine the power of House gerrymandering by packing the body with many more left-leaning districts through the creation of many more new seats, and outflank the right-wing lock on the Senate by diluting the power of Senate minorities and admitting new, likely left-leaning states and senators into the Union.